Once, in the distant past, gamers stood upright in front of the glowing arcade cabinet, legs splayed like a bipod for support. They would play with faces three inches away from the cabinet’s CRT screen, the scanlines imprinting onto their irises. If that sounds like your ideal setup, X-Arcade’s $400 Arcade2TV-XR stand-up controller can get you halfway to that arcade promised land.
You likely already identified by the main image that this machine is missing a crucial part, the screen. The Arcade2TV-XR is a solid arcade stick on its own, and you can connect it to just about any monitor but with the aid of a Meta Quest 3 or Quest 3s headset it offers a surprisingly compact way to play all your arcade games in a VR environment. Just so long as you don’t mind some heavy lifting—sometimes literally.
X-Arcade Arcade2TV-XR
It’s a fighting stick for PC or console, but it can save you from clogging your living room with cabinets.
Pros
- Stick and buttons feel great
- Once it works, gaming on a VR arcade cabinet feels close enough to the real thing
- Cool aesthetic with sturdy design, especially for the price
Cons
- Controller doesn’t make it easy to play games on any system
- Installing emulators and ROMs takes too much time and effort
- Playing games on consoles requires buying extra adapters
I don’t have a lot of good experiences with VR peripherals, but the Arcade2TV’s system’s strength lies in the solid simplicity of its controller. It’s built with a Meta Quest in mind, but you can still use it outside of VR. The main unit, which X-Arcade calls the Tankstick VR, is as beefy as its name implies. You can get the controller individually for $300, but with the extra stand the entire unit weighs 50 pounds and takes close to an hour to set up, especially if you try to do it alone, like me.
Once it’s put together, the entire device feels like so, so close to old arcade cabinets of yesteryear. The ball-top, Japanese-style joystick is clicky and sturdy without having that flimsiness you get with some other, cheaper recreations, the 16 bowl-shaped, Sanwa buttons don’t require much force but don’t have a squishy feel you might find on aged arcade machines, and , the trackball is truly a “chef’s kiss” of multicade setups. Playing games on it is a simple joy reserved normally for higher-end devices. The rub is getting to that point.
Connecting it to your favorite system isn’t as simple as plug and play. The Tankstick is designed to operate on every console, and I mean every console going all the way back to the Sega Dreamcast and beyond. You can hook it up to a Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5, though you will have to spend upwards of $80 or more to buy separate adapters from X-Arcade. It’s the classic dilemma of being a jack of all trades and master of none. Even connecting it directly to a PC for some quick and dirty head-to-head Street Fighter 6 is not as straightforward as it should be. The PC recognizes Tankstick as a keyboard, which means you have to manually bind the keys for each game you play.
The most seamless experience is with emulation and—as noted by the “XR” in the name—with a VR headset. The Arcade2TV-XR comes with a small dongle that plugs into the Meta Quest 3 (which itself includes a handy port for USB-C passthrough) and automatically connects to the controller via Bluetooth. The included user manual holds a code for Arcade Ranger, an app developed by X-Arcade that will let you install several open source arcade emulators, known as MAMEs (multiple arcade machine emulator). To actually get this working, you have to upload your own ROMs into the Meta Quest by connecting it to a PC and dropping in your files manually.
For those who haven’t yet tried emulation, ROMs refer to read-only memory—essentially game files ripped from its original source. In Arcade Ranger, you can play within a VR environment or make use of the Quest 3’s color passthrough to plop down a fake arcade cabinet directly in place of the Tankstick. From there, the Arcade Ranger uses the Quest 3’s hand tracking to simulate your hand hovering over the buttons or trackball.
It’s not the kind of thing to make you forget you’re wearing a headset, but I felt real joy standing in front of a cabinet with a screen full in my face. The app goes so far as to simulate the CRT scanlines on the VR arcade cabinets. It won’t be magic if you don’t like arcade games, and there’s still more troubleshooting to do because this is all emulator-based. I could play Missile Command or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade without issue, but I struggled to make Tekken 3 run above a choppy 10 FPS.
There’s nothing simple about X-Arcade’s machine, except the controller. Considering how arcade gaming exemplified the benefits of simplicity, that might give you pause. Yet this is still going to be cheaper than buying your own arcade cabinet and it will be easier than building your own (there’s an expansive how-to site). But cheaper is not cheap. This controller and stand still cost $400 and to take advantage of its VR capabilities you need a $300 or $500 VR headset too.
Still, what you get is a machine that saves on space and feels almost as good as the real thing. The cheapest stand-up, single-game arcade machines from a well-established company like Arcade1Up range from $500 to $600. Systems that can play more than one game, or multicades, can go for over $1,000 or far more, in some cases. If you already have a Quest 3, $400 for what’s still a solid-feeling arcade stick isn’t as big a pill to swallow. And at least the Arcade2TV-XR saves you a moderate amount of space.
