Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix: A fantastic remake of a classic game, this game basically requires me to repeat my Street Fighter IV tests as far as special moves go, though I added one twist: Balrog (Boxer) was tested for his turn-around punches, which require you to hold three punches or three kicks for a while before releasing them to do the stored punch. I realized shortly after my Street Fighter IV tests that I hadn’t tried this sort of thing, to see if holding several buttons prevents others from working properly. This was worth trying since a few arcade stick designs have this issue, and playing Balrog/Boxer on them is much harder due to it.
So along with my general tests to make sure moves worked correctly (they did), I tested holding three punches or three kicks while using the rest of Boxer’s normal moves. There were absolutely no problems with this, so I upped the ante by holding all six buttons at once, then releasing them one set at a time in the hopes of doing two turn-around punches in a row. This is of course an absurd thing to do in a real match, but it was worth trying and I’m pleased to report I got two turn-around punches out of it, just like I’d expect.
Verdict: The stick seems to play just fine with HD Remix!
Why this matters: As mentioned above, Balrog/Boxer players sometimes have need to charge their turn-around punch. On a few sticks, holding three kicks (or punches) causes the other buttons to not work, leaving these players without one of their more powerful attacks. Thankfully this Fightstick did not suffer from this issue!
SNK fighting games (King of Fighters ’98, Garou, etc.): I admit I did not give exhaustive tests to these games, for the simple reason that this article has gone on long enough and the player communities for these titles in the US are smaller than I’d like. But I did fire up KoF ’98 to test a few things, doing some of their more complex special move motions (such as Geese’s Raging Storm, requiring an odd ’pretzel motion’ to do) and found the stick would let me execute them just fine. I also found I could do "Just Defended" inputs in Garou just fine, which involved inputting a block motion, resetting the stick to neutral position, blocking again, back to neutral, etc. until all the hits in the attack were dealt with. This also worked just fine.
Verdict: Seems to do well enough here too, I have no serious complaints.
Why this matters: SNK games have some truly silly motions, and if the eight-way stick was going to mess up on anything, these would be it, but it didn’t. The Just Defended tests in Garou were also important because it shows the stick has a good ’reset to neutral’ time, which not only matters in Garou but in any other game with similar mechanics... such as Street Fighter III: Third Strike and its Parrying system, should a good Xbox 360 port of it ever be made. (No, I’m not claiming one exists, outside of the poorly backwards compatible one in Street Fighter Anniversary Edition).
At this point, I’ve done everything I can think of to make this stick fail at things a tournament-level player would reasonably expect to do. I’ve tried complex motions, rapid inputs, strange tactics, and run it through a variety of 2D fighters, the genre it’s built to play in. But every single time, I ended up walking away saying "Well, that worked just fine," and I won the majority of the matches I was playing online while testing this stick. The ones I lost were all the result of human error or a very bad match-up for my characters, so I couldn’t really blame the Fightstick for those. Suffice to say, I’m quite impressed!
Conclusion: This is labeled the ’Tournament Edition’ design of the Fightsticks that Madcatz currently offers, and rightly so. It uses authentic Japanese arcade parts, and its design features make it clear that tournament-level players had a lot of input on this stick’s layout. Would I recommend it for purchase? Absolutely! You can get slightly better performance in this price range, but it usually requires buying a custom-made stick. Would I take it to a tournament? If they’re running it on Xbox 360s (and not all of them are; some big events use PS3s instead), I certainly would! As it is, I’m very fond of the Xbox 360 version of this stick and am considering buying a PS3 one so that all my bases are covered as far as tournaments go.
