Racketboy

The XBox Live Arcade is truly shaping up to be a old-school gamer’s playground running on a cutting-edge console. With the Nintendo Wii’s Virtual Console on its way, Microsoft has been furiously finalizing deals to bring some of the most treasured arcade and console games of old (Street Fighter 2, Pac-Man, Castevania Symphony of the Night, and more) to the online gaming community.

While the games have been top notch, there is one thing missing from the equation: a controller worthy of arcade action. There are, however, a few ways to enhance your arcade experience with some joystick options.

First of all, you track down a Hori Dead or Alive 4 Xbox 360 Arcade Stick ($39.99–$59.99). They are getting a bit harder to find (Lik-Sang is out of stock).

You could also build your own arcade stick or rewire an existing one. Each of these techniques will probably give you exactly what you want out of a stick.

If you are willing to wait a bit longer for what may be quite a fine piece of work, MadCatz is supposedly going to be selling a (maybe wireless) joystick made specifically for XBLA. GameStop.com breifly posted a pre-order page for the stick, but we don’t know much more than that. It looks like it could benefit from a few more buttons (a nice six-button layout like the Dreamcast stick pictures above would be nice), but if it does turn out to be wireless, that would be phenominal. I’m a huge wireless fan and have been anticipating the days when a wireless arcade stick would be availible for purchase.

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XBox 360, Arcade, Fighters