CD-i member Glen Parsons has this boxed CD-i joystick for sale. It is pretty rare these days, but a true beauty on CD-i. Manufacturer Tecno Plus made these joystick for various formats, but this is the only version that was compatible with CD-i. Philips or a different manufacturer never released a joystick, although Philips had plans and even created a prototype. When I was younger I was always thrilled to play our PC games with a true joystick; especially shooters were very suitable to play with this. Otherwise we had the keyboard to navigate through games, but something like a gamepad we only got to know when consoles became more popular in every household. I always found it remarkable that our CD-i never had a joystick but only came with a thumbstick. As a separate pointing device you could buy a mouse, a trackerball, even a gamepad, but there was no joystick. A lot of times later, we discovered that there actually was a CD-i joystick available, released by a true third party company 'Tecno Plus'. These products were not sold in The Netherlands, as far as I know. We also know now that Philips was planning its own joystick on CD-i, but somehow never released it.
Steven Clinton comments: "I passed one of these up a long time ago, as very expensive and thinking it would be analogue and like a flight stick, made sense thinking of CD-i air mouse tech, but could not think of too many games it would be fun with? Maybe Kether, Chaos Control/Chaos Crusade. But, I eventually got it cheap enough not to refuse (unboxed). To my surprise it's not analogue but short travel, clicky/microswitched stick and microswitched buttons. Great for Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, and Namco's Arcade Classics collection, I'd recommend."
So what do we have here? This TP521 Joystick by Tecno Plus is a 'simple' joystick configuration, which means the joystick purely reacts as a digital pointing device and it is not pressure sensitive. Joysticks can offer quite some sensitivity when they have some kind of pressure sensitivity, but without it, this joystick can navigate a bit roughly and it is hard to make precise movements. Other than that, it does offer a 3-speed setting as it was also available on the CD-i touchpad and the CD-i gamepad by Philips. This speed setting changes the speed of the pointer, so the higher the speed, the faster the cursor moves over the screen. In fast paced shooters, like Chaos Control on CD-i, it is a handy feature to shoot everyone as fast as possible and even in games like Mad Dog McCree it is a welcome extra, although I still prefer the mouse to navigate the way I want, it is far more precise. CD-i member Dynamic-Gaming-Twinz, who owns this beautiful device, comments: "it is not pressure sensitive. It only has an adjustment for the speed of the pointer as the picture shows, there are three speeds much like the other controller peripherals."
