I've been working on a secret project before the summer of gaming really took off. Today that project is complete. I took a hori EX2 Xbox arcade stick ($40) and modded it up giving it my own look. I spray painted the body black with "plastic" spray paint to keep it's plastic feel and I ordered the buttons on-line. I had to place the art work in them myself. I would say this whole project cost me $80 - $90.


Technical Difficulties
It was a real pain to install the buttons because they were larger then the originals on the inside leading me to have to do some rewiring to make sure they made proper connection with the system board. I also had some trouble with the artwork. Originally I laminated the artwork and went through a few revisions before I was able to find the paper that gave me no bubbles and a milky look. Then I found out I can't cut the button holes out with out completely ruining the lamination; it would just fall apart. So I finally did the final with just thick cardboard stock.

The Buttons took forever to ship. I had to wait about a month. It ultimately took me about 2 months to finish this stick from start to finish but really it only took about 15 hours of actually working on it. I guess I spent most of my time thinking about the artwork. I was originally going to do a Sonic the Hedgehog piece which I was drawing myself but I hated it after I finished coloring it. lol.


The Artists'
The Artwork is from the following Artists'. I simply arranged all the pieces on my photo shop to create a battle scene. I did have to do some alterations to each character to make them look like they we're really engaged such as Wolf's eyes for example.

Not So Fast Star Fox by Delano-Laramie
[link]

Final Destination by priteeboy
[link]

Brawl by iamymai
[link]

I'm a huge fan of these guys' art style. We need more of this kind of Smash Art.


Gaming is now complete

My new modded stick sitting there next to my Modded wii is just....beautiful. Everything matches now! I can finally rest.
It really bothered me that the Wii was white and everything around it was black. It had to be done.