Sometimes when things come together, it is a truly beautiful thing.

As some of you know, I am moderately obsessed with Street Fighter IV. Many of you may not know that I have what they call ‘hitchhiker thumbs’. As a result, using a D-pad does not involve the tip of the thumb, rather the inner part of the joint. The problem in this rarefied condition is that while using the D-pad for a fighting game, the width of my thumb constantly hits the PS3 thumb stick – canceling out any previous action from a split second earlier.

This is massively annoying, especially so when I realize that the PS3 D-pad is far superior to the standard Xbox 360 fare. That’s why I got the PS3 version of SFIV in the first place. For god’s sake.

Click the link to continue reading my senseless ramblings.

So I was forced to go on a hunt for the perfect gamepad or arcade stick. Truth be told, it wasn’t much of a hunt from the beginning. Any arcade stick worth the effort is at least $80+, and any company that attempts to make a fight pad either fucks the whole thing up or gets it 75% right but falls flat on that last 25%. Perfect example: the Madcatz SFIV controller that everybody is gobbling up is perfect – except for the floating-disc styled D-pad. Nice looking, great button placement (ala Sega Genesis), but very inconsistent control.

I think to myself “shit, now what?!”

Fast forward a couple of weeks. My birthday hits and I get a new DualShock 3 controller for my PS3 (which is awesome by the way). Then it hits me.

I’ve had a PS3 Sixaxis controller that I had a…incident with while playing SFIV (big surprise). I’ll cut to the chase and say that it was slightly mangled but still operational. So now that I had three controllers and only a couple two player games, I figured I had room to experiment a bit. Twenty seconds later I found myself clipping off the thumbsticks with wire cutters. Several minutes later I finish my tweaking and my near-perfect Street Fighter IV controller is born. It works like a charm. Now I can finally do Ultra combos on the player one side. Rad.

In conclusion, I am a massive geek and should be wedgied immediately. Funny how that works out, huh?

Tell us what you think, gamers.