Are you a fan of Fighting games at the arcade but find it almost impossible to play at home with a regular controller? Well me too, especially the Xbox 360 controller. To you all, I introduce the Tekken 6 Namco Bandai fighting stick manufactured by HORI. This fighting stick comes with the Tekken 6 game and art book, and if you look around you can pick it up for next to nothing. I paid $59 Canadian dollars for mine at my local game store for a brand new gaming stick, with the game and art book, which is very inexpensive since this fighting stick can be found on eBay for $70 to $100 USD.
The fighting stick button layout is taken from the layouts you would be used to at the arcade. The stick is an 8 directional stick that clicks in every position which is nice because you can tell how far you have moved the stick for those tricky moves. There are 8 buttons available in the pad that are well placed, exactly as you would expect from the arcades and the buttons are dark grey. All button presses are noiseless and smooth. At the top there is the start and back button (or select on the ps3 version) and these buttons are yellow. The face of the controller has great Tekken artwork with a few characters on the front and keeps the face interesting instead of a plain color, giving the controller some character, no pun intended.
The controller is fully wireless and runs on 2 AA batteries. These last about as long as they would in your standard Xbox 360 controller so you will get hours of gaming in. However on the Xbox 360 there is no way to use the battery pack if you have a play and charge kit. The bottom of the controller has a jack for the headset so you can play online and still chat with your friends, or smack talk the guy you just had a flawless victory on.
The only problem I have seen so far on the controller is that sometimes the light indication on the position it is synced in turns off. This happens once in a while for an unknown reason, though I think it has something to do with people messaging you or signing on and off since on the Xbox 360 the controller lights flash when that happens. However that is just my hypothesis and not a fact. This little problem does not impede the controller in any way, since it doesn’t lose connection.
If you are a fan of fighting games you owe it to yourself to pick this up, it will make your gaming experience with fighters much more enjoyable and give you that authentic arcade feel. This controller works for all fighting games I have tried it on (Street Fighter 4, Marvel vs Capcom 2, Tekken6) and will last for hours so you never are handicapped by the standard d-pad ever again.
Thanks to my brother, @michaelkawa for the photoshop job on the picture featured here.
I bought Tekken 6 on release day but the bundle was way too much at the time. I picked it up yesterday at a local shop new for $40. The stick is great so far but when I turn off the console by holding the xbox guide and choosing shut off console, the lights on the controller stay on and I can’t use it to turn the xbox back on; I have to pull the batteries and put them back in.