When I was a kid I loved the arcade.  It was a special treat to be able to go to the one in Charlottetown, half an hour from where we lived and play some Mortal Kombat II.  On the ferry that connected PEI to Canada, you’d occasionally be lucky enough to get on the boat that had a decent arcade, and you’d grab a handful of quarters and play until the engine thudded to a halt in New Brunswick.  Street Fighter II’ Champion Edition was one of my favourites, and I played the hell out of it when it finally hit the consoles.

When Street Fighter IV was released, MadCatz partnered with Capcom to release two types of arcade fightsticks – both are highly-moddable, but one  – the Tournament Edition – already features Japanese (Sanwa) arcade-quality parts.  The other, the Special Edition, has crap parts, but they can easily be swapped out for legit arcade quality parts.

San Diego Comic Con Exclusive

This summer at the San Diego Comic-Con, MadCatz released an extremely limited Tournament Edition fightstick with special Sagat-getting-his-scar-via-Shoryuken inspired artwork.  The colour scheme was wild and zany, I never would’ve chosen those colours, but the day I saw it I was smitten and immediately placed an order for the appropriate buttons and balltop from Lizardlick.  It has taken a helluvalong time, especially since by now quite a few modders have already made their own versions of the stick, but here is the final result, complete with an updated Super Street Fighter IV logo just for kicks.

Ze Insides

Nothing too interesting going on in there – just the standard Xbox 360/PC printed circuit board and the relatively clean MadCatz wiring.  And now for the outside:

Shot One

Shot Two

Shot Last

As always you can click on the thumbnails for ridiculously large shots.  The process for getting the artwork on there, since we don’t have a Kinko’s within a two hour drive, was to get it printed on cardstock at Staples, then laminated, then cut out and the edges trimmed to fit.  I then sprayed Elmer’s adhesive onto the back of it, attached it to the metal plate on the stick and cut out the holes and the 360 guide/turbo area.  This was dumb for a number of reasons, and in the future I’m just going to trim those holes before I ever get the adhesive spray into the equation.  When I had to peel back the artwork to screw the metal plate on, I ended up creasing some of the artwork, which most people wouldn’t notice but drives me kinda crazy.  Anyway, live and learn.  Next time will be better, and I still think it’s a marked improvement over the original artwork.

For the tech-minded I swapped out the MadCatz joystick and buttons and replaced them with a Sanwa JLF-TP-8Y with orange Sanwa balltop, and 8 Sanwa OBSF-30 snap-in pushbuttons. Thanks to the great folks at LizardLick for such a great transaction for the gear on this mod!

P.S. I did not forget Beta.