About a year and a half ago, I was publicly humiliated on Tekken's smallest stage.
It was a fly-quest weekly. It didn't mean anything.
And Joe Crush, one shot me. And even Horata himself said that that was awesome.
And today I'm coming out of retirement to talk about the junk food swirl.
It is a leverless controller, fight stick, pad. All of those combined and it has balls.
So if you're not familiar with junk food arcades, they are a leverless fight stick company based
in the United States and they have their flagship product. It is called the Snackbox Micro.
There's many different controllers that one might use for fighting games such as Street Fighter or
Tekken if you're going to get one shot. There's a traditional game pad such as the PS5 controller,
which is the one that most people prefer because of the D-pad. And then there are more legacy
controllers such as a fight stick or a arcade stick as you know the old ones might call it.
Here we have a leverless controller. It's sort of a leverless controller. It's kind of hard to
describe what this actually is. It's a sort of a weird hybrid of a leverless controller and a
game pad, I guess. And so junk food decided that, you know, why have both a PlayStation controller
and an arcade stick when you can just combine the two? And I guess that's how the swirl came to be.
On the left here we have a more WASD traditional layout of a keyboard and then we have a more
fighting game-centered layout here on the right of the swirl. The elephant in the room here are
these two giant... At the bottom of the controller we have their thumb domes and they are hall effect
sticks and they offer superior accuracy and responsiveness. But before we continue on,
let's take a look at what else you get inside the case. It actually comes with a really nice
carrying case. This is nice. It comes with an angled USB-C to USB-A sleeved cable. Yeah,
it's about six feet long. So, you know, when you're at a setup or something, good amount of length
between you and the screen, even though your opponent might be like right next to it. I hate
those guys. You got some propaganda stickers. Very nice. And then it comes with a welcome to the
swirl family with a swirl QR code. Now this is epic. Overall, first impressions. It looks
cool. I mean, it's a design that I don't think I've ever seen. One really interesting thing,
though, is you market this towards fighting game players and like controller players because
it's supposed to be the best of both worlds. But this WASD layout here is not really what we use
on levelless controllers. Like on levelless controllers, it's usually just the bottom three
buttons here. And then there's actually a center button here for jump, jump or up. Like, it's
so I'm surprised that there's no actual button for that so that you could like map it to that.
So that's really interesting because I get the vibe more that this is like just a replacement
of a keyboard. And then they just added some thumb gums. The pattern here is I'm not the biggest
fan of this pattern. There's a whole bunch of different fight stick patterns layout. It's like
this. I'm more used to this sort of layout where it tapers down. Some of them they like to go
straight across like this, like the Razer Katsune. On the top, we got the USB-C port. Nice to always
have the universal connector, have a detachable USB-C cable. My fight stick is not detachable.
And every day I worry that it's going to break. On the bottom here, you know, we got a nice foam
sort of like cushioned bottom, which is nice because when you use these, you usually don't
actually use them on desks. They're usually built to be put on your lap. This button is the home
button. This is the select button. This is the start button. We got the touchpad button here. Then
we got the edit button and the profile button. So I'm assuming you can assign different profiles to
this and then you can kind of hot swap it between games. So before I continue, I want to talk about
getting one shot in Tekken. Nobody talks about that I actually took two games off of Joe Crush.
I just got one shot. So that's it. So one thing I do notice about these buttons is I believe they
are all key switches. They feel like Cherry MX Browns. If I rip one of these off, whoa. Yeah,
these look like just Cherry MX clears. You know, I'm sure somebody in the comments will correct me
about that. And I guess they are just hot swappable. So you can just rip them out of the PCB and stick
them back in with all these junk food, loverless controllers. They try to keep it pretty thin.
So they use these key switches instead of the typical like Sanwa Denshi buttons that you find
in regular fight sticks. Definitely prefer those. They just feel like I'm at an arcade machine,
not that I'm old enough to know what that's like. But it's just good fun. One thing I do notice is
that there's already a bunch of fingerprints. Holy moly. I mean, my fingers are pretty grimy. I don't
know why I wish I could fix that. I'm a stick player. I have the Toki Omni and the artwork
is impossible to swap on that. This one, they advertise it as it's a, it's just a magnetic
top plate. Plexi off. Whoa. There's the Plexi taken off. And now we got the artwork. I mean,
it's just a piece of paper, which is great because this is the most effortless way of taking off
fight stick artwork that I think I've seen in a long time. This being magnetic is actually
awesome. You can clean this so easily. I can just run it under some water and give it a nice wash.
So I'm assuming these buttons are like X square triangle circle. R three L three are actually
here, but then these do actually click down. So that's really, I mean, we'll see. I guess we'll
test them out, which I guess we'll do. Me and Bella are going to fight after this word for more
sponsor. All right, we're here in the web app now for the junk food swirl. And I mean, looks like
you can remap quite a few things. You can change the controller name. You can change the analog
sensitivity. They got firmware updates connected. You can disconnect it by just clicking it.
I don't know why you would do that. You can just rip it out of the port. I mean,
it seems like a lot of people actually have complaints about the software for this thing.
