Optical mice are fairly common products in the computer gaming
household, and Sandio’s laser is no slouch. The standard
configuration for the Sandio mouse is set at 2000 dpi, so any of you
that are still rolling along in your low-dpi settings might have to
crank that option down a few paces. Bumping that option down a few notches is made incredibly easy with
on-the-fly dpi settings changes. If you do change the dpi setting while
you’re in the middle of something, a voice-over announcement declares
your current dpi setting.  

Comfy?

The first thing you notice when you place your hand on the
Sandio mouse is that your fingers fit snugly in the curved surfaces of
the directional sticks. These concave indentations allow your fingers
to rest on the sticks without any fear of slipping, even if
you’re desperately trying to initiate one of the functions
you’ve mapped to the directions on the sticks.

width="200">
href="http://tth.tentonhammer.com/modules.php?set_albumName=album359&id=sixdegrees&op=modload&name=gallery&file=index&include=view_photo.php"> src="http://media.tentonhammer.com/tth/gallery/albums/album359/sixdegrees.thumb.jpg"
alt="Six Degrees of Freedom" title="Six Degrees of Freedom"
name="photo_j" border="0" height="150" width="128">
Sandio's slogan for their 3D mouse is "6 Degrees of
Freedom".

In all, there are 16 functions that can be programmed into the
Sandio 3D mouse: four for on each direction joystick, the two main
buttons, and two alternate side buttons. The mouse wheel can also be
programmed if you’re feeling the hankering for a seventeenth
degree of functionality. At this point, I’m guessing you may
be feeling a bit overwhelmed. Functions are useful and often necessary
in combat flight sims, mech combat, and other button intensive games,
but why would you need a mouse with 16 functions for an MMOG?

Essentially, I was considering the same dilemma when I first
cracked open the 3D mouse and felt the piece of hardware underneath my
fingertips. As an avid World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online
participant, I’m always eager to try out new equipment to try
to improve my often lackluster gameplay. However, the Sandio 3D mouse
seemed far from the ideal tool to boost my performance, and honestly
didn’t believe it would work well with my style of gaming.

I was wrong.

The keyboard and mouse have been my essential tools in MMOGs
for years, and I’ve gotten used to flipping my hands back and
forth to hit extra hot keys, type chat messages, etc. The 3D mouse,
however, promised to dispose of the keyboard altogether (aside from
chatting). By mapping my movement keys to the direction sticks, I could
explore Azeroth and Middle Earth with simple movements of my fingers.
It seemed like a dream come true, and my keyboard was shaking from fear of the trash bin.

As part of their 3D mouse package, Sandio included a
“Mouse Management” tool. The Mouse Management tool
is a low-memory process that runs in the background of your machine
(Word is currently using more of my memory than the mouse), and allows
you to map the keys on your keyboard directly to your 3D mouse, which
are then mapped to functions within the game via the game’s
client. Thus your “W” key may equate to the forward
direction in WoW, and you can then map the “W” key
to the “Forward” direction on your Sandio 3D
mouse’s top direction stick. The Mouse Management tool acts
just like a basic keymapping application in any popular computer game
and is easy for the youngest player to pick up. After setting my
direction sticks to my movement keys, I entered WoW and prepared myself
for some 3D goodness.

But reality is a cruel mistress, and I quickly found that
moving about in the 3D realm by holding the direction stick was
extremely awkward. For each of the sticks, there seems to be one
direction that my fingers simply did not want to go. For the uppermost
direction stick, it was the side-to-side motion. Movement, especially
in FPSes and MMOGs, needs to be a precise action, and the Sandio 3D
simply cannot provide the precision that a keyboard can. I was sorely
disappointed that I wouldn’t be tossing my keyboard away
anytime soon, but I knew their had to be a solid functionality for this
epically proportioned device. I wasn’t done with this 3D
mouse just yet.

Hot Key Heaven

Any MMOG player is familiar with hot keys, especially those
gamers that have cut their teeth on many of the 2nd generation titles.
Battles are often won or lost by the rapid firing of hot keys. When I
noticed that the Sandio direction sticks equated to a possible 12
mapped functions – the exact number of hotkeys on a standard
WoW hot key bar – I knew where this mouse would excel. I
reentered the Mouse Management tool and reset the direction sticks for
1-0, “-“, and “=”. Upon
entering Azeroth with this combination, I found casting my spells was
amazingly easy, even easier than the standard button configuration.

width="200">
href="http://tth.tentonhammer.com/modules.php?set_albumName=album359&id=Red_Box_300X300&op=modload&name=gallery&file=index&include=view_photo.php"> src="http://media.tentonhammer.com/tth/gallery/albums/album359/Red_Box_300X300.thumb.jpg"
alt="Red Box" title="Red Box" name="photo_j"
border="0" height="150" width="150">
With its 16 functionality settings, Sandio's mouse
blows the competition away in turns of in-game options.

Instead of having to take my hands off the direction controls
to cast my spells, I simply clicked the direction stick to the
corresponding hotkey when I wanted to cast my desired magics. It was
great, easy, and a whole lot of fun to learn how to operate this mouse.
And the uses for the direction keys on the mouse don’t stop
there. Functions that are normally too cumbersome on the keyboard could
be mapped to the direction keys, allowing you to quickly scroll through
hotkey bars or use access inventory slots with incredible speed.

Right now, the folks at Sandio are still putting together a
thorough list of game sets for users to download and enjoy. Given more
time, Sandio will have a host of options for gamers that
don’t want to individually code every single game that they
have on their computer. At this point, Sandio doesn’t have
every popular game listed (World of Warcraft isn’t on the
list, but Guild Wars is) but they’re constantly updating
their interface list with more games.

Despite my inevitable success with finding a solid use for the
Sandio 3D mouse in my MMOGs, the decision remains in the
consumer’s hands to decide whether this particular mouse is
right for them or not and whether it is worth the price tag. At $79.99
the Sandio 3D 0’ Gaming Mouse is far from the cheapest mouse
on the block, although it’s only $10-$20 more expensive than
other gaming mice. Even with that price tag, the functionality of the
direction sticks with the hotkeys really improves the sale value of
this particular mouse compared with other gaming mice. Despite its
comparative lack of flair, the Sandio is a decent looking mouse and
would fit in with many high-end systems. If you’re looking
for a high-end mouse anyway, and you’re into MMOGs and other
precision-based games that require lots of functions, the Sandio 3D may
be the right choice for you.


For more hardware and game
reviews, check out Ten Ton Hammer's href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/78">reviews page!

Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

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