A Wonderland Of Violence

Holy shit. Golf N’Stuff in Ventura, California still exists! I’d dearly love to drop in and see what that place is like now.


Playing Super Street Fighter IV on my Xbox 360 has really gotten me nostalgic for the arcade ‘olden days’. I’ve actually been a bit choked up at times. I’m getting the same feeling watching the new Captain America trailer that just hit, but that’s a different, though similarly nostalgic story. The source here is SSFIV’s fight request option when you are playing Arcade Mode. You play through the one player game as normal, but people seeking online matches can drop in on your game, just like an opponent could walk up, drop in quarters or tokens, and push the 2P button on an arcade cabinet. The other night I had so many fight requests coming through I barely made any headway on the 1-player game. Which was fine. I was just playing Arcade Mode to practice and kill time waiting for matches.

I mention Golf N’Stuff in the opening paragraph because when I think back on the good old days of arcade gaming that place is the one with the clearest memories for me. There are specific games at other locations that also mean a lot to my history, but their respective arcades sort of blur and aren’t so identifiable.

Back in 1990, I lived in California. I’d been there a couple of years, and had been hired by Games Workshop to help man their store in Santa Monica… effectively the first one ever on the west coast. I worked in Santa Monica but lived in Ventura, a commute of about 55 minutes through Malibu. I owned a NES at home and had bought a Genesis pretty much on its release day in 1989, but I was a player from the arcades first and foremost. So having home consoles didn’t stop me from hitting the game places, of which Golf N’Stuff was probably the best that I knew.

Golf N’Stuff was/is based around a huge miniature golf course with very elaborate setpieces for most of the holes. And a pretty big go-kart track. It also had an arcade with the usual hoop shot or skeeball games, an air hockey table and A LOT of quarter munchers. I don’t know what all is in that part of the complex now, but their website says 100 arcade games, and they list many of the riding, driving, and shooting games that have big hardware with them… the kind of arcade games that dominate Dave & Busters or Jillian’s. Back in my memories of the place, the machinery on video games rarely got more elaborate than a periscope, mounted guns, or a steering wheel. Hopefully, Golf N’Stuff also has the good ol’ arcade cabs with nothing more than sticks and buttons too. Or maybe a trackball. Of course I ran through the miniature golf course, more than once. It was way too big and fun not to. I drove the go-karts. But it was the arcade I went back to repeatedly… frequently just going to the park for that.

They had tons of games. My first time there was overwhelming. Had to try most everything once. They had three-screen Darius AND Ninja Warriors machines. They had standbys like Rush ‘n’ Attack, Shinobi, and Galaga ’88.. There was the super-tech game at the time, Hard Drivin’. After the newness wore off, I settled down to just a fraction of the games, putting a lot of hours in on Space Harrier, Outrun, and Spy Hunter.

I think the game I played the most was Strider. I was determined to 1CC this game. The closest I got to that was clearing it on the second life of my second credit. I just couldn’t get through that last upside down section, with the moving spikes and robots before the last boss rush, without losing two lives or more. I’m still going to insist there’s some luck involved in getting through that part unscathed.

But there, in my memory, near the middle of the main room was this cabinet with an attract mode depicting one on one combat. It looked a bit like Karate Champ, except mounted on this shelf to the front of the cabinet were these big rubbery looking buttons the size of dessert plates. You used a joystick to move per standard, but then you smacked these big-ass buttons and the force detected determined the power of the punch or kick from your onscreen avatar. This was Street Fighter, people. The original. Later versions of this game switched out the giganto-buttons for a six-button layout in standard-sized components, but THIS is the one I remember:

http://www.arcade-history.com/?n=street-fighter&page=detail&id=2647

I was NOT very good at the game. I don’t think I ever played it against another person actually. It was not a busy game, and I think part of that owed to the fact that the act of looking like a fool whaling away on a game hadn’t yet come into vogue the way it has with Samba de Amigo or the various Bemani games. Karaoke Syndrome. I tried it a few times, got a few victories, but never stuck with it enough to get decent. You couldn’t just credit feed to the end if you weren’t good enough to beat the AI opponents. I remember what Sagat, the boss, looks like from the game, so I guess I probably got that far.

