Sandio’s Game-O :

I shall abandon all usage of words with “O” at the end, because how childish of a review would it be if I did that? It’d be pretty lame-o, I think. Damn! Sorry.

Anyways, upon receiving the Sandio’s 3D mouse (Five billion points of articulation! Kidding.), I was immediately thrown by the flimsy nature of it’s design. When picking it up out of the package, I immediately figured it was a mock-up design, perhaps a prototype that wasn’t ready to go out. Reading through the information, I came to find that not only was it not a prototype, it was priced at $79.00! This shocked me, so I had to install everything and try it out. It felt like an instant betrayal to my gorgeous Logitech G5 that is plugged into my Alienware.. but alas, it had to be done.

Upon installing it, I ran into a few tiny speedbumps that seemed unnecessary. It was conflicting with my touchpad, my other mouse drivers and even my video card. I grimaced a bit and trudged on, begging it to ignore these problems and move forward. Once installed, I palmed the mouse and tried to get used to it’s clunky feel. It’s much larger than a mouse really ought to be in our current age of slim-lined design and weighted control. Well, in this day and age of slim lined designs and smoother feeling. Did I mention when you click the buttons it sounds like an actual.. living mouse? Seriously, I kept calling out.. “Ben!? Ben!? Is that you!?”.

Curious about if the design was just a strange factor and they were cutting corners with design because of all the power and prestige within the product - I booted up Oblivion. Now, for those who have been following my review for the Alienware laptop, you know it’s all been going very well. No problems.

Until I installed the Sandio Game-O and wanted to die-o because nothing worked-o.

I know, I said I wouldn’t do that.. but I am a weak willed person.

Anyways, I trudged forward and tried to use one of the three analogs built into the mouse. Other than feeling like I was operating a mouse through Tron, I kept having problems with moving the analog AND the mouse. Since Oblivion needs you to be move the mouse and the Game-O has analogs that do the .. movement for you, I kept running into Pavlovian problems. I’ve always MOVED the mouse to move my character’s eyeline — so now I’m supposed to use these analogs? When I tried to use the analogs instead, my fingers wanted to seize and die, because face it - they’re not meant to do that on a mouse. What’s the point of having that laser embedded into it? Why even have one at all if all movement can be done with analogs? It’s a crazy crash-test when trying to work it, which I was not meant to have.

So, I exited Oblivion and stared at the piece of plastic infront of me. Crudely designed, lighter than your mom’s alcohol tolerance at Christmas Parties and reminiscent of something you’d see out of a badly made futuristic b-movie. It’s not good, folks. It’s not even good enough to own for free. The only thing that would make this mouse worth having is if those analogs actually shot laserbeams out of the bottom of the mouse so you could attack people in your neighboring cubicles.

And that’s the ONLY way this mouse would be acceptable.