Competition within the fighting game community is fierce, so you’ll need to arm yourself with a sweet weapon of war if you want to compete with the best of the best: a fight stick.
Few gaming-related experiences are as satisfying as having a sleek, featured-packed, mod-friendly, multi-platform controller beneath your fingertips. I was in the market for such a fighting stick for a long, long time and once thought that mythical device couldn’t possibly be real—and affordable. Qanba, a Chinese fight stick manufacturer that makes a variety of excellent controllers, made my dreams a reality with the Q4 RAF.
The Q4 RAF sports a slick piano-black finish, fighting game-friendly button spread, turbo functionality, and PC/PS3/Xbox 360 compatibility. That’s right, the 16 x 10 x 2.5-inch Q4 RAF is multi-platform out of the box, so you don’t have to dual-mod it as you would with a Mad Catz stick (that said, only a few screws keep the controller in place, so it’s easy to replace the Sanwa buttons and joystick). There’s also a somewhat flimsy side panel in which you can tuck away the 8-foot USB cable when it’s not in use, and a handle (!) that lets you tote the 9.5-pound controller from tourney to tourney. This is a premium stick, and the $169 asking price is on display in a most beautiful, and useful, fashion. My one major gripe is that the cord isn’t a break-away cord that will separate when yanked (like the Xbox 360 controller cord, for example).
The Q4 RAF handles like a champ, too. The Sanwa JLF joystick (featuring a square restrictor gate) makes it very easy to bust out special and super moves. In fact, no past controller—be it stick or pad—aided me in executing dragon punches with such high consistency in The King of Fighters XIII: Steam Edition. The stick’s felt bottom and rubber feet prevent it from slipping and sliding when place on a lap or flat surface.
The Sanwa buttons are responsive and well-spaced, but the start button is a little too close to the combat inputs for my liking—one could accidentally press it in the heat of the battle, which is a disqualification-worthy no-no in tournament play. Ideally, it should’ve been located at the top of the stick or on one of it’s sides. If you’re not a tourney player, then this is a very small gripe. In fact, I’ve yet to accidentally press it.
North of the buttons lay the Home, Select, and Mode buttons as well as the platform switch. Home and Select act how you’d expect, but Mode lets the stick act as a D-pad (when off) or a left analog stick (when on). The sync lights flash blue when in Xbox 360 mode; red when in PS3/PC mode. This multi-platform compatibility is a technological godsend because aftermarket dual-modded sticks sometimes (often?) suffer from poor system switching performance.
Bundled with the stick are several extra goodies: a low-end headset (which plugs into the stick’s audio port), three button caps (in case you want to ditch a few buttons), and a cleaning cloth for keeping the black ABS plastic fingerprint-free.
The Q4 RAF is the best fighting game controller I’ve ever touched. Although I thoroughly enjoy the X-Arcade Solo, that tank of a stick is not the definition of a true fight stick. Sure, the Solo is great for playing old school arcade games on PCs and consoles, but the controller lacks certain elements that fighting game fans crave such as a six- or eight-button layout and extreme mod-ability. Fight sticks don’t get much better than the Qanba Q4 RAF, and as such it scores a 2D-X Excellence Award for an deft combination of feature set and bang-for-the-buck wallet-friendliness.
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You can buy the Qanba Q4 RAF