 Review By: Jared Black |
Developer: | Sandio Tech |
| Publisher: | Sandio Tech | |
| Genre: | Hardware | |
| ESRB: | N/A | |
| # Of Players: | 1 | |
| Online Play: | N/A | |
| Accessories: | N/A | |
| Buy Now: |   |
I’m a fairly simple man with simple needs, even when it comes to PC gaming. My “gaming” mouse has been the same as my “do everything else” mouse for as long as I’ve had a PC, and over the past 4 years or so that’s been a black two-button optical Logitech mouse with a scroll wheel. It serves the purpose; it’s accurate, comfortable, and versatile enough to work effortlessly with virtually any application I throw at it. Despite that fact, I was eager to try out the Sandio Game O’ Mouse, which promises “6 Degrees of Freedom” by letting gamers control movement along all three axes (X, Y, and Z) all on one device.
Although the cheap generic blister packaging didn’t exactly inspire me with confidence, installation was a breeze. I simply plugged the mouse into an available USB port, ran the install program on the CD, and it was ready to go. Once installed, a small application runs in your system tray, with 20 or so pre-installed interfaces (basically keyboard mappings for the three thumbsticks) for recent titles like Oblivion, Battlefield II, Prey, Stronghold Legends, etc.
The idea behind the mouse makes a lot of sense. In addition to the standard left button, right button, and scroll wheel, the Sandio also includes two non-programmable buttons on the left-hand side and three thumbsticks. The top thumbstick is located just above the scroll wheel, with the other two on the left and right-hand sides of the mouse respectively. The thumbsticks aren’t true analog sticks, as they only recognize four directions of movement similar to a d-pad.
The fact that they aren’t true analog is definitely for the best however. As you can probably imagine, it’s already a pretty complicated mouse for any human with a mere five fingers on one hand. If you use all of the available buttons, you’ll need all five of those fingers to use the three thumbsticks and two main mouse buttons. Most likely though (as Sandio’s pre-set interfaces suggest), you’ll probably want to stick to just four and ignore whichever thumbstick is beside your pinky finger (depending on whether you’re right or left-handed). Needless to say, this is quite a transition when going from a traditional mouse, and requires a lot of practice to truly get used to. I highly recommend first practicing with the simple cube demonstration included until you’re used to it, but even then you can expect to have to keep “training” your fingers to operate it properly for some time to come.
Before I get into the nitty gritty on how this thing really works, let me get this out of the way first. The Sandio Game O’ Mouse is not meant to be an all-purpose mouse. In fact, for regular 2D applications like Excel, Firefox, and Windows Explorer, it’s actually fairly clunky. The top thumbstick pushes the scroll button down too far, to the point where using it feels unnatural in use when an average human’s fingers are fully extended. The two non-programmable buttons are useful in some 2D applications however, particularly in web browsers where they default to convenient forward and backward buttons. On the whole though, if you’re using it on anything but a pure gaming PC, you’ll likely want to keep your current mouse handy to switch out when not gaming.
Movement along the X-axis with the Game O’ comes from simply using the top thumbstick. Movement along the Y-axis is a bit trickier however, and is achieved by using both side thumbsticks at the same time. Push both upwards to move up, downward to move down, and alternate directions between the two (simultaneously push one forward and backward or vice versa) to rotate in a direction. To move along the Z axis (basically coming to or from the player’s face) you push the opposite of those directions, either moving both side buttons forwards and backwards, or alternating up and down with both.
Chances are you have games you play regularly that don’t have pre-installed interfaces, and that’s where the easy to use setup process comes in. Simply create a new interface, type in the proper key you wish to use for each direction on each thumbstick, save it, and then load the profile before you begin playing the game. Simple as that, but the tricky part comes when you try to tweak the mouse interface for each game. I found that what seemed to make sense in theory often didn’t in practice, thus requiring me to tweak each game’s interface several times before it felt as good as it possibly could.
The first game I tried was The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. I chose it because I’ve never played the PC version before, but I did put well over 100 hours into the Xbox version. So, Morrowind represented a chance for me to evaluate the mouse with a game I was already familiar with, but also didn’t already have a preconceived notion of how it should control on PC.
After trying a wide variety of different interface configurations, I found that a simple approach worked the best for me with Morrowind. My ideal setup was to program the top thumbstick as the Caps Lock key, so it would toggle running on and off. Otherwise, I left the side thumbsticks alone, and used their built-in functionality to quickly rotate left and right. This did improve the gaming experience for me versus a standard mouse, as it reduced the number of times I had to reposition the mouse (since I didn’t have to physically move it to turn anymore) and made turning much easier overall. At the same time however, this did not free up my left hand, as moving my character around with the thumbsticks never felt right. In the end, I still felt most comfortable moving around with the WASD keys, and using the mouse to improve turning. So overall it was an improvement, but not a huge leap.
Next, I tried it with a fairly recent FPS, The History Channel Civil War – A Nation Divided. Since Civil War runs on a modified Call of Duty 2 engine (and I don't have that game for PC, just Xbox 360), I ran it using the built-in Call of Duty 2 profile with all of the defaults. It maps the W and S keys to forward and backward on each side thumbstick, and A and D to the top thumbstick while putting jump and other actions on the other directions. Again, it worked decently enough, but in this case didn’t really feel like an improvement so much as simply “different.” It did at least prove that the pre-installed interfaces can work well for other similar titles however, meaning in reality there's built-in functionality for more than just the 20 titles listed.
I tried it with a number of other games, but in every case I got the same general impression. The Game O’ works great for isolated functions (generally in slower paced titles), worse for others, but on the whole seems to just “change” the game experience more than revolutionize it. For example, it’s a nice addition to strategy games, and was easy to use for navigating maps and such in a turn-based strategy game like Caesar IV. Once again though, it didn’t exactly revolutionize the experience, regardless of how I set it up.
Sandio isn’t marketing the mouse as just a gaming mouse however, as it also comes with a custom interface for running Google Earth and Sketch. Using it, I was able to navigate the globe in Earth and quickly locate destinations with ease in a way similar to strategy games. I imagine it would also work well for other 3D applications such as AutoCAD, although I wasn’t able to test that out.
Bottom Line:
The whole mouse/keyboard paradigm is an established one, and hasn’t seen a lot of true innovation since the invention of the scroll wheel. With so many advances made in controllers on consoles in recent years (motion sensing, shoulder buttons, rumble, etc.), there certainly seems to be room for a company to step up and truly revolutionize the way PC gamers play with a mouse and keyboard.
Unfortunately, while the Game O’ is a step in the right direction, it doesn’t quite get the job done. While it works great in some gaming instances, it fails in others, and you’ll probably want to unhook it completely anytime you’re not playing a game. Truly hardcore and/or professional PC gamers may want to give it a look since they’ll have enough patience and variety of games to get the most out of it, but otherwise it's a hard sell at $80. For that price, anyone else is probably better off just sticking to what they already know and trust.
| Pros: | Cons: | Final Score: |
|---|---|---|
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| 6.0 |
Posted: 2007-02-17 12:46:39 PST