Eventually, Games Workshop asked me to move across country to the HQ in Baltimore, Maryland. So my visits to Golf N’Stuff came to an end. But not before a thunderbolt struck. Street Fighter II. I only got a few games in over what was probably my last time there. There were crowds around this machine. All the serious players seemed to want to get in on this. All the combos, the specials, the tiers and matchups hadn’t been worked out yet. The internet wasn’t pervasive enough for players to have read up on all the strats before seeing the game. I tried Ryu and Guile. But I pretty much fell in love with Chun-Li.

Over in Baltimore, I never really found an arcade that could compete with Golf N’Stuff. The closest thing was a Sega Center that was in Towson north of the city. Arcade machines usually were found in the closet-sized arcades in shopping malls or in the lobbies of movie theaters. But there was always a version of Street Fighter II (CE, Turbo, Hyper Fighting, whatever) available to play. And usually already stocked with players, observers, and on-deck opponents. I remember vividly now how it was to switch out back and forth with other people waiting to play. Not a lot of words spoken. I rarely saw the same players from one day to the next. There were no organized meetings that I could detect. But that didn’t matter. It was intense. Stories from old players about that time are everywhere on the internet. Many of the tournament champs that arose then are still active experts today.

We seem to have no arcades left these days. Home consoles changed the way we game. I didn’t just give up fighting games altogether as arcades got scarce. I went along with the times, got into other genres more popular on home platforms, and just kept plugging away at the one-player-versus-CPU mode of 2D fighters like Samurai Shodown IV or 3D fighters like Soul Calibur. I just sort of kept at it off-and-on as the mood struck me. I’m sure many other arcade enthusiasts drifted out of fighting games altogether without a ready supply of human opponents. With the passing of the arcades and their respective scenes, game genres with fat ties to arcades (fighting, shmups, light guns, etc.) have been largely relegated to niche corners of the video game universe.

But fighting games kept being produced even if the customer base was a small cult. Online play has to fill the competitive void for most players, but it is dominated by massive multiplayer online games and first person shooter arenas. Every now and then SNK would release some special volume of collected King of Fighter games, or a young studio would re-tool a Capcom classic for the HD-generation to download over XBLA or PSN.

For fighting games that niche-yness changed with Capcom’s recent decision to update and revisit their Street Fighter series for real. Street Fighter IV, released in 2008, was a big budget return to the most popular 2D fighting series of them all. Gathering in many of the old favorites and pitting them against new faces, Capcom decided to go with polygonal fighters (like Soul Calibur or Tekken) instead of the venerable hand-drawn sprite approach in portraying all the characters. However they also made two critical decisions that ensured the blockbuster sales that followed. First, the characters are polygonal but have rendered in a very detailed, almost painterly way. Features like hands and feet are more exaggerated compared to their old portrayals… it looked odd to me at first… but there’s no denying the attention to details, and the artistry involved in the shading and modeling. More importantly, Capcom kept the mechanics within a 2D plane. The characters are 3D models, but the camera only moves around them during certain special moves… for drama’s sake really. The game is played along only two axes just like it always has. So you have all the detail and flashiness of a modern game with the tried and true delivery of traditional Street Fighter.

Super Street Fighter IV

Capcom released an update with some tweaks to the mechanics and moves, and several new characters in 2009, with Super Street Fighter IV. Although I bought SFIV, it wasn’t until Super that I really found myself trying to get back into Street Fighter mode. And that only just recently. I’m kind of a latecomer. I practiced quite a bit with good old Chun-Li and some with Fei Long… the Bruce Lee lookalike that I never used in the arcades, but that had grown on me in the various home versions of Street Fighter II and Street Fighter Alpha. I really like the new mechanics and this feels like the most rigorously balanced of any modern fighting game.

