Now that you're properly titillated, I'd like to show you my joystick. And by joystick I mean penis. And by penis I mean PS3 peripheral by which I control my characters whilst fighting streets. You know, this one:

This is my limited-edition Femme Fatale Fightstick from Madcatz, number 73/350 made. There's isn't much that makes her special, but I swapped out the stick when the old one went bad and of course traded my square-gate in for an 8-way gate because I'm not a maniac, so in those little ways she's unique to me. I've spent more time with her on my lap than pretty much anything, but never went in for any fancier mods because A) money B) what if I break her and C) money.

But the week of E3 Arcade Shock announced a set of Street Fighter chibi pushbuttons and something inside me (my common sense) snapped and I knew I had to buy a set. I had no idea how much they were going to cost, I just knew that I needed them. At first I thought about buying a complete set of Rose because, well, it's Rose, but decided that would be a bit redundant and besides, I'm nowhere near good enough to consider myself a character specialist, so I immediately set to wracking my brain for which characters I wanted to buy.

I decided that I would buy 8 different characters that I play with some degree of competency, then assign each of them to buttons that I felt really exemplified that character. I came up with something like this:

• Jab = Boxer
• Strong = Rose
• Fierce = Dhalsim
• PPP = Zangief
• Short = Dan (light Dankukyaku)
• Forward = Ryu
• Roundhouse = Dictator
• KKK = ?

It worked out pretty well (although I don't actually play Ryu) and fit within the limited set of characters they had available, but I couldn't figure out who would be KKK. Maybe Claw?

It didn't matter though because Arcade Shock started announcing more characters. Then they announced ball-tops. Then they announced more characters. Then they announced prices (ouch!). Then it hit me. Looking through the cast there were exactly 8 female characters available (sorry Poison, Elena & Decapre) and duh, I had a femme fatale stick. And of course once that was decided, the ball-top had to be Dan. Who else in the cast is a better fit for creepily hanging around a bunch of girls?

With this in mind I decided on a new layout based on my extremely limited character knowledge for most of the characters I was going to buy:

• Jab = Makoto (she has that one command normal? I don't know...)
• Strong = Rose
• Fierce = Sakura (cl.Fierce, cr.Fierce, j.Fierce, even with the nerfs)
• PPP = Ibuki (her target combo got buffed to not whiff as often)
• Short = Chun (Short, Short xx EX Hyakuretsukyaku, Ultra)
• Forward = C.Viper (because LOLOL she has footsies now so fair)
• Roundhouse = Cammy
• KKK = Juri (sometimes her punches are kicks!)

July 1st rolled around and I "happened" to be awake around 3AM and just "happened" to be refreshing arcadeshock.com when online preorders became available so I fought my way through the phone interface, got all eight buttons and one ball-top in my cart, and checked out. The next morning I told my Beyoncé that I had done a bad thing and had spent (exorbitant sum of money) on cosmetic upgrades for a video game interface device and she thought it was cute because she rocks my face off.

So on Saturday I got my package, tore it open, hastily watched a tutorial on button replacement on youtube, skipped most/all of the important parts, then opened up my stick and got to swapping. Outside of a minor mishap involving me not remembering which wires went into which buttons nor the fact that I had unbound L1 and L2 in the options, things went off without a hitch and she plays as crisp as ever.

Now I'm fully ready to get hype over Evo weekend, and if you run into a Rose player on PSN named catbond just know that while I may be ass at Ultra, I have a sweet stick! See you in the chat!

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