“67% of Team Fortress 2 players own a mask that makes them look like an adorable baby seal.”
Ten of the latest gaming mice get reviewed and rated by Ian Evenden.
In this fine country of ours, the right to excess is absolute. Sure, you can play games with a lump of plastic that has two buttons and a wheel, plus some sort of movement sensor. Maybe even with a trackpad. Coupled with a keyboard, you can beat anything from an RTS to an FPS to a point-’n’-click adventure. So why do better? Why do you need 12 programmable buttons, a sensor with an ungodly resolution and a whisk attachment for omelets? It’s down to two things: control and options.
The first can be control of movement or control of interaction, and comes down to how fast you need to react. Playing something like XCOM 2 doesn’t require the same sort of reactions as Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, and the dedicated Kharak player may well want to send her pointer zooming across the screen at great speed, stopping it with precision on a particular unit. And for that precision you’re going to want a high polling rate, which directly affects how often the mouse’s position is relayed back to your PC. The higher the better.
Control of interaction relates to the buttons’ programmability. Almost all gaming mice now come with software to control their functions. Being able to map a grenade throw that’s just a click of a bumper button on a console controller to an extra button on a mouse can speed up your play and make you more effective in combat. One function that’s often fixed is the rocker switch on top of the mouse, which alters the DPI rate on the fly, and the ‘sniper button’, if present, lowers the DPI rate so your aim doesn’t wobble when you’re trying to draw a bead on an opponent’s skull.
These, then, are the latest and possibly greatest gaming mice. Enjoy.
USELESS UPGRADES?
This year’s crop of gaming mice has something in common: useless lighting. It’s a customisation option that’s often mocked in these pages, because it adds nothing to functionality.
The pointlessness of having a mouse that lights up is compounded by the way mice are used — your hand covers them 100% of the time they’re in use.
Valve showed us, with its hats and other cosmetic items in Team Fortress 2, that people were willing to part with cash for upgrades that don’t upgrade. Introduced in 2009, there are over 1,200 such ‘upgrades’ for sale on the TF2 store, although premium account holders can get them as random item drops, too. 67% of TF2 players own a mask that makes them look like an adorable baby seal, although only 7% of them equip it. In League of Legends, cosmetic upgrades are the only things locked behind a paywall — anything else can be purchased with XP points.
What does this tell us? Well, mainly that people like shiny things. Research from the University of Houston can shine some light on one reason why: it all comes back to water. The attractiveness of a shiny surface is hardwired into us because we once depended on rivers and lakes for water. This manifests itself at an early age — an experiment showed that babies were more likely to put glossy plastic plates in their mouths. From here, as we age, shininess or brightness becomes associated with the fulfillment of needs and living the good life. It’s only a short distance from there to making your PC flash bright green or blue.
Buying a mouse with lighting, because you believe it will more strongly fulfill your needs, would be a poor choice, however. That moment when your mum, who hasn’t bought a new mouse in 20 years, admires the lighting is a fleeting one. Lighting effects are now so prevalent that they go unremarked by anyone who’s flicked through an online store recently.
Basically, lighting up your mouse is BS — something we strive to have a minimum of here. It makes no difference to how the mouse functions or how it’s used.
What’s not BS, and can have a real effect on the way your mouse moves and feels, is weighting — something we’re seeing less of this year as the focus has altered to pointless cosmetic enhancements.
Adding weight to a mouse adds inertia, the resistance of a physical object to any change in its state of motion. If more force is needed to start your mouse moving, or to make it deviate from its present course, any tiny adjustments, applied without thinking and with little energy behind them, are evened out. Your movements should be smoother and more accurate as a result, perhaps combining with the sniper button for ultimate accuracy.
So if you’re playing a game that requires long, smooth, uninterrupted motions, consider adding more weight to your mouse. If it needs lots of small, jerky motions — especially if you need
the pointer to stop quickly, as inertia also governs how easy it is to arrest movement — look into making your mouse as light as possible.
In some models, the weights are arranged in such a way as to balance the mouse. A cartridge of individual lumps of metal can be customised to place all the weight on the left side of the mouse, for example, which makes a difference if you lift it off the table often. The natural position of your right thumb (if right-handed) tends to lift the left side of the mouse in this situation, potentially causing it to scrape on the pad or making it harder to replace it flat on the surface immediately. Increasing the weight of this area can help prevent this, leading to a smoother repositioning and a quicker return to the action.
Something else can override all this and make a bigger difference to your success with a particular mouse, however: comfort and familiarity. If the mouse digs into your hand or scrapes your fingers, no amount of weight management is going to turn it into a match-winner. The same goes for your fingers’ ability to find buttons without you looking, and without you even consciously thinking. This kind of speed is only achieved with practice, and long familiarity with your mouse. Changing brands or even models could lead to a change in your kill-to-death ratio if you’re climbing the leagues of competitive multiplayer, or a lot of frustration if you’re trying to get those last stealth achievements in Hitman.
Handedness is also an issue. Many left-handers have adapted to using a mouse in their right hand, as devices designed for southpaws are few and far between. Razer sells a left-handed version of its popular DeathAdder gaming mouse, but any lefties liking the look of Logitech’s loveliness will be left in low spirits. The same goes for the strange MMO mice, with a whole numeric keypad bulging from their side as if they’ve received a large dose of radiation. They’re built around the thumb of the right hand, making their use by a leftie at first seem hopeful — as the buttons fall under your more dextrous fingers — then hopeless as the shape of the mouse body makes it an uncomfortable endeavour. Perhaps the best option is to go for an ambidextrous model, of which we have a couple on test here.
Programmability of buttons can be of some help if you’re struggling with your mouse, but it’s never going to flip a right-handed mouse into a left-handed model. The most common mouse interactions outside of gaming are clicking a window’s close button and hitting the back button in a browser. Being able to program additional buttons to carry out these tasks can speed up your interactions with your PC, and a particular favourite of ours is being able to program the wheel, in models where it clicks left and right, as well as down, to scroll left and right, complementing the vertical scroll of the rolling wheel. This tames large documents, especially in photo-editing or publishing applications, and helps out with those annoying web pages that don’t perfectly resize to a snapped browser window.
While there’s more to a gaming mouse than just gaming, the majority of these models are going to appeal to those who like to shoot, fly or micromanage.
Despite what controller manufacturers would like you to think, the mouse and keyboard combo has yet to be beaten as a PC game control scheme, and absolutely any of those scattered over the following pages would make a fine upgrade from the two-button-and-a-wheel device that sits by so many PCs. Whatever you want from a mouse, there’s bound to be something out there that appeals.