Continuing Adventures in Arcadestickland

I ordered an octagonal gate for my arcade stick. For those of you who don't know, on an arcade stick, you can have multiple kinds of gates, which dictate at how many points the directional stick can stop. What that does is basically let you know what direction the stick is pointing at purely by feel.  The default gate on my stick was square, which meant the only stops were at the diagonals. I replaced it with a diagonal one, which meant that I had the complete compass rose of stops to work with. What that meant was that I could more easily know when my quarter-circle forward  was complete -- a necessary part of being able to play fighting games effectively.

I've written on the topic multiple times, but this has usually been on the side of someone who plays fighting games on a controller. But, having already bought an arcade stick that was gathering dust on the eve of Marvel vs. Capcom 3's arrival, I decided that if I was ever going to get any use out of the thing, I'd have to switch out the gate. I'm used to the octagonal gate because that's how the sticks at the arcade I used to frequent worked. This was about as experience with arcade stick as I was going to get.

I ordered one for about 10 bucks after shipping. While I waited for it, I decided to remove the square gate. I saw an instructional video on how to do and quickly got to work. I had to admit, applying a screwdriver to a machine with a semblance of knowing what I was doing felt great. Not so great was actually removing the gate. In the video I watched, the dude clenched his hand around the tabs that prevented the thing from falling and just squeezed it out. Didn't work for me; I had to file down the edges of the tabs and push down on them with the screwdriver, then swat my hand upwards to lift 'em off. It took about an hour, but I managed to get through it without breaking anything serious. The installation of the octagonal gate was easier, since all I had to do was line up the holes with the tabs, and press down really hard.

I twirled the stick around its fancy eight-way gate, and it instantly felt familiar. I eagerly tried it out with the Super Street Fighter 4, and I noticed a definite improvement over the square gate. Super Combos were a breeze to pull off now, since I knew immediately where to stop. There was still some over-performing of movements, but that was more due to my eagerness than anything. Overall, it felt much better. I understand that some people prefer the square gate, but I don't think I can go back now. My actions feel too easy with the stick now to retrain myself on something I think is inferior. But we'll see how this goes. Maybe I'll actually learn to use an arcade stick effectively this time.