Price: 99 Australian Dollars (or about $50 US) from www.claw.com.au
I'm sick and tired of seemingly clueless peripheral designers. Some of these new devices are plain uncomfortable, some try to be everything to everyone and end up pleasing nobody, and some are just crappy and dumb. So as cliché and often inaccurate as it may be to say this, it's great to finally see a device built by gamers for gamers and with a healthy dose of common sense too. The Claw was designed by Australian company Ferraro Design to partially replace the keyboard for use in FPS games, and for once this is a device that is actually useable! And then some…
Just my luck. Not long after I called the Gravis Eliminator Pro the sexiest game controller around, The Claw comes along to prove me wrong. All black, apart from the white and orange logo on the rear of the unit, it looks slick as hell. This thing wasn't made to sit on your mantle piece and impress visitors though… oh no. It's shaped so that the bump at the front has wide grooves that your fingers can sit in, supporting your hand and guiding it right onto the buttons at your finger tips. Each finger gets a button of its own except the forefinger which gets two, and your thumb gets a square of four buttons to use. For those of you who haven't been counting, that's a respectable nine buttons. Each is a made of a solid chunk of plastic and they've been tested “to over 1,000,00 cycles” according to the Ferraro Design page. With a shell of solid black plastic (high impact ABS actually) a heavy metal base plate and rugged buttons, this thing should last you for a damn sight longer than most game controllers. The only downside to such sturdy buttons is that they're harder to press than you'll be used to from mice and joysticks. Personally I'd have preferred highly responsive microswitch buttons like the ones on the Razer Boomslang, but then microswitches tend not to last beyond 20,000 clicks so they'd hardly fit with the Ferraro “build it to last” philosophy.
I did eventually get used to the unfamiliar button feel enough that it tended not to matter in games, including Unreal Tournament, the Quake 3 Team Arena Demo of of course Counter Strike. However while trying the recently released Alice demo, quickly tapping a button on the Claw seemed to send Alice forward further than a swift keyboard key tap would, which was strange and rather unfortunate, although it took me a while to notice this oddity and it didn't stop me from easily completing the demo.