The QuickShot II was never the best joystick. That was the Competition Pro — rugged, precise, the choice of anyone who actually wanted to win. The QuickShot II was the one you could afford, the one that looked like it belonged in a cockpit, with suction cups for your MDF desk and an auto-fire switch for when your trigger finger gave out during Green Beret. The new remake from Retro Games and Plaion Replai understands this distinction completely, and leans into it with admirable self-awareness. In dimensions, it's almost an exact replica. You can still wrap your fist around the shaft, still hook thumb and forefinger around the large red buttons, still stick it to your desk via the original suction cups. The auto-fire switch is there at the rear, unchanged in principle if not in execution. Where the designers have allowed themselves modern upgrades, the choices are sensible: the two fire buttons on the stick can now be separately configured — an update the reviewer specifically mourned not having on his Commodore 64, where independent laser and bomb control in Skramble would have been transformative — and six base buttons align with standard joypad layouts. A USB cable means compatibility with PC and the modern computer remakes in Retro Games' lineup, including the C64 and Spectrum. The stick has the long travel distance that made the original infamous: you have to push it quite far to register movement, which rendered the QuickShot famously unsuitable for joystick-waggling titles like Daley Thompson's Decathlon, where the required left-right movement distance caused physical damage to the joystick and, the reviewer notes with precise understatement, 'indignity to yourself.' Microswitches are the most significant mechanical upgrade — you now get a satisfying click on stick movement. The fire buttons, however, retain the same soft click of the original, and this turns out to be the emotional core of the entire product. The reviewer describes the sound as 'hardwired into my memory as the smell of school dinners or the wash of the ocean against a pier.' That's not marketing copy. That's what this product is actually selling. Real-world testing covered the Spectrum remake (Ant Attack, Pheenix, Head over Heels — many hours), Steam (Truxton, the classic arcade shooter, worked fine after simple calibration), and RetroArch (failed after an hour of configuration, though the reviewer acknowledges others may manage it). The auto-fire proved problematic with Steam. These are honest failure modes, reported without softening. The product costs £30.95. At that price point, the reviewer's conclusion is that the compromise is appropriate and intentional — the QuickShot II was always the affordable option, and the remake honours that spirit rather than pretending to be something it isn't. The fourth star in the review is stated explicitly to be for nostalgia — not performance, not build quality, not compatibility. This is the correct and honest position. The reviewer earns the sentiment because they've earned it through specificity: Skramble's laser and bombs, Blackpool arcades, the computer desk imagined as a cockpit, the precise memory of those soft-clicking buttons. Retro gaming hardware lives or dies by whether it can activate that involuntary recall, and by that measure the QuickShot II remake succeeds completely. 'Every time I see it sitting there beside my hi-tech PC and big HD monitor, I smile.'
