The Cross|Up is ... Pretty Great?
The Cross|Up is ... Pretty Great?
I bought a Cross|Up™ (I’m just going to call it a cross-up for the rest of this article, sorry Hit Box Arcade™). I thought it’d be interesting to discuss it a bit!
tl;dr:
If you want to skip to the end:
The cross-up is straight-up better than a standard arcade stick, so if you’re going to buy a stick with a lever in it, you should get something with a cross-up style layout (assuming it’s available and within your budget).
Completely leverless controllers like the Hit Box are still probably objectively the best overall fighting game controllers.
How good a given controller “objectively” is only matters at the margin. No controller will magically make you go Super Saiyan, so just play on what you like best.
The build quality/extra features on the cross-up are really nice.
How It Works
If you’re not familiar with it, you might be wondering what the hell all of those extra buttons are for. The lever is your left analog stick and the black buttons are the same attack buttons you’d find on any regular stick. If you ignore the buttons with the white rims, you could use this exactly like you’d use a normal stick. The buttons with white rims are intended to be used as the dpad, giving you another way to input directions. By default, it’s configured like this:
This allows you to do certain kinds of directional inputs more easily than you could do them on a lever alone. For example, in Guilty Gear Strive, a lot of supers have an input that’s 632146 and then an attack button. On a lever, it kind of feels like three distinct steps—you do the half circle, and then swing the lever back to forward, and finally hit the attack button:
For a lot of characters, this is the one invincible move they have, so you might want to use it as a reversal, but consistently getting the input quickly and accurately in reversal situations was inconsistent for me. On the cross-up, you can divide the motion between your two hands. My left hand can do the half circle part, and my right hand can hit forward and the attack button. This makes it feel more like just two steps:
In practice, this worked exactly like I’d hoped—it’s way easier/faster vs. using the lever alone.
With the extra directional buttons, it seems like I have a few possible paths with the cross-up:
I don’t end up using the extra buttons really, so it’s “just” a stick
I use the buttons for certain specific use cases (like my Guilty Gear Strive example above), but 95% of the time, I ignore them
I use the buttons a lot and they’re integrated into my moment-to-moment play
I’ve had the cross-up for about six months now, and path 2 seems like the most likely one. Using the directional buttons requires you to (slightly) reposition your hand, so l go to them for specific use cases, but most of the time, my fingers rest on the main action buttons. This is the reason that I don’t think a cross-up can be as objectively good as a completely leverless controller like a hit box.
On hit box, your fingers are always resting on the directional buttons, so there’s minimal hand repositioning, and aside from certain types of inputs (like half-circles), you get the advantages of a cross-up all the time (and not just when you decide to reposition your hand).
Also, while the two input methods for motions do allow the cross-up to do certain things better than a hit box, there’s nothing to stop stop you from combining the hit box and cross-up ideas into the Infinity Gauntlet of fighting game controllers.
The Software
You can use the Cross|Up Designer software to change the inputs associated with each of the different buttons, and you can also change things like the SOCD method used. There’s a rocker switch on the cross-up itself that allows you to switch between three different main profiles (and you can have even more with a bit of extra work).
For example, I have this as one of my main three layouts for when I play Vampire Savior:
I swapped the dpad up and down buttons. With the up button next to the left/right buttons, it's really easy to hit 9 (up+forward) with the buttons. This allows for crazy fast instant air dashes by pressing up+forward with the movement buttons and then tapping forward on the lever as soon as I release the buttons. I can do faster IADs than even double tapping up+forward on a hitbox.
I haven’t messed around too much with the software (the rabbit hole goes deep!), but it really opens up your options and allows the cross-up to be used for nearly any game (especially with the option to plug a Wii nunchuck into it).
Final Verdict
If you saw the tl;dr at the top, you already know what I’m going to say here. If you’re planning on buying a stick with a lever, just buy a cross-up or a cross-up equivalent (assuming it’s within your budget).
The extra directional buttons are great to have. Whenever there’s a specific input that’s giving you trouble on the lever alone, the buttons offer ways to work around it and troubleshoot.