Shrink Fighter II

Good news, everyone! My Switch Mini is scheduled to arrive in two days! That means I'll be able to take advantage of the Spring and Sega sales scheduled to end next week. Did you know that you can't purchase Switch games on the eShop until you actually have a Switch, in your hands, registered to your Nintendo account? Absolutely true. I even called the customer support line to check. None of the other game companies do this... with PSN and Xbox Live, you can "bank" games for next generation systems and download them once you've bought the machine. Not Nintendo, though! They've got to be big jerks about everything.

While I'm waiting for the Switch to get here, I can twiddle my thumbs and their neighboring digits on this...

This is the Street Fighter II Champion Edition fight stick by New Wave Toys. Yes, it literally fits in the palm of your hand. What's more shocking is that it works surprisingly well in spite of its size. They put real microswitches in this thing, as demonstrated in a teardown video by Johnny Liu. This results in a level of precision that's not quite up to snuff with a full-sized fight stick, but will definitely get the job done for a quick dip into Ultra Street Fighter IV or a few rounds of Sunsoft's brilliant NES adaptation of the late 1980s Batman film.

My only beef is that it's so small it can be tough to keep it still on a table. Set it in your hand instead and it restricts the use of the action buttons to your thumb, which isn't ideal when you've got six of them. Nevertheless, I've had much larger fight sticks that were much worse.