When I got the chance to review Marvel vs Capcom 3 I knew this was a chance to test our a new piece of kit I’d recently got my hands on – the Hori Wireless Fighting Stick 3, the only officially licensed wireless fighting stick for the PS3.
Officially licensed here means something very important – no matter what Sony send down in any future Playstation 3 updates, this stick should continue to work and not just stop working with a new update as has happened to some of the cheaper Wireless Arcade Sticks you can find on eBay.
Shipping with a dongle, the stick simply requires you to plug that USB stick into the front of your PS3 and whack batteries in the stick – and then with a press of the Playstation Button you’re away, ready to batter some folks on fighting games arcade style.
I played Street Fighter IV, Marvel vs Capcom 3 and Tekken 6 with the Hori Wireless Fighting Stick 3, and all of those games worked beautifully with it. Most of the fighting games out there have a control set that is pre-configured for Hori Fighting sticks – usually type B in the menus – so there’s no need to mess around with assigning buttons – it’ll just work right off the bat.
The buttons on the stick are laid out in what’s become the standard for fighting games over the past few years – the slight downward curve as featured in the Street Fighter IV arcade cabinets over in Japan. Despite that, this isn’t a six-button stick layout, as it features two extra buttons here which means when you consider Start and Select as well the stick has all the face buttons and triggers that the PS3 controller has.
The stick itself pulls its input into the d-pad from the PS3 – meaning any games that require use of the analog sticks to work will not work with this stick. That said, I can’t think of any fighting games that would ever do this – but if you’re looking at a stick for Shumps or other arcade-style games, be aware of that fact!
Hori have managed to strike a pretty good balance with this arcade stick – it has a decent heft to it, but being wireless it’s a fair bit lighter and a little bit more portable than the Mad Catz Tournament Edition sticks or Hori’s own Real Arcade EX series of Arcade sticks. How you prefer an item like this to weigh is always a deeply personal thing, but I didn’t find it any harder to play with because it lacked some of the weight of other Arcade Sticks on the market.
The one problem the weight does have is that the stick does feel a little more plastic in its build than some of the other sticks out there which boast metal bottom plates. Despite that, the stick seems to be very sturdy – it was thrashed about furiously in Marvel vs Capcom 3, as is necessary for that game, and worked great.
The design is thinner, sleeker and more understated than other sticks out there, and won’t be as much of an elephant in the room as other, larger sticks out there. While the plastic feel of it isn’t something I’m a massive fan of, I really do love the way this stick looks the smaller, thinner size of it works well for me. The downside of this, of course, is that the thinner side means the parts are packed in more closely and tightly – and as such are harder to modify or switch parts, which is popular in the fighting game community.
The main draw of this stick, though, is its wireless functionality – so how does it hold up? All told, pretty damn well. Hori boast a modest range of 10 meters on the box, but playing from my sofa (around 5m from the PS3) I found there was really no noticeable input lag or issue with the Wireless – it definitely wasn’t causing me to lose any matches. It did its job, and well.
Being wireless, the stick requires power - and that comes from 2 AA batteries that are inserted into the underside of the stick. The battery life was alright, serviceable, but it could be better, and is made worse by the fact that there’s no obvious way on the outside of the stick to turn it off and stop it from consuming power when you’re not playing. There are not even any LEDs to let you know if the stick is on or not or what controller port it’s attached to, which seems to be more than a bit of an oversight in my opinion. That said, I still found the amount of life I’d get from the stick to be satisfactory.
The fight stick market has really kicked up a notch in the past few years since Street Fighter IV revitalized the fighting genre, and owning one is becoming more and more viable as games like Marvel vs Capcom 3 and Mortal Kombat join the fray this year – and that’s without even mentioning the upcoming Tekken Tag 2 and Street Fighter vs Tekken crossovers. If you’re looking for a stick on PS3 that’s suitable for casual use while you’re sitting at home playing online that won’t leave a wire trailing across the floor, Hori’s Wireless Fighting Stick 3 definitely comes highly recommended.