When I decided to go online and give versus play a go, I got several rude awakenings. I already knew I wasn’t that good. It had been long enough since I’d played any Street Fighter game, and there were enough differences, that I didn’t expect to be kicking ass. I also knew there’d be ruthless people out there, spamming difficult-to-defend moves, and doing anything to win. That’s fine. That’s part of the game. It is an old fighting game tradition that when someone shows up with some move or combination of moves that supposedly breaks the game, a veteran will come along and take them down a peg. In the absence of real-life experts to demonstrate this, the internet is full of advice and videos and discussions covering this very issue. If you become skilled enough you will be able to handle even seemingly ‘unfair’ characters or moves.

But one thing I didn’t expect was experienced players masquerading as n00bs. I just didn’t consider it prior to playing online. Why would someone who is obviously ‘good’ want to start a whole new account just so they’d get matched up with new suck-ass players and crush them? What would be the point of that? Yet it happened numerous times in my first out. I was bewildered. Here is a guy with zero ranking, but I can’t lay a glove on him and he’s obviously using sophisticated tactics with ease. Surely someone that good would have more pride, wouldn’t they? I have since come to understand that some decent players go to the trouble of starting new gamertags specifically so they try out new characters or new strategies and they want non-expert players to do it with. Someone who’ll have less predictability than the CPU, but will still leave them plenty of openings to try stuff out. I can’t say I respect this very much, but it is what it is. The matching service ‘thinks’ they are novices and so it puts them up against people like me, where they proceed to rip me one before I can blink.

The other shock was losing ranking points when beaten by a much higher ranked player. Before doing this I figured if you played against a MUCH better player (as determined by their points, there’s nothing telling the system about a masquerading expert) you wouldn’t go DOWN in rank. Hell, if you did well you might even gain some rank despite the loss. Nope. If you lose, you drop points. Yeah, if you lose to someone mighty, your points loss is less. But there seems to be very little ‘incentive’ to how the losses and gains work. I’d have created the system to be much more dynamic and encouraging. Even allowing some gains if you manage to do well or even win a round against a vastly superior player… which I did do but it mattered fuck-all to the ranking points. I’m sure a lot of hardcore players think this is fine, and don’t really care if the n00bs (forgetting they were new at one time) ever claw their way up from the ranks of pathetic-dom.

I have since adopted the philosophy (similar to real martial arts actually) that you can learn from someone who beats the shit out of you and to not take the ranking points very seriously. They show progress and all, but getting hung up on the points takes the fun out of it. It’s supposed to be a game. The game has a facility for matching you up with opponents close to your skill level but I wasn’t having much luck with that. That’s what I get for starting so late. It wouldn’t hook me up with other newbies. The lobbies are full of people that are all way better than I am. So if I set the matching to just take whatever I could get… BZANG!… ass handed to me.

After a few days of this discouragement, but before I’d learned to wax philosophical about it, I read someone’s suggestion of using the ‘fight request’ feature in Arcade Mode. So the next night I did that. I started the game with Fei Long on single player, to practice with him against the CPU, with my request parameters set to ‘same skill level’.

This worked out pretty well. As I said at the beginning of this post, it has been, to me, a really fun, nostalgic reawakening of that old arcade excitement. You’re sitting there trying to beat the AI opponent when suddenly ‘Here Comes A New Challenger’ splits out across the screen. You get a chance to re-select your character and his or her ultra, but then you’re off and fighting. I kind of wish when they showed you the gamertag prior to the match you could also see their ranking, but in the main, the ‘same skill level’ setting in this context worked pretty well… much better than it did when I was manually requesting same-skill fights outside of Arcade Mode.

And I’m winning more matches. I still suck, but I’m winning a bit more. I have the hardest time with the relatively new characters… or the ones originating from Street Fighter III which I have less experience with than SFII or SF Alpha. And even when I lose, it is a pretty priceless feeling to wake a better player up by beating them in a round and making them work harder for their victory.

