Since this is a tournament-oriented arcade stick, it’s only fair to expect it to do things expert players will attempt. Fortunately it handles them quite well, and I put the Fightstick S through a variety of tests. This included both actual play against high-level players, as well as several tests to see just how fancy one can get with the stick’s inputs. I’m very pleased to report that without exception the stick was able to handle anything I tried to do, and these are the general results I got in various categories.

General Execution (Typical combos, specials, Super/Ultra attacks, EX attacks, throws/teching, command normals, etc.): There are a lot of techniques in fighting games that are just plain hard to do on a regular controller. A quarter-circle plus a single button press to do a fireball may be easy even on the system’s default controller, but what about things like ’Tiger Knee’ inputs (Down, down-forward, forward, up-forward plus attack button), 360 and 720 motions for a grappler’s most powerful throws, and so on? Or how about charge motions, which are notoriously difficult to do on most d-pads? Any good fighting game controller must do well here, and the Fightstick S did.

Everything I could think of worked just fine. Normal execution (blocking, typical combos, etc.) went well, and even decent benchmarking gimmicks like walk-up 360s and buffered 720s from very short moves were easy to do. Multiple simultaneous button presses (for things like throws/teching, EX moves, Zangief’s lariats, Barrier Burst in BlazBlue, etc.) also worked just fine, as did charge motions for characters that use them. The buttons needed about a half-hour ’break in’ period before they worked perfectly, but after that they did fine in all my tests. Simple motions worked fine, Focus Attack Dash Cancels likewise. I had no problem getting my Super and Ultra attacks to work, and tricks like doing Tiger Knee motions to get aerial specials to come out close to the ground (such as Bang’s D Shuriken in BlazBlue) were executed reliably. All of these fundamental controls worked great on the Fightstick S, and it easily passed this series of tests!

Unusual Motions/Inputs: It’s great that the stick can keep up with typical fireball/uppercut motions, 360 throws, and so on. But what if you play a character with really strange motions to do their moves? The TE Fightstick S handles these just fine; my benchmark for this was loading King of Fighters ’98 and doing Geese’s Raging Storm several times. Raging Storm has a rather odd ’pretzel motion’ to it that consists of down-back, half-circle back, down-forward plus A or C. I got it on the first try and was able to do it consistently throughout my tests, which was quite encouraging. More practically, I also tried E. Honda in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix; as you may know his Oicho Throw in that game uses an unusual motion, requiring a near half-circle input that ends at down-back rather than true back. I had no problems getting it to come out reliably, and even landed several ’stored motion’ Oicho Throws on unsuspecting opponents. It’s fair to say the Fightstick S can be used to play characters with more complex motions, and they can be played very well indeed.

Repeated and Rapid Inputs: This falls into two categories; repeated and/or rapid inputs on the joystick itself, and on the buttons. Repeated stick inputs are necessary to do things like air-dash in games that allow it (as well as air-dash one way, then quickly do a second air-dash in the other direction), and are also useful for doing "Just Defended" blocking in Garou; it would also be useful for Parrying in Third Strike if a native Xbox 360 port existed. On the button input side of things, the obvious use would be ’mash specials’ like Honda’s slaps, Blanka’s electricity, and so on. All of this worked fine; ’stunt combos’ relying on multiple air-dashes (in relevant games such as BlazBlue) came out well enough and the times they didn’t were honestly human error on my part. I also had good results mashing out Honda’s slaps and other comparable moves, so there were no problems here.


Summary of Tests: This is admittedly not a scientific list; I didn’t go through fifty repetitions of each test and take notes on each attempt, but I did do all of these things several times both in actual play and in training modes to make sure the stick could handle them. I tried everything I could think of; typical combos, doing super cancels off of relevant special moves, blocking cross-up combos, doing walk-up 360s, 720s buffered off of very short moves, charge motions, dashing around, crouch-teching, and more. They all worked great, and anything that was within my skill to input and understand, the Fightstick S was able to let me do it consistently. It’s true that a few things mentioned in these tests are not match-practical but are instead ’stunts’ done to see if the Fightstick S could keep up with very fast series of inputs, and it handled those too.

Next: Conclusion