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Ok, so before I kick of with the review of the Razer Dimondback Plasma edition, I figured I’d give a little bit of a life update.

Tomorow I go back into hospital for the….. damn I’ve lost count of how many times it is. The only thing is, I should NOT being going in. Let me explain.
The last time I had this operation done, the surgon didn’t finish the job, yup thats right, he only did half of it. And take a guess whats happened. Its relapsed. It was fine for almost all of my first year at Uni. I’m guessing aorund exam time Craig and Luke may have started to see me in some discoumfort during the warmer days.
So anyway, got the call on Tuesday, and am going in on Thursday.
Now While they gave me the choice of taking the Thursday or keep waiting (i only got the Thursday because there was a canclation), it means I will be missing a few things. The first being one of my friends going to New Zeland for a backpackers holiday. I havn’t seen her since exams last year as we have both been busy with work(her)/uni(me), other new relationships, and the general summer partying, and we WHERE going to catchup on Thursday (tomorow). Oh well, gotta keep my self alive, so really no choice.
This also means I will be missing Nik’s 19th birthday party.

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Now, the Razer Dimondback Plasma. The final verison of the Dimondback.
Now as many of you know, I am obsessed with mice. I have tested almost every single mouse that has come out from the big brands short of the Fatal1ty 1010 and 2020. The list of mice that I have deemed worthy enough to serve my palm is very short: Microsoft IteliMouse Explorere Optical, Microsoft InteliMouse Explorer 3.0, Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical 1.1/1.1a, Logitech Wingman Gaming Mouse, Logitech MX500/510/518. Does the Dimondback make it onto my short list? Lets find out.

First of, the Dimondback is an ambidixtrious mouse, that is, it is sutible for both right and left handed users. And I must say, its one of the best looking mouses I’ve seen in a while. The big rubber buttons that Razer are well known for are prominant and take up roughly half the mouse. A prominant ruberise white ridge also runs from the front of the mouse to the rear which houses the two rocking switch side buttons.
And finaly, to finish it off astheticly, the low thin shell is semi-transparent allowing the blue LEDs inside to glow through.
Now the side rails and buttons. You are either going to love them or hate them. It all depends on how you coose to grip the mouse. If you plan on plaming it, they will most likly frustrate you. If you grip your mouse in the clasic “claw grip” that i use – that being fingertips touching the mouse only – then you probably wont notice they are there, and actualy love the prominant side rail.

Thats all we will say about the shape, as that is subjective. What I like, others might hate, etc.
Now for the sensor.

Now for anyone who uses their mouse extensivly, a good sensor is a must. For general use, the Dimondback’s sensor is way-way-way overkill.
So what makes the Dimondback’s sensor so special? The answer is the shear amount of acceleration this thing can handle. Now by acceleration, I mean how fast you can physicly move the mouse before it fails. By failing I mean skipping or inducing negetive acceleration. I cannot find the limit wtih this thing. In game I have literaly thrown it accross the mousepad whilst playing CPMA at ultra low sensitivity. It does not skip and does not produce any negetive acceleration that I can find.
Now for those who are wondering what negetive acceleration is, it is were the faster you move your mouse, the slower your actions translate onto screen.

Another feature I love about this mouse is the teflon feet, there are two small white teflon feet at the front and a single large white teflon foot at the base. Now many of you are probably used to using the normal nylon, or even those horrid plastic feet that come on cheep mice. Do these feet make a differnece? Hell yes! It makes the glide so much more smoother, the mouse feels like its gliding accross the surface, not making contact at all.

Pros:
-Infra-red lit sensor, looks very cool
-Good looks
-side rails
-great driver software
-best mouse feet ever
-light weight

Cons:
-some may not like the shape
-side rails
-cost

The Razer Dimondback still retails for $69-$79, but is being phased out for the new DeathAddar

Over this blog and the next one, I will be reviewing two products by Razer, both of them designed to make your mousing input into the computer as perfect as posible.

Today, I am looking at the Razer Mantis Control mousepad, and I will go into the reasons why I chose this pad over the Xtrac Ripper XL, Everglide Titan MonsterMat and the SteelPad Qck+.

The first thing I should point out, is that there are two versions of the Razer Mantis. The Control (which I have here) and the Speed. The difference Razer makes between them is that the Control is for low sensitivity players because of its high friction (more control) and the speed is for high sensitivity players because of its low friction (able to move mouse easier).
Now before we even start. The Cotrol has les friction than the Speed, this is because the mouse makes less contact with the surface designed to be “rough” to give more friction. So just keep this in mind.

The first thing you notice about this mousepad when you get it, is the packaging it comes in. It comes in a nice plastic tube which you can use to transport it to LANs with (i use it for this as well). The tube looks like an oversides tennis ball package, and has the Razer logo plastered over it, with the version of the pad under the razer banner.

