About a month ago I bought the limited edition Madcatz Evo fight stick from my local game store and brought it home. I've always been itching to play with a stick for as long as I can remember, but was hesitant on it because of the price. Well it didn't matter anymore since I sold most of my movies and DVDs to save up for one and I did. Guess what happens after buying one? After playing with it for one night, it stops registering X and weirdly enough DOWN... So next day I returned it and got my money back.

After researching on shoryuken.com and seeing GravityPenguin's Aigis fight stick, I just instantly went to Amazon and ordered the brawl stick and some Sanwa parts from Gamesharkstore.ca (1 Lever and 8 buttons). After finishing work I rushed home to see if the package arrived early and it did! I was so excited that I didn't even bother to take off my uniform lol. So I just unscrewed the bottom, replaced the lever, swap the buttons and also rewire the buttons to be more like Street Fighter IV style. I also replaced the artwork with some Persona 4 Arena art and after 30 minutes I was done!

I should mention that I originally wanted clear buttons but I couldn't find it anywhere for a decent price so I decided on my P4A colours. Here's my project:

OK now for the actual use of the damn thing!

I've only played Persona 4 Arena for 3 hours so far and I'll tell you what my experience was like. The first thing I wanted to find out was "Let's see how different it is compared to the PS3 controller." So I went into VS mode and played against the CPU... I had no clue what I was doing and started to feel a little intimidated. So I immediately quit VS and went to Lesson Mode, which I should have done in the first place. So I went through most of the lessons and then a move requiring a quarter stick appeared, dumbass me said "This is no biggie" and for the life of me I could not pull it off! After sticking with it for around 20-30 minutes, I figured out the range of the stick and can now pull of the swift strike some-what on a regular basis. After passing that hurdle I completed the lessons and went straight to training to try out what I have learned.

So in training I found out in a few hours that I can pull off almost all my regular stale moves like Raging Lion, Swift Strike to cross-slash and etc. but I still need to practice the left quarter stick motion on the lever. There are also a few things I noticed while practicing, when using the fight stick I noticed that I'm not as mobile as I am on the PS3 controller and second I can pull off air combos much better with my fingers ready on the other buttons.

I'm sure within the next two months I can get used to playing with a stick assuming I practice almost everyday and I plan to. My next few blogs will consist of updates from me on how I'm adjusting to the stick and also other games.

If you read all of this you are crazy!