Getting out there and fighting online is an exercise in ego-check for sure. It was pretty frustrating at first, but there have been a few people I had to send a kudo to for being good sports. More than one guy let me have a decent round (without just handing it to me) before wiping up the floor with balls. I think you can do what you have to in these games, and I’m not going to cry over tricky moves and tactics, but a little sportsmanship when you obviously dominate is a pretty decent thing to hand out.

Now that Marvel Vs Capcom 3 just came out and the new generation Mortal Kombat is on the horizon, I may find my pool of potential opponents shrinking considerably. I don’t think it will stay that way. SSFIV is the only one I really feel like being competitive with. Something to do with my old history with it, something about how they’ve worked so hard to make it balanced. MvC and Mortal Kombat have their appeal… I will buy and play both. SSFIV seems to have rather opened a floodgate and now lots of 2D fighters are starting to come out. These new hot fighting games are super-flashy or gory, but they’re usually relegated to novelty status by the most hardcore fighting players, who play them to see everything and unlock everyone… maybe prove their online dominance… and then gravitate back to the more technical shit like King of Fighters and Street Fighter.

I’m not a hardcore fighting game player by any stretch, but I’ll probably do the same thing. Enjoy the other fighters, but always come back to Golf N’Stuff in my living room with Street Fighter.

Nerd-Stick Part Deux

I got the proper part in (thank you Gremlin Solutions in the UK) and finished off the modification of my Xbox 360 joystick, the HRAP EX. My daughter helped me on this part of the project, as she did with the buttons two weeks ago, proclaiming that snipping the wires to the old Sanwa stick was ‘cutting the nerves to the brain’.

The Hori Real Arcade Pro EX does NOT have a simple little molex connector that harnesses the wires for easy hookup. It has a ribbon cable with tiny fine wires all splayed apart and soldered individually to each lead and ground on the four individual switches of the Sanwa stick. So eight connections to have to account for. The kiddo helped me make up masking tape labels to stick on each wire, so we’d hook up the correct directions when the new part went in.


I really didn’t want to have to solder, especially since their was ten-year-old child I wanted to keep involved. The switches on the new Seimitsu stick have flat pegs (blade connectors if you will) that internet searching told me could take a certain type of flat connector. So I hunted all over town for some female quick-disconnect ends that I could crimp on to each wire and as luck would have it, after every other outlets items were all too big, Radio Shack came through.


The disconnect ends themselves fit the Seimitsu stick perfectly. The end you push the wire into for crimping was a bit problematic. The wires off the ribbon cable were just so small. You had to really crunch down on the connector ends to get them to hold onto them. It looked a bit odd to see the smallest quick-disconnects in town sticking off the end of each tiny gray filament, but it worked. I almost got everything screwed back together when I realized the stick seemed short sticking up from the top of the faceplate of the unit when I was testing it on a game to make sure it all worked and the directions were correct.

I then remembered something I’d read when researching this project in the first place. The flush-style mounting plate that comes on a Seimitsu LS-32 stick isn’t quite correct to go into a HRAP. The SS-style mounting plate that I needed (named for the curvy cross-section of each end) actually comes on the LS-32-01 stick that I originally bought… y’know the one with the useless connector (and PCB). So I was okay on having the right part, but if I didn’t know better I’d swear there was some sort of evil afoot with the makers of the HRAP. If you want to swap in a Seimitsu stick you need the body of one model with the mounting plate of another?

Anyway, the SS plate nestles the top of the Seimitsu stick right up where it is supposed to be, so all worked out. A green ball top added on, and my daughters small hands to help me close up the case. I’m glad I went back in and fixed the plate because the difference in height switching between the two HRAPs would’ve driven me nuts.

The green of the joystick top and the A button don’t exactly match Microsoft’s more leafy green that is the Xbox 360 hallmark, but that’s okay. Controls on Japanese candy cabs in arcades tend to have bright party colors, so that’s what this green is, but it is close enough.