Now I will let you know, when I got this pad, I was at the eGames expo in Melbourne, and I figured, what better time to test it than strait away. So me and my friends who I was with went over to the Quake4 competition stand, and after a quick talk with the friendly chap running the stand, let me play using my new pad. Luckly the systems there were basicly my home setup, that being a Microsoft Comfort 2000 keyboard, Microsoft WheelMouse Optical 1.1 (this was the A version tho), and a lovly crisp 19″ CRT monitor.
So all ready for some fragging? Nope.
Apon taking the pad out of the tube, I relised it was not going to fit on the desk. Atleast not with the keyboard next to it. You see, this mousepad is big. 444mm accross and 355mm deep to be exact. So I had to addopt the “russian style” of Quakeing, that is, keyboard on my lap, with monitor rotated 45*. This gave me enough room to fit the pad onto the desk.
So I set my sensitivity, and fov, and started palying. At first I was disapointed. The WMO1.1 wasn’t gliding over what-so-ever, infact it was catching the mouse and preventing me from moving it. I was concidering taking the pad back and asking for a Everglide insted. But then I had a brain wave: The mouse feet.
Quickly turning over the expo’s mouse prooved to me that Melbourne is a dirty city. Five minutes of cleaning and shirt polishing the mousefeet (so they were nice and shiny like mine at home), and OMG!
The Razer Mantis is a brilliant pad. The mouse had no issues gliding from one side to the other, and was able to read accuratly without skipping over the entire surface.
I was able to make large arm motions accross the pad quicker than on my old pad, due to the lower friction. BUT I was also able to stop the mouse on a dime due to the texture of the surface.
The thickness of the pad is also brilliant, its about 5mm thinner than those old small MarBig cloth and styrophome mousepads that people used to once buy, so there is plenty of cusioning there for your arm. But, suprisingly, the mouse doesn’t sink onto the pad when using it. The honeycomb base really is quite extrodanary. I am yet to find someone who doens’t like the feel of this pad.

Now for the complaints. As with everything “perfect” there are flaws. And these are really minor.
The honeycomb construction of this pad. The edges “bump” up after a week, and can start to burn your forarm unless you have this pad right at the edge of your desk (this is experience with all thick pads tho).
The pattern. Ok, for a pad designed for low sensitivity players, why do we have such a small detailed area in the centre? The speed is designed for high sensitivity, and the pattern covers the whole pad, not just the centre!
I have to keep it clean, I mean, seirously, why can’t it put itself in the washing machine! Why doens’t it stop me spilling crumbs onto it!

Okay, okay, those were really small issues. I’m finding it hard to faulter the pad here.

I should also point out, that this mousepad is probably the best pad for those who wish to use a laser mouse. This is mainly due to the way laser mice work. That is, in a lazer mouse, the mosue isn’t taking photos of the surface, its comparing the difference digitaly, kind of like reading a CD in your computer. This is generaly why we see laser mice getting horrible negetive acceleration, and not tracking on that many surfaces, and the obvious “skipping”.
However, I can conferm that this pad will suport a laser mouse upto around 20cm for a 360* turn. Anything above that and you get skipping. Craig, before you jump in here and say “but we used a G5 at the lan and you couldn’t make it skip”, that was because I had the sensitivity at 18cm for a 360* turn. Without drivers, I couldn’t get the G5 down to my sensitivity.
But, just to conferm. Laser mice “do” work on this pad.

pros:
-Large size
-low friction
nice packaging

cons:
-requires cleaning
-mgiht make you be accused of cheating online 

All up I give the razer a 8.5/10
Cost: AU$29-AU$39

 At the start I said I’d explain why I didn’t go those other pads. Here are the reaosns: the Xtrac Ripper was too thin and wears down within a month losing its smoothness. This is the same problem with the Qck+, BUT the Qck+ also is THINNER, and only an extra 50mm deeper (that is 440mm x 400mm). And the Everglide is the EXACT SAME surface as the Razer Speed (they both use the same technology and fabrication plant), except it weighs in at $15 dearer.

After watching some of the games from the WarSow Fun Cup, I must say, whilst alot of the games seem like blowouts, like score differences of fifteen frags or more, but are they really?

Lets take the game between pod and phrantic as an example, I have the recording of this game if anyone wants it, the score of the first map was 23-0, pod winning ofcourse. Now you look at that score, and you would presume that pod is just uber awesome, or the phrantic sucks.
But if you watch game, expecily from pod’s point of view, you will notice that every time he makes a frag, he is down to less than 25 hp. Also, if you look at the stats, phrantic delt ALOT more damage to pod, than pod did to phrantic, the only difference being that phrantic was reckless in the fights he chose, and ofcourse, this falls back to knowlage of the game and were all the health and armours are.
This must have been hugly anoying for phrantic, i know he was getting frustrated, as he was landing a tone of hits, and his opponent just wasn’t dying. Now obviously this must not have been very fun for phrantic, but it was highly entertianing for me and everyone else who was on GTV (proxy spectating through me) to see.

