i bought the cyborg evo (dont think they make it any more, replaced but the FLY5 i guess) and it's a decent joystick for the price, about£30 i think.
on bf2 for ages i flew with just keyboard for agesss (that's right no mouse

). in the choppers it was great as it was digital input (all or nothing) it was easy to dodge missiles by doing rolls and loops xP flying the jets was a bit harder and i often got raped. i tried to use the mouse for the jets but couldnt get the feel of it :\
then i bought the cyborg evo and woooooo i could fly it all

i would give it a 3/5 tho as the dead zones are quite fiddly. found i had to increase the deadzones a bit as even when not touching the stick it would be registering movements. but as for functionality it had more buttons than could possibly need! love flying the jets on bf2 now

but tbh i really wanted the ms forcefeedback but they were still going for 70£ish second hand!!!!!
flying in BC2.... ha! everything handles terrible in that! they seem to have a mind of their own. black hawk can hardly yaw, the huey in vietnam was just insanely agile. the russian gunship was slower than cake, the apache was pretty decent but has a mind of its own when not wanting to pull up. everything was just so restricted in it's movement it was silly.
expanding on that point, you had a finite altitude of something like 100ft. so you would get up as high as you could... still throttling but yet you would lose height, and then if you moved over landscape it would force you even lower.... speed wise, i sware you could almost run faster on the ground. only way to get decent speed would be to hurtle it towards the ground and then try and pull up before you smashed into the ground (see handling issues

). even the roll, if you roll a heli it will keep rolling, (like in bf2) not do about 20 degrees of bank and then say... nah.... that's far enough
and then there are the hit boxes.... i sware the heli hit boxes in bc2 are no where near the geometry of the actual aircraft... imagine you but a model heli in the box it comes it.... that's more like the hit box size... a giant shoe box!

countless times been flying... seen a gustav fly past (and actually pass the heli) with a good few meters of space yet it smashes into "something" and explodes.
for these reasons i found using a joystick in bc2 to be completely pointless as to get the dam things to move you have to keep moving the mouse and with the joystick, to get it to change direction quickly you'll probably end up snapping the control column and still be facing the same way haha xD
goon84 has the saitek x52, maybe a little overkill with a separate throttle control for bf games but it's good quality (better than the fly5 and evo) and feels awesome to use *queue top gun music*

i would be even tempted to just stick with your forcefeedback xP
with one of the other points... it will probably be months before most of us get in an AH or jet with all the "mine" people jumping about and getting you kicked by jumping infront of jets if you get them.

but if people tk me for something i make it a personal mission to grief them til i get kicked or they leave.... i can be quite bitter... especially if been waiting for a while.
happy flying, and you can be my wing man any time xP haha! sorry
