Hello everyone. I have been playing a lot of fighting games on my PC ever since GOG.com released Street Fighter Alpha 2 on their site. I am currently using a Playstation 2 fightpad with a PS2 to PC converter and find it to work quite well with fighting games, but I am wondering what other controllers people use and what ones they think are the best.

I mainly use a Madcatz SF4 Fightpad now a days. I have a PS2/Saturn to PC adapter that I used to use with the SF2 15th anniversary controller before.

The main reason I switched to the Fightpad is I got it for my 360, and in a lot of games and emulators the turbo fire is a nice thing to have.

I'm not sure what it's called, but it's in the picture I've attached.

This is what I've been using for my platformers/fighting games/Dark Souls etc. for the last 5 years and it still works great! I don't really recommend using it for shooters though, the analog sticks are a little iffy.

I think the higher end MadCatz fight sticks are some of the top of the line sticks right now (retail anyway, some folks mod their own). The Tekken one they were demoing earlier this year was really quite a good one some folks were saying, but this is me telling you what other people say, because I suck at fighting games:)

I think if you really want to get into fighting games you'll need an arcade stick sooner or later. While back in the day when we played Super Nintendo and stuff a gamepad worked just fine, the moves got a lot more complicated over the years with the combo fests that modern games are (like it or not). It's just way easier and more reliable to pull off certain moves with a stick than with a gamepad. If you consider playing online this is even more important.

That being said I prefer the old style of fighting games where special moves were actually special and not something you would use all the time. So I'm more into Samurai Shodown, the early King of Fighters or Street Fighter 2+3. It's probably because I never got good at this genre and newer games require way more "mechanical" skill to actually play the game while in Samurai Showdown you can win matches without even using a single special move.

If you are playing Mortal Kombat 9, use a PS3 controller, it was practically made for that game (fightstick is also good)

But if street fighter or Marvel vs Capcom only a fightstick would work.

If not a fight stick, something with a good d-pad. Never an analogue stick.

I kinda just keyboard it. After some practice, you can't beat your fingers doing an extremely fast forward river dance on the keys.