If you could design your own gaming mouse, where would you start?
You’d probably choose a comfortable shape, because you’ll be spending lots of time using it. Once you know your hand will be pampered, you’d probably want to make sure that the mouse’s surface was covered with some sort of non-slip material so that you are always firmly in control, no matter what. You’d then want to make sure that your gaming mouse was capable of providing you with pinpoint accuracy, maybe with DPI settings that you could adjust quickly and easily on the fly from 200 to 8,200dpi. You’d add plenty of programmable buttons (say, maybe, eight) and an easy-to-manage profile system that you could use to set up control sets for your favorite games, and you’d build in a scroll wheel with a solid stepping motion so you could quickly and accurately change weapons when every second matters.
Once you had all of these things squared away, you’d be ready to design a good look for your mouse. A dark outer shell would make sense, but you might want to spice things up a little with LED accents. Maybe you’d design LED controls in your mouse’s setup app to allow you to choose from among seven colors, and if you were really feeling frisky, you might build in the ability to make those lights pulse or flash. You’d want to add a cord, naturally, and you’d probably pick a high-quality, braided cord so that it will never tangle or bind.
At that point, it’s fair to say you’d have a pretty good gaming mouse, right? What if you went beyond all of that and added an insane amount of configuration settings— settings to let you adjust details such as
your mouse’s USB polling rate, button response times (with specific response times for each button, if you want), and doubleclick speed? You might even add the ability to program control macros and scripts into your mouse via an easy-to-use software interface and then give your mouse 128KB of onboard memory to
store said programs.
You could probably do all of this, provided you know where to get all the parts and how to put them together without soldering your finger to the PCB, but it would cost you a pretty hefty chunk of cash and it would take a lot. Of. Time.
Or, you could pick up a CM Storm Sentinel Advance II from Cooler Master for less than 60 bucks and have it running your favorite games in the time it takes to tear open the box.
CM Storm Sentinel Advance II
$59.99
Cooler Master
www.coolermaster-usa.com
