Vertical mice

Brian_B

FPS Enthusiast
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May 28, 2019
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So, I'm getting old.

I can always tell when I've been on the computer too much. The same way I can tell a storm is blowing in. My wrist is shot. I don't think it's carpel tunnel, but the back of my hand and wrist area will burn like there's ghost pepper in my veins, and using a mouse for a long time is one sure-fire way to set it off. It's probably just a symptom of being a chronic life-long masturbater, but what ya gonna do?

One way I try to get around this - I try playing more games with a controller. That doesn't seem to upset my wrist nearly as bad.

Often, when my wrist starts to act up, I'll gravitate to the console for a bit, play through a game or two there and give it a break. This year, however, I'm on self-imposed Playstation strike - I won't buy any new games until I can get a PS5 to go with it. Now, that's a lousy excuse, I know, and my PS+ free game backlog on PS is nearly as bad as my Steam backlog. Truth is I like my PC better, but I do enjoy playing on the big screen at the couch, and having everything set up to interact in that manner the way consoles cater to it - just nothing excites me over there right now apart from HZD2, which I'm not buying for my PS4.

I also try, with mixed success, using a controller on the PC. It works well with some games, passable with others, and with many is downright horrible. It takes a different type of muscle memory, and chording is something required in a lot of games I tend to play and I struggle to get used to.

Parallel to that - Steam Link is ~awesome~. It lets me play PC games on my TV, using my PC like it's a console. I use the AppleTV app. That said, it isn't universal, not everything works flawlessly with it, and you still have the controller issues. When it works, it's the best. But it doesn't always work.

So, in my current bout of wrist restlessness, I decided to try a vertical mouse. I had a Amazon gift card and I dumped it in on a Logitech MX Vertical. I've been using it for the past week.

I will say in a week - my wrist has not been miraculously healed. But it is better, and I can play games again, with some moderation there. The vertical mouse isn't as comfortable to use though, I constantly find myself trying to re-orient my hand in a traditional manner over top of the mouse, rather than to vertically and have to adjust. Accuracy that I have years of muscle memory built up for is .... close, but not quite. It's like trying to look through smudged glass, it's not quite clear, but so close. The muscle movements aren't so different that it's impossible to use, but just different enough that I notice a stark drop in speed/accuracy and I have to concentrate more on mouse movements to make them right. Maybe that's part of what is helping my wrist, I don't know.

The mouse itself - well, I'm not a hardware reviewer. It's a Logitech. It seems to be fairly standard for their more business-oriented products. It is supported by the MX software suite, which lets you do a bit of customization, but no where near as much as their G-Hub software suite. It works wired (USB-C) or wireless (Bluetooth or dongle). I find the scroll wheel to be a bit of a stretch, and the two thumb buttons to be mostly useless, I have to stretch excessively far to reach the forward button and the rear button is in the way and I hit it accidently all the time just trying to grip the mouse properly (I never used them on any of my other mice either though, so I've just disabled them). The thing is made for huge hands I think, and mine are just overly average. It does have an on-the-fly DPI adjust on the top of the mouse, but it caps out at 3000 DPI (enough for me, but a far cry from what most gaming mice support).
 
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