If playing Street Fighter IV on a keyboard sounds about as appetizing to you as lunch at Arby’s, make sure to cough up a little extra dough for the special Mad Catz FightPad bundle of SF4 on PC, which comes packaged with a fancy controller built for the game.
Keyboard and mouse may still be the ultimate control setup for playing real-time strategy games and first-person shooters, but fighting games will never, ever be ideal to play when you have to use WASD to do quarter-circle motions for a plain old Hadouken.
So what to do now that the current king of the fighting genre, Street Fighter IV, is coming to PC this July? Well, if you’re willing to cough up an extra $20, you can pick up a special bundle which includes both the game and a Mad Catz Street Fighter IV FightPad in the same package. It’ll retail for $60, while the regular bundle goes for $40. Unfortunately, the bundle will only be available in US stores.
Capcom VP of business development and strategic planning Christian Svensson had hinted at the bundle earlier this year, saying that he was “in talks with Mad Catz to figure out how can we actually do some bundles of pads and Street Fighter IV PC.”
Keep in mind that these pads, which are specially designed for SFIV and feature a six face button set up with a nice d-pad, are still plenty hard to come by in regular retail stores, and sell for around $40-60 on the secondary market. In a sense, you’d be paying $60 for a $40 controller and a $20 game. Not a bad deal if you think about it that way, but also be aware of the fact that there’ll probably be people picking up the bundle just for the controller, and that it’ll probably limited in any case, considering how hard of a time Mad Catz has producing the controllers already.