As I said in the first part post, the big push for me to do this was because I was having assloads of trouble pulling off double-hadouken motions in Super Street Fighter IV. I was hoping the characteristics of this Seimitsu joystick would help me. While I was waiting for this new stick to arrive I happened to re-read one of the online tutorials at shoryuken.com and happened upon a paragraph that I completely overlooked before. The author was swapping out his Sanwa for a Seimitsu (on a PS2 HRAP) for the exact same reason. I was inspired to try it by shooting game fans’ describing shorter, more precise movement capability. He got good results so that only made my waiting that much more difficult.

Now that it was all together, I didn’t waste any time testing it out. For STG/shmup games you can definitely notice a difference during quick direction changes. There is a lot less of a dead zone (virtually none really) when the stick is centered. For SSIV, I’m still not awesome at complicated command motions in the game, but I can get them out with at least twice the frequency after one short session. The flip side to this is that I have to be less sloppy or I’ll inadvertently move a way I don’t want to. A quarter circle for a hadouken is MUCH easier to accidentally turn into a forward jump if you push a little up past the 3 o’clock mark on the stick.

The new buttons are nice too. The original Hori buttons weren’t a problem, but these definitely feel less mushy.

All told, the whole thing, both joysticks, went well… and I’m pretty happy with the results. No glaring difference in appearances from the originals, but the play is the thing and that seems quite improved. It took a month from start to finish, but only two evenings and one afternoon were actual work. The rest was waiting on the mail. As I said in part one, I’m not actually enamored of this sort of work, so if I had to get another HRAP I’d probably get the EX-SE model that has all Seimitsu parts to begin with.

Complete Nerd-Stick

That fine old game controller, the joystick, seems to be increasingly uncommon amongst the general gaming population and yet there's a pretty big sub-market for high-end and even custom versions.

Ever since I started playing on home consoles, I've had to buy a joystick for use as a controller. The need stems from all the arcade playing I used to do before the NES resuscitated the console market from the post-Atari days. Joysticks... really crappy ones... were the standard on the old Atari 2600, the most popular home machine before the NES. But I didn't get into the 2600 too much... or the Colecovision, or the Intellivision, or the Atari 5200. My video game time was spent on quarter munchers.

There were some different input devices scattered around the arcades. All-button layouts for a lot of games. A steering wheel for any driving game. A spin knob for Tempest. A trackball for Centipede. There were cool custom devices like the the periscopes for Battlezone or Sea Wolf. But mostly it was a little knob or bat-shaped stick jutting up from the panel and with it you moved Pac-man around the maze or alternately blasted aliens and rescued humans in Defender. It was a simple, durable way to translate directional inputs, leaving the other hand free to push whatever buttons were needed.

When the Nintendo Entertainment System came out, I got the little brick 'd-pads' just like everyone else. I wasn't TOTALLY unfamiliar with the concept because years before I'd had a friend with an Intellivision. I'm not sure why the Intellivision pads are considered so awesome now. Back in the day I hated them so much I wanted to jam them up a stray dog's butt and then shoot the dog, hoping the controller got crushed in the death throes. The NES pads were better (to me) but it wasn't even a week later that I tracked down a Toys 'R' Us carrying official Nintendo joysticks. And these things were pretty damn awesome at the time. MILES better than the Atari 2600 stock versions. They worked with every game and made every game better. I think the only NES games I didn't use them for was Pinbot and other pinball simulators because it was unnatural to move a stick for the left flipper and push a button for the right. With the d-pad you could 'press a button' for both flippers to make it much more like actual pinball.

When I upgraded to a Genesis, there were no joysticks immediately available. I was pretty frantic. There had to BE joysticks released, since I was not a particularly early adopter of the console, but it was like a month or two before I could lay my hands on some. So before that happened I took a fairly heavyweight screw and drove it right into the middle of the directional pad on the Genesis controller. It stuck up about an inch, and it made all the difference in the world. It was not super comfortable... I got a pretty sore thumb nudging the screw around instead of cradling a joystick in the hand as I normally would... but it was a workaround that kept me from dying a bazillion times trying to learn how to get along with a d-pad. And when I finally did get the real joysticks, again my enjoyment of the console skyrocketed. And these were some goshdamn cool-looking pieces of hardware too, all-black with lights above the buttons. Both these and the NES sticks had turbofire buttons, which really helped considering that, as cool as the joysticks were, their base size and button placement didn't allow me to hammer the fire controls with anything like the speed and stamina I could manage in arcades.

