I’m a huge fan of fighting games. I’ve been Dragon Punching, Flash Kicking and Yoga Firing for the majority of my life. I’m nowhere near as good at them as I used to be, but I’m still a sucker for them, especially for 2D fighters by Capcom specifically.

I still remember the first time I ever played Street Fighter II. It was 1992, and everyone in my second grade class was talking about how cool it was. Everyone said Chun-Li was the best character. I went home with one of my friends to finally play, and of course I picked Chun-Li because hey, everyone said she was the best. I don’t remember if I won or lost that first match, but I remember wanting more.

I don’t play as Chun-Li much these days, but when I do I remember the first time I ever picked up the game, and it feels like hanging out with an old friend.

All I wanted to do at anyone’s house, if they had a copy of Street Fighter II, was play Street Fighter II. I was hooked. I played Ryu a ton (yeah, I know I know) but I loved mixing it up as each of the World Warriors. As we were moving some stuff around in the apartment today, I picked up my Sega Genesis copy of Super Street Fighter II, and remembered how many hours I put into that game. I played by myself, mostly, but with the amount of time I put into it you’d have thought I was having tournaments with my entire class on a daily basis.

I was never too much into Street Fighter III when that came out, mostly because the home console versions were so hard to come by, but I still loved Capcom’s other fighters, especially the Vs. series. X-Men Vs. Street Fighter was SO AWESOME. How cool was it to fight Wolverine and Ken as Ryu and Cyclops? Pulling off a full screen Hadoken/Optic Blast combo was so freaking satisfying.

One of my greatest gaming triumphs was when I was 13 years old. My parents had taken me out to pizza, and the Round Table Pizza we would go to had an X-Men Vs. Street Fighter machine. After I had wolfed down my pizza and begged for money, they gave me one quarter to shut me up. So I went over and started my game.

I got through a few fights when a bunch of older kids, probably 17 or 18 years old, came up around the machine. “Hey, let’s beat this kid and get him off the machine so we can play.” I wasn’t about to let them waste the only quarter I had, so when the first kid stepped up to challenge me, I beat him. I don’t mean just barely, either; I mean absolutely whooped his ass. I didn’t say anything as he kicked the cabinet, just kept staring at the monitor, looking out of the corner of my eye at the next one to step up.

One by one they fell, over and over again. They kept getting angrier and angrier, and I was feeling pretty good. Eventually my parents wanted to leave, so the other kids finally got the machine to themselves after my dad literally pulled me away by my collar.

I bought the Sega Dreamcast primarily for Marvel Vs. Capcom 2. OH MAN I loved that game SO MUCH. I thought I was pretty good at it, too, until I started playing other people. For some reason, I was never good at combos in that game, so pretty much every time I went up against someone who knew what they were doing I got my ass served with all the trimmings. Still, I loved my team of Ryu, Mega Man and Jill, or “Team Sequels” as I called them.

Capcom vs. SNK 2 on the original Xbox was another favorite of mine. I always liked the Fatal Fury games a lot, mostly for their characters, so seeing the two rival companies going head to head in one game was something quite special, and something I didn’t experience again until Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games on Wii.

Anyway, once Street Fighter IV came out for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, I knew I wanted to get back in. It had been a decade since the last “proper” Street Fighter, and I was ready to relive my glory days. Of course, I never got to relive my glory days because apparently I suck now, but I still had a lot of fun. I didn’t really like how Ryu played in Street Fighter IV, and Ken… well, everyone plays Ken. So I tried out spunky schoolgirl Sakura, since I played as her a bit in Street Fighter Alpha, and I had found my new main.

Also, for the record, The Last Ride is a fantastic song. Anyone who disagrees is a jackass.

Everyone knows that the Xbox 360 controller sucks for fighting games, because the D-Pad is so awful I’m convinced they designed it without knowing what a thumb looks like. To remedy this, I invested in one of Hori’s fighting sticks.

Now, I’m no scrub. I wasn’t about to hang out with that stick’s awful color scheme. I did some research on the Shoryuken forums, and saw that a lot of people were modding their sticks, or building completely custom sticks from scratch. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do something from scratch, because I’m kinda dumb, so I decided to fix up my Hori stick.

The main problem I had with Hori’s stick was the square gate for the joystick. What this means is that at the bottom of the joystick, there was a square frame for it to move around in. This makes the “fireball” motion (moving the stick from the down position to the right position in one motion) extremely difficult. So I ordered an octagonal gate to replace it with. While I was at it, I ordered new buttons as well. According to Shoryuken members, Sanwa was the company whose parts were in the actual Street Fighter IV machines in Japan. I ordered those, because having authentic arcade parts in my stick was something I wasn’t going to pass on.

While customizing your stick to perform better is always your main focus, you HAVE to make it look cool. I fooled around in Photoshop (with Christina’s help) and came up with a simple, fun design with Sakura, and got it printed out as a “lami-label,” basically a laminated sticker. I peeled off the boring default sticker, tossed it in the trash and slapped STYLE onto my stick.

Christina’s dad helped me with the inside work, since I didn’t have any experience soldering wires, but by the end of it I was pretty good. Inside the stick is a little sloppy since it was the first time I’ve done a project like that, but the stick controls like a dream. More importantly, though, it’s MINE. It’s not something built and designed and mass produced. I gutted it, rebuilt it, and put my own personal touches on it.

Of course, I still suck at Street Fighter, but my arcade stick is awesome. I’m always down for a match, so if you ever want to kick my ass, my Xbox Live Gamertag is Joe Sunrider.