A flight stick for a simulator, or even for an old vector game like Star Wars, is nice to have it function like they should: up turns down the nose of your "flight craft" and down pulls it up. But a top fire joy should function in normal joy directions if you use it for games that use top fire sticks; using a flight stick to be a more comfortable and functional "top fire" to play those same games it works best to set the flight stick directions to behave exactly the same. It's easy to get your flight stick to do both depending on the game using the mame config menus. Same for a top fire except that top fires don't work well for games that call for an analog flight stick.