Monkey's Paw with One Finger Extended

If you've got Xbox Live Gold or Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, you can play Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz HD for free through the weekend. This is good, because you can play the first couple of levels, foam at the mouth after dying to the cyborg orangutan boss a dozen times, and vow to never play it again. Congratulations, that's twenty-five dollars you won't be wasting!

People have had the gall to complain that Banana Blitz HD isn't hard enough, since many of its stages have guard rails which made them more manageable back when the game was designed for motion controllers. These people clearly have not had the pleasure of fighting the eighty foot long dragon at the end of the fourth level. The good news is that it can be brought down by pressing a button on its forehead. The bad news is that it constantly fires clusters of homing missiles, ensuring that you'll be launched off its back before you get anywhere near that weak point.

Same to you, game. Same to you.

Anyway, I'm writing this to discuss the latest Mayflash controller adapter, the Magic S Pro. I had reviewed the company's Universal Adapter a couple of years ago and was pretty pleased with it... it still gets pulled out from my pile of random controllers whenever I need my Killer Instinct or King of Fighters 2002 UM fix. 

However, I'm not as happy with the Magic S Pro. It's not Mayflash's fault... the adapter works as intended, and can even be used with Bluetooth controllers, a feature missing from the Universal Adapter. However, it can't be used with the handful of PS2 Classics released for the Playstation 4, thanks to Sony's short-sighted and inflexible design. 

One thing Mayflash DOES deserve criticism for is
the tiny, barely tactile mode switch button on the
side of the adapter. Maybe your pet ant could
hold it down for you.
(Image from Amazon)

Those titles map start and select to the touchpad, which works fine with a Dual Shock 4 but doesn't adapt well, or at all, to any controllers you'll connect to the Mayflash adapter. They don't even work with some official PS4 controllers without a touchpad, like the Hori Fighting Commander. It effectively makes it impossible to play SNK's nine PS2 Classics with a joystick, which is what these Neo-Geo and Atomiswave ports were designed for in the first place.

Luckily, there's a solution. It's a stupid solution, but it's a solution. If you connect a wired Playstation 3 controller to the second USB port of the PS4, then pick the game you wish to play, you can use its start button to get past the attract mode in SNK's games. Technically, you wouldn't even need the Magic S Pro... you could start the game with the Dual Shock 4 and use a legacy controller to play it. However, if you want to use a wireless joypad like 8BitDo's M30, this will be the only way you'll have access to start and select. 

By now, you're probably thinking "It's not really a wireless experience if you have to reach for the other controller to continue!" Yeah, that's why I said it was a stupid solution.