Last Saturday, I went to Fry's Electronics and I saw the Street Fighter IV standard edition fightstick on the shelf. As you know, this joystick is pretty much what I was waiting for and to see it on the shelf 4 days before the actual release date was a real treat. The thing that pushed me to pick it up was the fact that it was the very last one there.

When I got home, I fired up Super Turbo HD and played several online matches for about an hour or two. As I kept playing with the stick, I realized that the actuator on the stick was getting stuck everytime I went for a fireball motion or a shoryuken motion. I made note of how often it would get stuck, but to my mistake, I kept thinking to myself, "eh, I probably got a random bum stick, and it wouldn't effect my level of play of I just shake it back into position when it gets stuck."

So when I went and did a little research on NeoGAF and Shoryuken.com and found out that my problem was more widespread than I originally thought it was.



Fast forward a week later and this happens to me.
I open it up and take apart the stick to find why all input on the left has died on me. It turns out that an errant washer that moves around when you use the stick scratches up the PCB and causes the traces to just disappear. How could such a thing happen in just a weeks worth of time? Was it because of poor planning on Mad Catz's part or was this just a manufacturing error at some random Chinese production plant?



Maybe it was a little bit from column A and column B, at least from what I can see based on what they were trying to do. I guess they didn't want 2 pieces of plastic rubbing against each other, so they dropped a metal washer in between the plastic to prevent erosion of the plastic parts. What they forgot to do is glue the washer to the actuator, which results in the washer moving around and scratching the PCB.



So the point of all of this is that I wanted to warn anyone that is interested in purchasing this stick that they should wait to see if they fix this problem in the next batch that is coming out around April. If you like tinkering with joysticks and want a good base to drop some Sanwa or Seimitsu parts, I would definitely recommend this stick to you. But if you don't like opening up stuff to perform small fixes (like removing the stick and taking it apart to glue the washer onto the actuator by yourself) then I would advise you get a Hori Fighting Stick EX2 (MSRP: $60) or a Hori Real Arcade Pro EX (MSRP: $120). Just don't get gouged on the price for either of these sticks because Street Fighter IV has really jacked up the market for joysticks and joystick parts.