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Subject: Capcom Fighter, ASCII FT2
I have a couple of new toys. This is not a review, so I'm sticking them in the general chatter section. Also, I'm shamelessly stealing other people's photos rather than making my own.
The Capcom Fighter Power Stick should be familiar to anybody who took their Street Fighter SNES action seriously:
![[Image: http://www.prismnet.com/~kkc/gamesx/capcomstick.jpg]](http://www.prismnet.com/~kkc/gamesx/capcomstick.jpg "http://www.prismnet.com/~kkc/gamesx/capcomstick.jpg")
I'm not as big a Nintendo fanboy as Lawrence is. The bulk of my 16-bit gaming enjoyment occurred on Sega hardware. Still, I'm a sucker for nicely constructed joysticks. If you turn the thing over, you can see the giant flathead screws holding the stick and its clicky switches in place. However, the funny off-center orientation means it's hard to tell where the cardinal directions are. It's very hard for me to pull off the fireball move with this stick. For Pac Man action, there's a slider near the stick that lets you cancel diagonals and get only four directions.
The ASCII Fighter Pad FT2 was adorned with art to promote whatever fighting game was hot on the Dreamcast or the PS2 at the time. My PS2 pad is a plain grey one, but it's no less functional:
![[Image: http://www.prismnet.com/~kkc/gamesx/ascii_pad_ft2_front.jpg]](http://www.prismnet.com/~kkc/gamesx/ascii_pad_ft2_front.jpg "http://www.prismnet.com/~kkc/gamesx/ascii_pad_ft2_front.jpg")
I bought this for a song from NCS because it was broken and they didn't have time to fix it. I just recently resurrected it by reflowing all the solder around the encoder chip. It's an excellent digital pad, with nice solid action buttons and clicky shoulder buttons, and the pad is flexible without being mushy. However, as I'm used to the proportions of the Saturn and Genesis/Megadrive pads, the button layout is slightly unfriendly to thumb users. Doing the pinky grip so you can use three fingers on each row works quite well though.
I'm not a big fan of the stock PS1/PS2 controllers. For fighting games and anything that doesn't need analog functions, I'll go for this pad, a tiny Hori pad or a Neo Geo-styled controller whenever possible.
The Capcom Fighter Power Stick should be familiar to anybody who took their Street Fighter SNES action seriously:
I'm not as big a Nintendo fanboy as Lawrence is. The bulk of my 16-bit gaming enjoyment occurred on Sega hardware. Still, I'm a sucker for nicely constructed joysticks. If you turn the thing over, you can see the giant flathead screws holding the stick and its clicky switches in place. However, the funny off-center orientation means it's hard to tell where the cardinal directions are. It's very hard for me to pull off the fireball move with this stick. For Pac Man action, there's a slider near the stick that lets you cancel diagonals and get only four directions.
The ASCII Fighter Pad FT2 was adorned with art to promote whatever fighting game was hot on the Dreamcast or the PS2 at the time. My PS2 pad is a plain grey one, but it's no less functional:
I bought this for a song from NCS because it was broken and they didn't have time to fix it. I just recently resurrected it by reflowing all the solder around the encoder chip. It's an excellent digital pad, with nice solid action buttons and clicky shoulder buttons, and the pad is flexible without being mushy. However, as I'm used to the proportions of the Saturn and Genesis/Megadrive pads, the button layout is slightly unfriendly to thumb users. Doing the pinky grip so you can use three fingers on each row works quite well though.
I'm not a big fan of the stock PS1/PS2 controllers. For fighting games and anything that doesn't need analog functions, I'll go for this pad, a tiny Hori pad or a Neo Geo-styled controller whenever possible.
![[Image: http://gamesx.com/grafx/CPS2.jpg]](http://gamesx.com/grafx/CPS2.jpg "http://gamesx.com/grafx/CPS2.jpg")
![[Image: http://www.pipitan.com/gazo/cps_f/CPSF_MD_TOP.jpg]](http://www.pipitan.com/gazo/cps_f/CPSF_MD_TOP.jpg "http://www.pipitan.com/gazo/cps_f/CPSF_MD_TOP.jpg")