Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

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.

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.

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 reviews page!