This has made me wonder, obviously Quake style games amplify the skill difference between players, yes that is me saying that pod and phrantic are just as good as each other, the closer that SMALL percentage in difference, the closer the scores will be, not due to big swings in combacks, but because frags will be traded more often (for example me vs pr0nking in wSw, scores of 3-5), and maby this is the reason why amongst casual gamers the Unreal Tournament series is more popular.
Now, UT, the game is alot more slower, and its alot easier to score a kill because of this. You see, in warsow or quake, when your health gets low, you go bounding off at over 500ups to grab some more health. In UT, because you can’t accelerate quickly, and your maximum speed is alot lower, you don’t have a chance to get to any health, so it all comes down to who deals the maximum amount of damage, insted of the player who has the most skill. This means that the frag count climbs quicker. At GreenTubeLAN in a 1v1, it wasn’t uncommon to see both players with scores in double digits.
You see, it wasn’t the dueling skills of the players, it was how well they could aim, or inother words, the game was only testing 30% of their dueling skills.

Personaly I would like to see at the next GreenTubeLAN Quake3 or Quake4 make a comeback, but I know that wont happen, purly because the game wont stroke all players egos’, its obviously going to be another UT2k4 1v1 event. And the 1v1 competition will most likly remain UT2k4 untill we get larger, and obviously have to apeal to Victoria’s more skillful duelers, inwhich case we really have no choice but to drop back to Q3A or Q4 (all depends on the comunity making a switch this year), which I know sadly means that we are going to see less casual players joining in for fun, as they will get completly mauled by 20 frags, and not want to touch the game again. Not many people want to learn the game. If they arnt good at it, they will drop it. Its very rare to owne someone at a LAN event in a game they have only just started in, and then have them come upto you, and ask how to improve their game.
Thats sad, understandable, but sad, personaly, when I’m taking on a “newbie” in a game like q3a or wsw, I will take it easy on them, deliberatly making it close. Give them some confidence, its only when playing someone like phrantic that I will go all out in a first game (mainly ’cause he did that to me when i was learning SoF2).

I guess this post is all over the place, hopefuly I got my thaughts on this accross, even if they are somewhat jumbled. I’m sure Craig will scoure through this looking to pick apart any hipocracies in this he can find.

Ok, well, last night I got bored shitless with working on the damn FIT2002 assignment. Nick wasn’t online, so I decided to give good old Mike a call, heres a basic transcript of the conversation:
Me: Hey, you going out tonight?
Mike: I don’t know, only if Da…
Me: Are you or arnt you?
Mike: No
Me: Ok, i’m comming over.

So anyway, got there, setup laptop, and started to bash away at Counter Strike Source, us on the terrorist team, taking 20 knife counter-terrorist. We lost most rounds .
Then came time to load up Quake 3 Arena, we started off with a quick duel on pro-q3dm6, were i scored 5 frags in the first two minutes (doing my best impersination of Toxic), before we moved onto the Clan Arena game mode against five bots.
The round limit was set to 20, and we only won seven of those rounds .
I was hitting an average of 40% shaft and 60% rail wasn’t enough. I blame Mike for only hittng 17% / 20% respectivly.

wait a second….. this is my blog so ofcourse I get the first post….

 Lets see, today was nothing but homework, and getting owned by a girl in Q3A (9-6 were the scores on pro-q3dm6).

Definatly something more interesting tomorow once I got this done, if I can get this f***ing assignment done, then I may have some pics to show off from the UrT LAN tomorow night, if not, then I’m not going. Uni work > UrT LAN :<

Well thats made my day.

The next min-GreenTubeLAN is comming up, 17th-18th i think are the dates (its the sat-sun that w/e, so feel free to correct me). Its gonna be awesome.
There is going to be the famous Unreal Tournament 2004 1v1 competition, an Age of Emprise 2 competition FFA, a V8 Supercars FFA competition, and a Quake 3 Arena Clan Arena 2v2 competition.
The network is going to be FAST! Like a whole gigabyte backbone fast (if someone keeps their end up….) game packs will be avalible. Its just going to freakin rock!

Oh, thats not whats made my day, something else has, you can try and guess

Happy Australia day!

Comon people wave that flag high!

So whats the plans for today?
Well not alot, I have this FIT2002 assignment to finish, that has to be done around being forced down my Nan’s, which will be as bording and as big of a waste of time as….. a really boring thing that wastes time (World of Warcraft anyone?).

Guess I better jump on the mobile, I got a few SMSs to send now to run through my credit.