MadCatz, thank you so much for listening!
My must-have peripheral for 2009.
Street Fighter IV is less than a month away and once again I have become totally swept up in they hype. My Xbox 360’s NXE dashboard is now adorned with a Premium Street Fighter IV theme, Chun Li is now my gamepic, and my brothers and I have been playing SSFTHDR on Live more and more often. A bit of news out of this year’s CES has only added fuel to the fire: MadCatz Accessories and Capcom have teamed up to produce official Street Fighter IV joysticks and gamepads for both the 360 and PS3.
For most people, the real news-maker in this story is the extremely limited-run Tournament Edition Joystick ($150) which reportedly will feature all the same SANWA-DENSHI arcade parts found in the arcade cabinet. However, as I have already hinted in an earlier post, what has me the most stoked about this announcement are the SF-style 6-button pads, which according to an early preview on Gamecyte.com promise to be “the best console 6-button pads ever made”. Best of all, they will sell for only $40 a pop, a mere fraction of the cost of the Tournament stick, and half the cost of the standard stick. Since I already own a Hori DOA4 stick which does a serviceable job on SF and most other fighting games, I am interested in the gamepads for several reasons: They’re quieter; they’re smaller, take up less space and are easier to carry; and they make a great Player 2 option when a friend comes over. I’ve already put down my $5 deposit for one controller at my local EB and will pick up a second one after SFIV is released and it becomes clearer exactly what art styles are available (right now, I’m gunning for Chun Li and Ken).
The only game in town for SF purists on the original Xbox.
Another one of the reasons that I’m excited about these gamepads is because these are the first gamepads of this type to come out on an Xbox platform in 5 years. The last time was after the release of Street Fighter Anniversary Collection for the Xbox and PS2 back in 2004. The Xbox side was handled disastrously by manufacturer Nubytech, who released the Xbox versions of the controller more than two months after the release of SF Anniversary on the system, while the PS2 controllers were released practically day and date with the game. Ironically, the Xbox version of SF Anniversary was the only version that was online-enabled, so while PS2 owners got both the game and the pads at release, they had to be satisfied with only local, offline play, while Xbox owners were able to play the game online but were stuck with the standard Xbox pad until Nuby’s SF pads finally shipped. Being the crazy SF fan that I was, I actually called upon the assistance of a friend in Japan and imported the extremely hard-to-find Hori Fighting Stick EX for Xbox, but with hardly any other fighting games to play on the Xbox, there was little reason to keep it as my interest in SF waned. I did eventually get a couple of Nuby SF Anniversary Pads, but once it became clear that the Xbox would be replaced by the 360 in less than a year’s time and that it would not support Xbox peripherals, I sadly had to get rid of them all.
This time around, things are looking good on the 360. Love or hate the Dead or Alive franchise, DOA4’s early post-360 launch release alongside the DOA4 Arcade Stick from Hori ensured that 360 fighting game fans had at least one decent control option for fighting games, and with Street Fighter II – Hyper Fighting available on XBLA and Anniversary collection playable through back compat, there was actually more of a reason to hold on to an arcade stick than there ever had been on the original Xbox. Nowadays, Hori sticks are quite common on the 360, as there has been a re-release of the exact same stick with different decals with almost every major fighting game launch on the system (e.g. Virtua Fighter 5, Soul Calibur 4). But even after three years, there are still no 6-button gamepads for the 360…extremely puzzling given that Hori makes them in Japan but refuses to make them available in Canada. Hopefully this will all be rectified when the MadCatz gear is released alongside SFIV. Fingers crossed!
