Playing fighting games with a controller is a painful experience. In fact it’s so awful I’m surprised there aren’t support groups for us poor souls who have been afflicted with this condition for so many years. However, there is hope for us. I recently found salvation in the form of the MadCatz Tournament Edition FightStick. Brothers and sisters, I’ve come here to sing its praises.
Ok, on a more serious note, this joystick rocks. It really has been a painful six months trying to play Street Fighter IV with the standard PS3 controller. I’m not as cool or lucky as Greg with his fancy SlikStick so I’ve been trudging along getting my ass kicked and slopping up a few wins the hard way. Somehow, a deal on the TE FightStick fell in my lap and I jumped at the opportunity. While I’m still getting my ass kicked online, I definitely feel that this finally what it should feel like to play Street Fighter IV.
As I’ve written before, I grew up in the arcades and learned how to play pretty much every genre of game with a joystick. I’ve never gotten completely comfortable tossing hadoukens or dragon punching with a joystick but I’ve been making due since the days of the SNES. I was really just getting by with copious amounts of cursing and blaming the computer for being “cheap”. Now that I can finally pull off the moves properly with this joystick I feel like I can tell you more about this fabulous piece of hardware.
The first thing to know about these joysticks is MadCatz really went all out and built a seriously high quality piece of hardware. The TE stick is built with authentic Sanwa parts (yeah I didn’t know squat about them either but apparently all good arcade cabinets are built with this stuff) and they have such a great feel. The buttons are snappy and have that great arcade tap, while the joystick is tight, responsive and equally clicky to the touch. Everything feels like you’d expect from an arcade stick and doing all of the usual SF moves is super easy again. Even unboxing this thing is fun, they packaged it in a very reusable window box with magnetic panels that open to reveal the FightStick resting within. Super cool.
My biggest concern before the TE arrived was “Is this thing going to feel like a half ounce slab of plastic that’ll slide off my sweaty lap in the middle of competition?” I was pleasantly surprised by the weight, this thing is easily ten pounds and is big enough to straddle your legs with no slippage. It has some rubber nubs on the bottom if you actually need to place it on a table or something but I’ve only found it comfortable to use from my lap. There’s even enough room to rest your forearms on the top surface so you don’t blow your wrists out trying to snap off Ultra Combos.
So far I’ve used the joystick with SFIV, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and ol’ Marvel Super Heroes and it’s performed perfectly. I haven’t had a chance to try it with a 3D fighter but I’m hoping to pick up Soul Calibur IV someday to give this a shot. I’m not sure it’ll be any better than a controller with this type of game, but I paid a pretty decent chunk of cash for this thing and I’m gonna try it with every type of game short of Scrabble. And maybe even that too.
As much as I’d like to convince myself that this is the perfect solution to all my fighting game woes, unfortunately I do have a few (very small) issues with the joystick. The first is that it’s wired. Yes, I’ve been spoiled by this gaming generation’s love of wireless controllers and having to spool out a USB cable and plug it in ends up costing me about 27 seconds of inconvenience. Thankfully the cable is thirteen feet long so I can still sit on the couch across the room and play my games. Next is the inclusion of a turbo button. I’m sure this still serves some purpose here in the 21st century, but I haven’t used turbo on a controller since Contra on the NES. I tried it in a few matches but I think it only expedited my ass in getting kicked. Who knows, maybe Contra will hit PSN and I can fire up this feature once again. My last complaint is that the TE isn’t a full size cabinet. For the price, I feel like I could have purchased about half of a cabinet and stuck it in my basement. Of course this isn’t really a valid complaint but I figured I needed three items for this to feel complete.
Unfortunately the final chapter in my TE FightStick saga will have end at another time, when I take on the awesome task of customizing my joystick. The wizards at MadCatz, in their eternal wisdom, left the door open to modify all of the guts and some of the appearance of this joystick and I intend to take advantage of this with new buttons, joystick ball and custom artwork. My hope is to post another update or two covering my work in progress and the final results. In the meantime I recommend checking out this thread on the Shoryuken forums to see the magic other folks have been working with their FightSticks.
So to wrap up, if you have the cash and want to play fighting games the way they should be played, do yourself and your left thumb a favor and buy this joystick. You won’t find anything better and you might even win a match or two!
