RUN COWARD!

I had a friend who never played it before that finally got to try it when Midway Arcade Treasures came out. He knew absolutely nothing about the game and since it he was tired and it was very late when he was trying it, he really did jump out of his seat when Sinistar first entered the scene.

That little animation of your ship getting sucked into his mechanical maw and blown apart, priceless.

I did play this in the arcades quite a bit, I can say it's just as brutally difficult with the real deal as it is with a directional pad. You can play more efficiently but the enemies get real aggressive real fast once you actually start destroying Sinistar successfully.