| Recently there seems to be an increase in the number of controllers available to the everyday gamer, all of which claim to enhance gameplay in some way, shape, or form. With the huge surge in recent years of multiplayer gaming where skills are put to the test against other thinking opponents, it stands to reason that any device that bestows even the smallest advantage would have a huge selling point. Still, in my opinion most of them are fairly gimmicky, and a mouse, keyboard, and joystick meet most of my gaming needs.
One area this is especially true is with first person shooters. I, like the vast majority of FPS gamers, rely on the tried-and-true mouse/keyboard combo. Generally this seems to give a vast amount of control for aiming with the mouse, and plenty of keys to which to bind controls. Up until recently the only other decent option for FPS games was one of the joystick/trackball combinations available (I have heard that some of the best FPS gamers in the world use such devices). However, there is now another option, known as The Claw, brought to us by Australian Ferraro Design.
Installation The Claw is by far and away the easiest advanced controller I have ever installed (rivaling the old analog joysticks). Why? Well, there are no drivers needed. That’s right…you read it correctly…no software drivers anywhere! This alone is a stroke of genius on Ferraro’s part. To install, one simply plugs TC into the keyboard socket, and then plug the keyboard into TC. That’s it! TC is ready to rock. This remarkable feature is due to the fact that TC functions by simply emulating the keyboard signals. One thing to note…plugging TC into the keyboard port blocks the nearby USB ports (since I have four ports it didn’t affect me). However, Ferraro has included a cable extender to eliminate this problem, so if you use those USB ports make sure attach the extension cable first. Programming As with most advanced controllers, programming and reprogramming takes up a decent chunk of time, and TC is no exception. Programming is a fairly simple matter though. A tiny switch on the bottom of TC places it into programming mode and away you go. Once in programming mode (TC will emit a continuous beep to confirm this), button assignments can be accomplished by simply pressing any TC button followed by the keyboard key you wish to assign to it. You can continue this step to program a sequence of keystrokes to a single button. For example, after programming “space” to button 1, one could follow with “F” and then “3” for instance, so now when button 1 is pressed, TC will emulate the keyboard signals for “space F 3”. This is useful for assigning complex commands to a single button. TC has two built in memory banks so you can switch between different sets of commands for different games (although two sets probably won’t meet all your gaming needs). I should also mention that TC can be programmed on the fly during any game should you wish to alter something. The modifier (Shift) feature of TC did not function quite as I expected. I thought that it would allow each button to be assigned two complete different sets of keystrokes, and while this is the case, it is somewhat restricted. For example, going back to button 1 we programmed as “space F 3”, let us suppose that another button is assigned to be the modifier button. Now, when button 1 is pressed TC sends the signal for “F 3”, and with the modifier, button 1 sends “space”. The modifier sends the first keystroke programmed into any other button, and without the modifier each button send keystrokes 2-5. I found this to be an unusual way to set up TC. It means that only unmodified buttons can be set up with multiple keystroke commands, and to me this seems backwards. In my opinion unmodified commands should be the simple ones (for movement, jumping, attacking, etc.) and the modified being the complex (more specialized) commands. Still, the modifier button allows for up to sixteen commands in total. |
