Review: Hori Fighting Stick 3 (PS3)

Arcade Sticks are usually used to play fighting games or arcade style shoot-em-up's, in my case I bought one to play fighting games with, and I chose the Hori Fight Stick 3 for the Playstation 3.

This is an entry level arcade stick intended for newcomers or people who do not want to fork out copious amounts of money for a fighting game controller.

So, the Hori FS3 is a piece of kit. It's weighty but quite small for an arcade stick and does the job well. It also comes with a turbo function with three different modes. “Slow” That goes 5 times per second, “Normal” Which does 12 times a second and finally “fast” Which is 21 times per second. This function is usually used for shmups so I think it's cheating if you use it in a fighting game.

The Joystick on the Hori FS3 is very smooth and you can feel the clicks of the microswitches confirming the direction you are going in, the stick uses a Square gate. Which means you can move the joystick around in a square kind of direction, this can all be replaced with higher quality Sanwa or Seimitsu Parts.

The buttons are very responsive and react with the lightest of touches, The layout of the buttons is a standard HORI layout, which is different to the Vewlix Layout which the Madcatz Arcade sticks use.

The quality of the parts is not comparable to that of Sanwa Or Seimitsu, but for beginners and newcomers like me, these should be enough. And If the need arises, you can replace the entire innards of the stick with higher quality parts if you wish.

My experience with switching to an arcade stick for Street Fighter and Blazblue is hard, because the actual handing is very different to that of the xbox 360 or DualShock 3 pads. Initially, there is a big learning curve to overcome while converting from a Pad to Arcade stick, but the pro's of owning a stick for Fighting games outweigh the Cons. While there are very big growing pains and the stick takes a LOT of getting used to in terms of actual execution of moves and even simple movements like Dragon Punches or Hadokens. But After you get used to the stick you start to see the improvements over the pad. Inputs are a lot faster. If I were to compare it, playing with a pad compared to a stick is like trying to play Piano with your thumbs. The Arcade stick Lets you be a lot faster in terms of reactions and overall execution of moves. It's well worth getting an arcade stick if you are serious about getting good at fighting games.

Overall, the Hori FS3 is a nice investment for me, It's a nice little stick that just does the job you want it to. Although not as high quality as the HRAP3 Or the Tournament Edition arcade sticks. It does the job and it does it damn good.