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At some point or another, if you get serious about a fighting game, the question of an arcade stick arises. There have been some fine pads developed for fighting games, both first- and third-party -- the second-generation Sega Saturn pad, ASCII's fighting pads for the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 -- but there's still nothing that can quite compare to a well-made joystick. It's a substantial investment, but it usually pays off in the long run if you're interested in the best performance possible.

After spending a fair amount of time with Guilty Gear XX, I got to the point where the PS2 Dual Shock just wasn't cutting it. GGXX employs a lot of multiple button presses, for Faultless Defense and different cancel techniques, and complex joystick motions in the King of Fighters mold, like quarter-circle into half-circle and half-circle into opposing direction motions. The PS2's button layout and stiff directional pad make these pretty difficult to consistently pull off, at least for my clumsy fingers, and as it happened, our stock of joysticks around the office proved pretty lean since our last spring cleaning. So, it was time to shop around for a stick.

Being interested primarily in Guilty Gear, rather than Capcom, Namco, and Sega's fighters, and rather fond of geekish licensed whatsis, my eyes settled upon the official Sammy GGXX stick. The branding and copyright information on this stick mention only Sammy and Arc System Works, but I get the feeling it may have been made under license by ASCII -- it has a shape and start/select button design very close to those of ASCII's Fighting Stick FT2, as well as roughly similar stick and face button design. Whatever its inspiration, though, it's customized to present a button layout identical to the custom GGXX arcade control panel.

The five main attack buttons are arranged in an arc facing downward. Punch, the square button, is in the lower left corner; Kick, the X button, is in the upper left corner; Slash, the triangle button, is in the upper center; Hard Slash, the circle button, is in the upper right corner; and Dust Attack, the R1 button, is in the lower right corner. There's also a smaller button off to the right representing R2, the taunt/respect button. L1 and L2, unused in GGXX, are pushed off into the upper right corner of the stick next to Start and Select.