Just as good as the grade A steelstick64 bowl.
The best
Quickest easiest upgrade you can make for your N64 controller. I have several of these and they are great. Highly recommend.
This review is for the "kit" - the bowl, the stick and the gate. I'm not sure how I would review them a piece at a time.
I have wanted to try a solution like this since the original SteelSticks64, but they always seemed to sell out a week before they went on sale, so it was great when I finally managed to snag this.
My experience differed a little from what was shown in the installation videos. The bowl I received did not have the mirror finish that's usually shown in images. It wasn't terribly rough, but there were light scratches I could see easily without magnification. When I assembled the joystick with the TaoV4 stick and the new gate, the hexagon was in the test program was roughly the right shape but it was shifted like 10% below the benchmark. It was off way more than the adjustment screw would allow me to correct. I fiddled with it for about an hour trying to get something like the perfect benchmark shown on the installation video, but in the end had to settle for "close enough".
My best theory is that either the N64Gears replacements or the new case was misshapen somehow and not allowing for perfect alignment.
At one point I had it almost spot on but the tension from tightening the stick too much created drift problem so I had to back it off to correct that which also deformed my hexagon.
When I looked at all of test results of the pre-made joysticks that were being sold at the same time I bought mine, I noticed those hexagons weren't perfect either so perhaps I was overthinking it.
The improved feel of the new stick and bowl is subtle. If I was a competitive gamer I might have a better vocabulary to explain it, but it was just smoother and more solid. Taking the stick to an extreme and letting go, it snaps back to center easily and without any wobbling.
The difficulty getting this dialed in made me very skeptical, however after getting it "close enough" perfection became academic. What really matters is how it makes the games feel.
After spending ~$200 on the controller, the bowl, the stick and the gate, I wanted to give it a thorough test drive. I spent most of my time in Super Mario 64. Since I originally finished the game in 1996, I have probably picked it up again a dozen times to test new controllers or new video mods or new displays, and each time I had done this in the past, I would get frustrated with the controls after an hour or two and put it down.
With this upgraded joystick, however, it was night and day. Everything just felt right for the first time in nearly 3 decades. It was a joy to play Super Mario 64 again. I managed to get to new stages I had completely forgotten about, where before I would get frustrated and just put it back down again. There are a lot of modern ways to play Super Mario 64 that should, theoretically, eliminate the problems inherent to a worn N64 joystick, but for some reason none of those clicked for me like this did.
This really is a great kit. I was tempted to ding it one star because it is difficult to dial in and nearly impossible to get a perfect test pattern with it. (I'm still not entirely sure which combination of fiddling got me as close as I am now). But the original N64 joystick design really is superior potentiometer and hall-effect based replacements, and deserves a materials upgrade like this to give it better longevity.
Is there a 6 star option ?