So in the years since, every time I've bought a new game console I've immediately gotten a joystick (or two) to go with it. I don't use them for every game any more. When Sega released the analog pad for Sega Nights on the Saturn, I finally started using the type of analog thumbstick controller that everyone else had been using for months on their Playstations (the predecessor to the dual shock controllers that are synonymous with Sony now). The thumbstick was kind of like the old screw I put in my Genesis pad, only a lot more comfortable. Hours spent on the Dreamcast (bought after the Saturn, I skipped the PS1 for awhile) made me finally tow the line and become comfortable with a non-joystick.

The thumbtick based analog controller is now the standard. Even the unconventional wiimote has a thumbstick on its nunchuck accessory.

Except there are still certain types of games that absolutely suck balls on a regular controller. The games that still adhere to oldest (some would say *shudder* 'most retro') game mechanics.... namely 2D fighting games and 2D shooters. I'd argue that 2D platforming games and beat 'em up/beltscroll fighters are also WAY better with a stick, but you can at least play them competently on a pad. I understand there are gamers who can play shooters and fighters very well on a standard controller but I don't know how they do it, especially the ever-present-in-fighting-game shoryuken/dragon punch motion.

So, uh, guess what kind of games I played to death in the arcades AND on home consoles. Yep. 2D fighters, shooters, and platforming games.

My kids are totally unfamiliar with joysticks. By the time my oldest could even muster interest in video games, the PS2 was the dominant machine. So all they've ever really known is dual shock controllers and their antecedents. I have the pads to all my old consoles, so if they feel like jumping in the wayback machine and play some games on the Genesis, the d-pad (screw now removed) is pretty similar to the cross-pad on their Nintendo portables. But when I'm playing... or when I drag a joystick out for a specific game on a newer system, you'd think I was bringing a musket to a drug war. Much eye-rolling and snorting is sure to ensue. It isn't enough that I like those stone-age style games... and that includes RECENT shooters or fighters like Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu or Super Street Fighter IV... I have to drag out the stone axes and flint arrows with which to play them.

The derision reached something of a crescendo recently when I decided to upgrade my PS2 and Xbox 360 joysticks. I don't mean upgrade as in purchase better ones... I mean upgrade as in replacing parts. This is a level of fanatic nerd-ery the likes of which my daughter thought she'd never see me display in my home. I think she'd have been less affected if I'd cosplayed Evangelion pilot Ayanami Rei at an anime convention. My son, however, was intrigued. He has always been something of a 'fiddler'. He loves buidling models, taking stuff apart, or messing with Legos. In racing games he spends more time playing with color schemes and decals for his cars then he does on the actual driving. These joysticks are big too, Hori Real Arcade Pro models, so the idea of cracking them open and working on the guts was like asking him to help me work on real-life automobiles. I asked him to second 'the surgery' on one stick and my daughter to help me with the other. I wasn't trying to foment love for the joysticks amongst my children, I just thought this would be a cool and very different activity for us to bond over. And despite the utter nerd-ity of the project, my daughter also wanted to get in on it. Just to 'help me do this correctly' of course.

The Japanese company Hori makes a line of controllers for all makes of video game consoles, but they have a particular rep (and cult following) for their higher-end line of joysticks. These frequently use the same parts as the candy cabinet style arcade machines still found in Japan. In the case of the two sticks under discussion, both have Sanwa JLF sticks, the most frequent model found on fighters, and Hori's knock-offs of Sanwa buttons.

The 'need' to do this upgrade has been borne out of my frustration playing Super Street Fighter IV. It has been quite a while since I've put any emphasis on getting good at a 2D fighting game, but the new SSFIV is pretty awesome. However it is the first game of its genre that I've tried playing on the Xbox 360. I haven't done BlazBlue or any of the HD Capcom remakes on the Xbox Live service. I might be a little rusty, sure.

