So my last entry into the Fight Stick Diaries was about buying the stick and trying it out for a couple of hours. In this entry I'm going to be talking about how I have been doing in the last month and two weeks with the stick and also talk about the arcade parts.

Over the last few weeks I have been putting in some hours everyday into playing my arcade stick so that I could get better or used to it. There are a couple of things that I have noticed while putting in the time:

1. Practicing with the CPU can only get you so far

2. Finding the right way to hold the joystick is hard

3. Hitting the right buttons takes some getting used to

I chose Persona 4 Arena as my main fighting game because it's very beginner friendly and also the community on Giant Bomb is pretty awesome and helpful. There are a couple of ways I have practiced in P4A and that includes training mode, challenge mode and versus mode against the CPU. I tend to avoid online matches since I don't really feel confident about my performance but sometimes I do friendly matches with the GB P4A crew so I can get actual human player practice.

Before I switched to an arcade stick I was playing with the DualShock 3 and was doing really well with it. After awhile I cranked up the difficulty in the game to “Hell” (which is the highest) because the game felt a little too easy. This might have been because I was playing with very skilled players on GB and started to learn some new moves and tricks from them. When I transitioned to the stick, the difficulty didn't really change much at all for me since I can beat all the characters (except for Kanji) almost 95% of the time. The only problem I really faced playing against the CPU is predictability. The CPU tends to always charge in first attacking and I can pretty much counter it most of the time and a good example of that is Chie always starting with Rampage.

Once I got used to playing against the CPU, I went to Challenge Mode but this time I started from challenge #1 with everyone again since I want to re-learn everything. Everything went smooth until after the instant kill challenge where it want's you to do longer chains of combos. So I spent the last 2 weeks doing challenges over and over until I basically reached challenge #20-21with every characters except Labyrs and S.Labrys. It was a very long and arduous process but it did help me learn every character's combos and also helped me to hit the right buttons with my fingers. It took a lot of time but I can definitely say it is pretty rewarding that I can chain combos.

There is one thing that I still can't get used to and it's finding the right way to hold the joystick. I looked up “how to hold an arcade stick properly” on YouTube and Google and tried the common ones that everyone uses but I can't seem to use any of them. Right now I settled on holding it like this in the picture below:

I find this way more comfortable than the ones I tried from YouTube but the only problem I have is doing QCF. I can pull it off when I'm in training but when it comes to a real fight I panic and flub the QCF completely and ruin the combo I've been working on. I think I just need more practice since people on the forums tell me it could take about 3 months to completely make it feel like second nature to me.

Well that's all the update I really have for now since I only played Persona 4 Arena seriously but once I get into Street Fighter 4 it's going to be a bit more different. Next time I'm going to talk about why I switched to Seimitsu push buttons and thinking about buying another arcade stick.