The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 game controllers aren't well-suited for arcade fighters. They're serviceable, but when you're stringing together multi-hit combos and entering long direction sequences for special moves, it's easy to trip up on the direction pad. Arcade game purists want arcade sticks, and that's where Mad Catz comes in. The company has produced arcade fightsticks for some time now, branding them with names and artwork from major fighting games. The latest is the Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 FightStick Tournament Edition, a scaled-up, premium arcade controller with a hefty $159.99 (direct) price and an even heftier profile. This arcade stick is big, sturdy, and expensive. If you want an old-school gaming experience instead of the current wave of newfangled motion controls like the Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Kinect, or PlayStation Move, it's a great choice.

Mad Catz offers both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the stick, both only useable with their respective consoles. We tested the Playstation 3 version. The FightStick's build is rock-solid, with a sturdy plastic casing and a metal backplate for extra structural integrity. The top of the FightStick has a glossy, colorful group portrait of the fighters from Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 flanking the controls. Under the control panel, a glossy, angular black body gives the FightStick a slightly futuristic feel. Under all of that, the metal backplate holds everything together, it's equipped with four rubber feet that can be unscrewed and reattached, for mounting the FightStick securely to a surface. The entire beast plugs into the PS3's USB port via a 13-foot USB cable that conveniently folds into a cable compartment on the back of the Fightstick. The door to the cable compartment has a small notch for the cable, so you can pull out just enough cord to sit comfortably away from your system without having any extra cable pooling on the floor.

The arcade controls are the entire point of the FightStick, and at this, the product excels. An 8-way joystick and eight buttons cover all gamepad controls except for the analog stick buttons (L3 and R3) and two of the three directional controls. A switch panel at the top left of the FightStick features a 3-way toggle for setting whether the joystick controls the gamepad's direction pad or either analog stick. The panel also houses the PS button, that lets you enable Turbo (rapid-fire) for any of the face buttons. The main controls are made by Sanwa Denshi, a highly regarded Japanese manufacturer.

While the build of the FightStick is incredibly solid, it's not quite as sturdy and bulletproof as the X-Gaming X-Arcade stick, an arcade controller well over nine years old and still going strong thanks to the company's many adapters. Of course, to run on modern consoles, you need those adapters, making it a far less convenient alternative to the FightStick. The far greater bulk of the X-Arcade stick also makes it less convenient than the large-but-still-stowable FightStick. On the other hand, the single-stick X-Arcade retails for only $130, and the dual-stick X-Arcade gives you two-player fighting goodness for the same cost as the FightStick itself. It comes down to whether you want convenience and portability or a rock-solid, flexible arcade experience. Being able to hop into a Best Buy or Gamestop to pick it up instead of ordering it online is also a minor point in the FightStick's favor; the X-Arcade has to be ordered direct from the manufacturer.

I tested the Fightstick with Marvel Vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds, and I was pleased by its performance. The heavy, bulky controller stayed in place while I wailed upon it with complex, button-mashing, stick-yanking combos and special moves. In an era when dedicated arcade sticks (and, indeed, arcades) are an increasingly distant memory and the majority of gamers are used to gamepads and thumb-sized analog sticks, the stick might feel foreign. As an old-school gamer who's burned many quarters on Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 and Tekken 3, the stick felt classic and right.

At $160, the Mad Catz Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 Arcade FightStick Tournament Edition isn't cheap. It's well-made and well-designed, but at more than half the cost of a new game console it's a major investment. You can shave off the cost by finding a Street Fighter 4 or BlazBlue fightstick (they're each the same model, but with different art on the top panel), or take a significant step down in size and build quality for a non-Tournament Edition model. If you're really willing to drop $160 on an arcade controller, you're probably a hard-core enough to order a two-stick X-Arcade controller for the same price and set aside slightly more room for your gaming setup. Mad Catz makes some great arcade sticks, but this model is simply too expensive for all but the most die-hard enthusiasts (who already have even more hard-core alternatives).