I've never really had problems executing any of the command motions in any previous fighting games, from any company on any system. But wow, I am having the devil's own time executing commands on this game, particularly the double fireball motion needed for most supers and ultras. My understanding is that the timing window to execute these commands is very forgiving. I've had no issues managing the same mechanics in various Street Fighter III iterations on other platforms, which is supposedly much more strict. I *think* my problem is the size of the 'throw' on the HRAP (Hori Real Arcade Pro) stick that I use on the 360. I think the time it takes to do the full range of motions goes outside even the timing window because the stick has to move very far in order to register each direction/point. I think the actual proper points the stick needs to hit are not quite all the way to the outside of the stick's range of motion... so in effect the map to get out the command is kind of smaller than the area the joystick moves... and I'm too old and impatient to sit there and fuck with this and learn it when all other fighting games I have DON'T have this 'placement' problem.

Because I play a lot of Cave shooters, small precise movements of the joystick are a must. Online the consensus seems to be that the short throw of the standard Seimitsu brand arcade joysticks are the best for these sorts of games. Short throw equals quick changes in direction... EXACTLY what seems to be required to overcome my problem with SSFIV. It appears the distance the Seimitsu sticks need to travel to engage each direction is smaller than the Sanwa sticks that my HRAP comes with. My play with Cave shooters could stand improvement but was never so bad that I felt like spending the money to upgrade to Seimitsu parts. But being unable to access a primary mechanic in SSFIV pushed me over the edge. My abilty to tap buttons quickly has never been a problem (my kids ALWAYS hand controllers to me for button mashing sections of games), but I figured I'd replace the Hori buttons with less-mushy Seimitsu versions as well.

The kids helped me with the modifications... small hands equals useful... and I'm really pleased with how they've turned out so far. I say so far because I actually got the wrong replacement stick for the Xbox 360 HRAP. From the outside the two models (HRAP 2.0 for the PS2, HRAP EX for the Xbox 360) look really similar apart from the colors, but actually the PS2 stick uses an easy slip-on molex connector for the wiring, where the Xbox 360 version is soldered. Which I didn't know. Seimitsu makes replacements in both slip-on (LS-32-01) and soldered (LS-32), but the soldered one ain't here yet.

The finished PS2 HRAP is pictured above. The original had all bright red buttons and a bright red ball top to the stick itself. I changed the button colors to match the color coding of buttons on stock Sony controllers. It makes the stick gaudier (though not brighter actually), but I then put black buttons corresponding to the controller triggers and a black ball top all to compensate for the color riot. Having the correct colors on there was done in the first place because onscreen prompts or quick time events can get confusing when your buttons are all red AND not placed the same way they are on the pad. I've also got a Dreamcast and an Xbox 360 with their own button color schemes. I'm not even going to try to memorise them all.

I'm not having fighting game troubles with the PS2, but I thought I'd give the new Seimitsu stick a whirl with one just the same. There is a noticeable difference in the ease with which the moves come out for me. The stick is a bit stiffer, and it has a smaller dead zone (the amount of travel the stick can move from center before engaging a direction). So subtler motions net the same effect as the unmodified stick. If my impression holds true, this should fix my problem playing SSFIV when I can get THAT stick changed out... hopefully next week. We've already done the 360's buttons.

Perversely, and probably temporarily, this little project has gotten my son all interested in joystick-necessary games. Up to this point, he hated almost all 2D fighters (doesn't like command motion inputs) and was indifferent to shooters and platformers. Now all of a sudden Gradius V and Thunder Force VI on the PS2 are hot commodities. And of course he wants his own joystick. If this interest holds up and we wind up having to get him one or two, the irony will be that I would probably give him the ones we've modified ourselves and I'd just get myself new HRAPs... but this time I'd get some specials that already come with Seimitsu parts (like the HRAP EX-SE). Modding these was fun, but I did it mostly because it was less expensive than buying new joysticks. If we're going to get new ones anyway, might as well get 'em already done. Unlike the kid, I'd rather spend the time playing than fiddling.