| paleface [sys=PSP; cat=Hardware; reg=JPN] |
| | | Capcom made little plastic stick-on d-pads to accompany the release of Street Fighter Zero 3 Double Upper for PSP in Japan. They were black, with four rubbery little pads on the back, with stick-up paste on them, and you just sort of glommed it on over the PSP d-pad. It "set" surpringly quickly, and seemed solid...until I tried doing a lot of fireballs in Practice mode. And maybe the heat was cranked up in the room a bit... Anyway, the stick-um started getting stretchy, and soon my d-pad was rotating to the diagonal every time I tried to do a fireball. Pfft.
While it's on there and solid, it's sorta okay. It will make diagonals feel a little easier to do, but diagonal movement is still anywhere near effortless; you have to think about it, but at least you can do it, as long as you concentrate. This is an improvement, but not as much as you need for, say, a 2-D fighter, and then the glue loosening gets annoying. Also, the pad lifts the control surface up a bit, making it slightly more awkward to thumb the pad. And while it's a nice round shape, the pad is smaller than the diameter of the PSP pad, just by a bit; you'd think it would have been better to be bigger, or at least the same size. In any case, my thumb felt like it was digging into the edge of the pad sometimes, instead of pressing down on the pad.
I thought this thing was all right at first (oh, but be careful slipping the PSP into your pocket with this thing on, as it can catch), but it didn't really help in fighting games, and then the loosening glue was the last straw. I stripped it off, and found that the shim mod was pretty much all I needed. Fortunately, it's easy to remove the thing, thanks to the week glue, and even on my white PSP, the black glue came off with just a little bit of finger-rubbing. I suppose if I ever wanted to put it back on again I'd just super-glue the darn thing, at least then it'd have a solid foundation. |
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| | | Oh, so I got mine by pre-ordering Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max from capcom.com. It's still the Japanese version of the pad, and comes in the little tiny Japanese shrink-wrap and all.
I think I read somewhere that Capcom was advertising these as usable on all game systems, but I don't see them being much use at all on systems whose own d-pad doesn't absolutely suck. |
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| | | | This thing really did cut into the finger when put to heavy use. |
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