Video games are the ultimate in capitalism, and not just because fanboys will queue all night to spend an extra hundred dollars for some fancy packaging (as long as you remember the magic word “Collector’s”)

Spartan Utility Cash Kollection/Extraction Receptacle System

In video games buying better equipment really does make you a better person, just like advertising’s been telling you.  You’re faster, stronger, more powerful and - depending on the level of choice and palette - significantly more fashionable.  You can tell you’ve joined a losing Counter-Strike team when they storm out of the buy zone with pistols, running along hunched over not to shrink their hitbox but to scan the ground for loose change. Gotta save for that AWP somehow!

In real life a better graphics card means smoother graphics (you might even be able to run Crysis), and a bigger monitor - well, if we have to explain what that’s good, someone’s reading this out to you and it would be cruel to describe the glories of sight.  But what other equipment enables you to blast better?

1.  Wolfking Warrior Pad

With a name like “Wolfking Warrior Pad” this should be the most tragically uncool contraption since the first fridge prototype caught fire.  The way it advertises “Fire Red” and “Mystic White” make you start looking for the Razer tag, but here’s the thing:  it’s absolutely fantastic.  Utterly indispensable, in fact, and I would no longer dream of logging on without it to the point where I use “I” in an group-voice-”we” article.

Using WASD on a standard keyboard means you have real access to less than half of it - how many times have you juggled keys, working out that you need to toggle grenades more often than the flashlight so the light source gets shunted over to T or Y?  Where do you cram all the quick-talk keys?  How many times have you been killed in the extra millisecond it takes to stretch across to hit rockets with “6″, before giving up and training yourself to hit “Next Weapon” five times fast?

The Wolfking arranges half a keyboard in circles around the sacred cross of WASD* with special attention to big fat buttons for the thumb - or as I like to call them, “reload” and “deploy.”

*It even works for obscenely obscure configs like my UOEK setup.

2.  The One And Only Awesome Mouse Mat Ever

It’s an absolute fact that every “gaming” mouse mat in existence is a money-sucking scam rendered harmless by how it only targets idiots.  But someone with a solid-steel serrated sawblade can alter absolute facts, and the awesome metalworkers at greensforged have brought the most badass gravity gun projectile out of Half Life 2 and into the real world.

The Ravenholm isn’t cheap at $50, but if you ever need another mat after getting this you won’t want to play games anymore - what with having the super-powered secret agent anti-zombie life that enables you to use up a 9″ circular saw blade.

(Greensforged provide a range of mousemats and you could technically choose one of the others, in the same way you could use three wishes from a genie to wash the dishes for breakfast, lunch and dinner.)

3.  USB SNES Pad!

You won’t use it on Team Fortress, but if can’t see the awesome in a USB SNES pad we simply have nothing more to talk about.  Go do whatever important modern clicking you feel you have to, we’ll be over here playing Super Mario Bros 3.

4.  Razer Naga Gaming Mouse

We mock a lot of Razer gear, and they deserved every word of it and a thousand more for building the DESTRUCTOR GAMING SURFACE, but we have to admit that they’re onto something with the Naga Gaming Mouse.  Mainly because (unlike the “Imperator” and “Abyssus“) they stopped trying to think of scary names and new ways to say “detects movement” and instead actually improved the thing.

It’s obviously designed for MMO play (all they way down to the advertising copy where they stress its comfort when playing “for hours on end”) but those twelve extra keys could be seriously useful in any game (especially since they’re customizable, and double especially if you use macros.)  In a perfect final touch, the panoply of pressables doesn’t necessarily interfere with normal mouse function, as the now-standard “two thumb keys” are still in place further up the pommel.

Well done, Razer!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 12th, 2010 at 2:08 pm and is filed under Counter-Strike: Source News, Half Life 2: Deathmatch Classic News, Halo News, Team Fortress 2 News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.