This is the limited edition arcade stick that comes in a bundle with Tekken 6 and a hardcover art book for Tekken 6 and the rest of the series. The stick is made by Hori and it uses the same buttons used for actual arcades and a rather sleek and responsive joystick. As you can see it also sports some rather nice artwork on the face of the controller featuring several members of Tekken 6's cast.
The stick is quite responsive and smooth to use. I actually prefer it to using a controller now when playing Tekken 6, but I'm having a hard time adjusting to the precise nature of Super Street Fighter IV after having used a controller more than an arcade stick with that game for a good fifteen years or so. The buttons are laid out real nice together, and it makes for easy button mapping to make the games closer to the arcades instead of the usual swaps that I make to accompany the lack of six face buttons on most controllers. Usually, for Street Fighter games, I put the weak kicks and punches on square and X, the fierce kicks and punches on circle and triangle, and then the medium ones on R1 and L1. It makes the game easier for me, but it also makes combos a bit more intricate. Here, I can lay the buttons out the way the're supposed to be and have immediate access to them. I'm still not sure how I want the Tekken 6 layout to be structured as I've grown used to having the shoulder buttons available for the awkward key combinations like right punch + left kick, but I'm finding that I don't need them all that much at all with all four attack buttons at my finger tips instead of a single thumb.
The stick has allowed me to access several combos that I've been having issues with in the Tekken series since the second and third games. Particularly with King as I couldn't ever get the timing right for one of his multi-throw starters. Here, it's so much easier because I don't have to rely on just my left thumb to key it in. It's a Shoryuken type movement, but it's much more precise than most of the other Shoryken types in Tekken (Kazuya and a few others also have this motion specific movement, which was irritating on the controller's directional pad) but here, with the stick, the timing is found easily. These moves are done as forward, down, down-forward + attack button, which for some reason I couldn't get with the directional pads across three PlayStation consoles, and two PSPs. With the stick, I can hit it much more frequently, and relaxed.
Out of the two games that I've tried with the stick so far (Tekken 6 and Super Street Fighter IV) I've found no complaints in the controller at all. Many with my inability to use it accurately having relied on a controller pad for so long, but none with the stick itself. The stick is amazing, and I'm actually quite shocked to learn that this stick falls into the lower end of the quality spectrum from various reviews that I've read elsewhere. The joystick, as I mentioned befoew, is sleek and very responsive when moving the characters, and the buttons are all placed in a nice location and are also very responsive. There's no lagging or input delay in the controller itself, which is very nice considering it's a base wireless controller and doesn't run off of bluetooth.
That's one of my only two gripes about the controller: that it's not bluetooth. And since it isn't bluetooth that leads to my second gripe: it runs off of two AA batteries, meaning it has an extra cost to it by having to replenish your battery supply whenever they die. I really wish that Sony would work more with third party hardware developers in getting their bluetooth wireless technology into their controllers. These arcade sticks would have a much better lifespan and range if they operated off of bluetooth and were rechargeable through a USB cable as Sony's DualShock 3 controllers are.
All that said, this is an awesome buy for a fighting game fan. Even one like me who has wrist and joint issues where arcade sticks have a tendency to cramp up my hands pretty bad. This is just how fighting games were meant to be played, and going back to a controller, even after just a few hours, proves to be more difficult than reacquainting myself with an arcade stick.
You can get the limited edition of Tekken 6 with the arcade stick and the artbook here, here, and here. The last link takes you to Best Buy, and online they only have the XBox 360 version available.
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