For the love of the game-Arcade sticks

Some people collect baseball cards and some people collect Beatles stuff...my name is Mike Dodd and I collect arcade sticks.

An arcade stick is just what the name implies, it's a stick that is meant to replicate the arcade experience at home and it can vary widely in size,shape and quality. Everything from the buttons, to the artwork and the stick itself can be special and thats what I love about them. Let me tell you about my first arcade stick which is posted above...thats my Mad Catz Street Fighter 4 tournament edition stick for the Playstation 3.

I got the stick for review earlier this year to tie into my review of Street Fighter 4 and immediately I fell in love with it.Mad Catz built this things for the serious street fighter player by making it an absolute dream to play with with superior Japanese parts like the buttons and the joystick itself and especially with the design so close to the SF4 cabinet. Sitting down with this thing and learning how to use a stick properly became a zen like experience to me, especially with my SF mentors like Drekken and RXS from http://www.pownz.com

So as I learned the ways of the joystick I learned to love something about the craftsmanship that went into making these things. As I played more and more Street Fighter 4 and moved onto King of Fighters 12, I wanted something different...I wanted something that reflected me and I wanted to move up to something that was uniquely me...and so I wanted a custom arcade stick and i did some looking around. I searched for a few days and one name just kept coming up...http://www.arcadeinabox.com and Ed over there.

I contacted Ed and decided that I wanted to cover one of these custom arcade sticks for 1150 AM WIMA and I wanted to see what went into making one of these things. I've had a few conversations with Ed and I learned so much about the process and its absolutely astounding. Ed sent me an arcade stick which I have dubbed 'The TWIG stick" and here it is


It's an experience to play with something hand crafted and you really see why people make their own arcade sticks and the love that goes into it. The great thing about having a custom stick is that it can do so much more like being able to play on multiple consoles such as Xbox 360 and Ps3 on one piece of hardware and that is seriously pretty awesome. My custom arcade stick really made fighting games come alive for me again and I really felt like I was back when I was 14 and playing Mortal Kombat 2 in the arcades and tossing down some challenges in the local arcade in Street Fighter 2. Having two great arcade sticks really made things come back full circle again and felt like a real gamer again and it showed considered the amount of fight time I've logged on those sticks since the summer.

However I learned of something new and exciting and that was Capcom's newest fighter, Tatsunoko vs Capcom and it being on the wii...and this caused me great pain as I did not have a wii fight stick and I refuse to go back to being a pad player. I began hunting for the wii arcade stick by Hori

I literally traveled all the way to Cornwall,Ontario which is PAST Ottawa and all around the Buffalo area in the Us for this thing. So well over 1000 KM for this little piece of plastic but why? I could have ordered it off Ebay or some retailer...but this was about the hunt for something important to me and what can I say,it was fun.
This stick though shall remain unused till I get my Tatsunoko vs Capcom in January but thats okay because now I am checking out some new sticks such as.....


I know that's a little overboard since it's a TE stick the same as the other Mad Catz ones but seriously, I'm a sucker for artwork and variants. Hell I even a second TE for the xbox 360 that is the Street Fighter 4 TE round 2 with the different artwork and I love it just the same as my other sticks. I kinda of look at it this way, women love shoes....and I love arcade sticks... however if I end up a closet full of them at some point it maybe time to stop me.

My best arcade stick is this one though which is in the door of my house.