Fighting Games

How Much Did My Modded Arcade Stick Actually Cost? I Dug Up the Receipts

My arcade stick is a HORI Fighting Stick Alpha base with almost everything inside swapped out. Every button is now a GamerFinger switch, the lever is a silenced JLF with a red spring and octagonal gate to firm it up, and I drilled an extra 20mm hole under the weak kick button. I built it around October 2025. I honestly assumed the total cost was pretty modest. This time I actually dug through my Amazon and bank order history and reconstructed the real total from receipts. It was higher than I expected. ...

Thirty Years of Fighting Games and Monster Hunter — What Was Good Wasn't the Game, It Was the Room

I’ve been following two things for about thirty years now: fighting games and Monster Hunter. I bought most of the hardware, and I’ve touched almost every entry in both series. But looking back, what stays with me isn’t which title was the most fun — it’s who I played with, and how. The Arcade Golden Age As a teenager I read Gamest every month. The publisher went under and the magazine folded; it became Arcadia, and I read a bit of that too. In Street Fighter I went through every version — II, II’, II’ TURBO, Super II, Super II X — and then on to ZERO, ZERO2, ZERO3, III, 2nd Impact, 3rd Strike. ...