Controller of the week Month is back!

Bullet Hell shoot-em-ups are an especially popular genre among gamers, and Cave is probably among the more popular developers in the shmup genre. A few months ago at Anime Boston my friend Carlson at Mad-Gear Gaming referred one of his customers to me when he inquired about custom joysticks, and he requested a custom art layout. Unfortunately, we were unable to do the custom art layout he wanted due to lack of time from my artist and he gave me some links to alternates he wouldn’t mind. Luckily, I think his #1 choice for alternate art came out great!

This joystick in particular is wired for Xbox 360 and as you can see, the stick uses Seimitsu buttons, a Seimitsu bubbletop on a Sanwa joystick, has a really right, deep, even dark walnut stain, and the button holes were cut out and inserted into the buttons so that the art work doesn’t look like swiss cheese. (NOTE: Between me handing this to my photographer and the pictures being taken, the button containing the art for her arm got rotated, but that is easily remedied by just loosening the nut on the button and rotating it to line up again).

If you’d like to order a joystick of your own, or any other arcade controller, shoot me an (email ) steve (at) desktoparcade (dot) com!

As I’ve explained on Flickr, Memorial Day I woke up with a burst of inspiration to create, so I began taking a more serious look at creating joysticks as a product to sell here on Desktoparcade.com. I spent a couple of hours looking at dozens of different sticks from several different sources, from “people like me” (hobbyists/garage work shop enthusiasts) to mass marked products like Mad Catz and Hori. After close consideration and analysis, I came to the conclusion that the mass marketed sticks are plastic/metal hunks of junk that STILL take shortcuts (even the Mad Catz TEs take shortcuts in my opinion, feel free to disagree if you wish). I noticed that a lot of joysticks from “people like me” had a certain formula, so I made a trek to my local hardware store to get a nice piece of wood and I began building.

By the end of the day, only a few hours later, I had this to show for my labor. I was very happy with what I made, so I did some light Google Image searching and one of the first things that popped up for “Ryu” looked perfect given the nice, rich “Sedona Red” stain I had given the prototype joystick. The next morning I had the design printed at my local place of choice, and I added it to the controller. What I had before me was like nothing I created before:

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My friend Carlson runs Mad-Gear and sellsnew and used import and domestic games. He asked me to make some classic gaming themed joysticks for classic consoles since most of the older systems did not have real joysticks made for them. The only joysticks that the older consoles got were those crappy plastic joysticks that companies of the 80s and 90s thought would pass for the “arcade experience” because instead of having a D-pad, they had something that resembled a joystick handle and some buttons that were bigger than usual. There were no authentic arcade parts, there was no “arcade feel”… If you wanted to play home versions of arcade games, you had to do it on the plastic lump-of-crap “joysticks”.

Maybe now I can do something to change that. I asked him what system I should start with and because of the lack of authentic sticks but abundance of great arcade titles for the system, Carlson suggested that I do a Sega Saturn stick. So, after I spoke with him I set out to make a Sega Saturn joystick that was not only authentic, but looked great. This is the result:

(Click to enlarge.)

This joystick is made with high quality pine wood which was treated and then stained with a nice, even red mahogany stain. It uses black Seimitsu buttons and a red Seimitsu bubbletop on top of a standard Sanwa joystick assembly. I’m very happy with how well this controller came out and I cannot wait to make some more classic console joysticks!

If you want to purchase a joystick like this for any system, with just about any configuration you could think, send me an email to steve (at) desktoparcade (dot) com and I’d be happy to build you the joystick of your dreams!

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