It might have been a little undercooked. I mean, the UI is great. It looks easy enough. You know,
you got different profiles so you can like swap. You got up to five profiles. You can import profiles
from other people. So you got that sense of the swirl community. And then you got export profile
files. So that's how you share your swirl profile with the swirl community. So here we have the
basic variant of the swirl. There's actually a second variant called the multi console. The
basic variant of the swirl only works on switch and PC, but the multi console version works on
Xbox and PlayStation, which is something to keep in mind because most tournaments nowadays are run
on exclusively PS5. If you're going to bring this to tournaments and you're going to, you know,
game it up and go oh two in the tournament, you know, you can't connect this without either the
brook converter to PS4 to PS5, which adds a little bit of latency or spending the money for the
multi console variant. Let's game. That was scary. No, no, no, one more time. Don't use that one,
Connor. I swear. So it does seem like these four buttons here are the actual buttons to be using.
So it's like your typical street fighter layout. It still is weird to have jump up here. Like I
said before, most leverless controllers, the jump is actually down here and you're usually just
playing with like the three bottom ones because I mean, you're just trying to hit quarter circles.
So other than that, though, it feels very good. How do you feel with the loudness of the keys?
So like the loudness of the keys, I slam my keys pretty hard when I play the game.
I mean, I just like how the keys feel when I am gaming it up. I mean, it's as responsive as I
would expect from a brook board. I will say, though, I'm just trying to see the sensitivity on the
keys because with Sunwa buttons, like the lightest touch will actually activate the button on these
keys. There definitely is like an actuation point. So it's nothing like too crazy. But when I like,
I can hit here and nothing is actually happening on screen. But then like when I actually get to the
point of actuation, there is so it is like just a regular key switch. It's not like a typical
arcade switch, the Sunwa button that you know, we all know and love. I do usually play on my lap,
though. I don't have enough space on my desk at home. This feels pretty good. I'm going to say
something that's a big no-no. It's almost like mall grabbing your skateboard. I'm going to use the
the stick. The dome. The dome. I'm going to use the thumb dome. The thumb dome,
it's just not for fighting games. See, you just don't get like the precision you get with a d-pad
or like WASD with the thumb dome. I mean, like I just have no idea. There's no click. I mean,
it's doable, but I would not recommend using the thumb dome. So I'm not absolutely smurfing. I've
been matched against a Platinum player. He's going to be playing Ed here. I mean, this guy has no idea
who he's playing against. He's like, who is LTT benchmark? Boom. Round one is a dub for me.
Oh no. I got him with the wake up level three as the pros do.
Guys, do I rematch him? You have to rematch, right? I'm going to use the thumb domes here
and you're going to just see me get slammed because I don't know. I don't have the precision that I
want with these domes, at least in the fighting game. Oh, I swapped back to the keys. I like the
keys too much. Okay, he's just, I mean, he's just throwing things out in neutral. This guy got no
neutral. So why don't we hop into another game and we'll test out the thumb domes in like a shooter.
Okay, so we got Cyberpunk going. I mean, this is the smoothest Cyberpunk has ever been for me.
5090, by the way. Here we go. I'm going to give you that cinematic E3 trailer look. If you just
love fight sticks and you just want it to be your everything, I mean, I guess that's what this is for.
Like you just never have to own like a PlayStation controller ever again. You know what? Honestly,
I'm finding aiming quite easy and it's actually quite fun. I mean, this is pretty doable. I mean,
you got to get used to the layout in a way. This is not bad. I thought it was going to be way worse.
Um, I can't lie. Oops, sorry. It's Tekken time.
All right, I'm challenging you to Tekken 8. I saw you got one-chotted. I've never played
Tekken 8. I haven't played Tekken since like Tekken 2, but I'm feeling confident. Okay. Also,
I'm using an Xbox controller. I have it. Yeah, you better not use the left stick. You better use
the deep end. You're using a special style. I didn't mean to. I don't know what these buttons do.
Oh, no, I have, I don't remember a single combo. Wait, I actually just got,
I lost. Please, please, please. I lost. It's going to kill. I know it's going to kill. I'm not going to watch.
Oh, we hate to see it. So if you didn't know, the trick to Tekken is,
is you don't hold down back like Bell is doing. Why? Because then you get launched like that.
He burst, he burst. Oh my goodness, dude. He just keeps ripping rage art. Special move,
special spot style. Oh, you died. It doesn't kill. But watch this.
What the, he had a vacuum. Okay, guys. He's just mashing the rage art every time. Listen, why did they put it in the game
if they don't want me to do it? That's so true. No, no, no. I got him back. I got him back.
I got him back. She hit me in the doiner. Okay, get me. All right. I saw how you lost. I'm going to
get it here. Oh, oh, I dodged. Boom. This kills you when I do this. And then I'm going to learn.
I learned. No. Subscribe to ShortCircuit. No, that's the price. So you too can beat Jake Bell
Belivance for the small price of, I think it's $175 is the basic, the multi platform, which is
the one you're going to want to get is about $225. I think you'll understand if this is for you. I
mean, overall, I had a lot of fun with it and it was fun finally redeeming myself in tech. And
thank you, Jake, for having me on ShortCircuit. I threw. Subscribe to ShortCircuit.