In my past article titled “A True Fighting Game Fan’s Only Choice…” I did a review on my very first fighting game arcade stick and how basic modifications can make it better. Now, it is sad to say goodbye to my very first because he is now with a new owner that loves to play good fighting games like myself and I know that he is in good hands. There is a reason to insanity for saying goodbye, because I have found another, yes a new addition to the family.
Before the release of Street Fighter x Tekken came out, Mad Catz released a Fightstick PRO Arcade Stick for the XBOX 360 and the PS3, this was a sign from the Geek Gods telling me to start over. So I did some research on the new stick and found several good things compared to my old stick, and one is the size of the case itself, wider! For me wider is better due to the fact that my hands are huge, and I need that extra space on the left side where the joystick is located. I can rest my left wrist when I play and not having my entire left hand up in the air, missing the stick when my hand slips out when doing a motion.
The option for hiding the cord is the other main reason why I got this is new stick because on my old stick I had to wrap the cord around the stick itself and had to be careful that it wont rip. The Fightstick PRO has a enclosure to hide the cord from harms way instead of what I did, wrapping it around the stick and causing a wire to be loose or worse completely ripped off.
On every Mad Catz Arcade Stick, there are art work that helps it stand out from the rest of the crowd. On my research I have found that there are two different art work that Mad Catz released for the SFxT game. Both art work has several characters from both sides of the series.
Now with the good, comes with the bad. Not all arcade stick is perfect from factory form at all, and the thing that I hate most of all is the 4 way gate that comes with the stick. For me, I have been use to the 8 way style of joy stick that a lot of arcade cabinets have, but getting use to the 4 is much more challenging. For instance, doing the dragon punch motion on a 8 way will come out as a dragon punch, but on a 4 way a dragon punch motion might come out as a fireball or nothing at all and this really annoys me. Linking a combo chain is way of winning a match. The final bad about this stick is the buttons. Push buttons on a arcade stick is valuable as the joy stick, without it a match is lost due to faulty buttons. New buttons are more sensitive so that every time I push a kick or punch button that it will come out without any hesitation due to broken button.
Now I shall and will fix these two problems that plague this new Fightingstick PRO that I bought and I will do another write up once all the parts comes in, but for now this will be abused like no other!