Update: Price update – G9X is RM 129, and the Tarasque is RM 99. For a limited time, Malaysians can purchase Alien IV G9X and get the Tarasque by topping up RM 1.
The parcel sent over by Armaggeddon got me pretty happy when I found out there’s a mouse inside since my Microsoft combo set mouse had an agonizing problem with the scroll wheel click what I’ve been living with for more than a year. I thought maybe this would be the replacement of my Microsoft mouse that has BlueTrack technology.
When Armaggeddon sent me their products, I have no idea how to review Tarasque at all. My main mouse is a wireless one by Microsoft, but since they want me to review then I’ll have to use their Alien IV G9X to test.
Since the Tarasque is a mouse bungee, I figured hey, why not combine both the products and do a 2-section review on that?
Let’s get on to it!
[nextpage title=”Alien IV G9X”]
Opening up the package you get a quite a lot of things included in the box itself – the manual, weights, a CD for the driver (you need this), extra adhesive teflon feet for the mouse, the weights for the mouse, and also the mouse itself.
You don’t actually get a lot extra things besides the teflon feet, as I think that the teflon feet won’t even be worn out anyway. I mean compared to a 8 year old optical mouse I got from Logitech, that mouse still runs fine and the teflon is still as good as ever.
Here comes my first complaint, and that’s about the round case that stores all the weights inside. By looking at it I was really praying hard for it to be a screw type lid, but sadly no. It uses the most horrible type of case, which damages the cap and the case itself when you’re trying to open or close it.
After carefully opening the case, there’s the 7 pieces of weights sitting in there on foam, with no spacing in between for ease of taking the weights out. Even slipping my finger inside is a problem.
[nextpage title=”Look and feel”]
Well moving on, all I can say is that the mouse looks gorgeous with the blue and black colour design. It actually fits well with the blue LED on this particular colour configuration, though you can get it in pure black or in black and orange colour.
Having blue LED is nice, since it does cover all openings of the mouse including the gaps between parts of the mouse. There is light leaking out in between mouse click buttons, and the weight management door button. I can even see the LED inside the mouse itself from the gaps between the scroll wheel.
The mouse itself has quite a weird approach in ergonomics, as they have included an extra button at the resting spot for fingers – for me, that’s where my ring finger goes. I couldn’t get use to that because I lay my hand’s weight on that spot, yet I always accidentally trigger that click for no reason. Well, I’m not complaining since you can change the function or just disable it if you don’t want to use it. That’s entirely up to you, since this is a personal preference matter.
The material of the mouse is soemthing that I would praise, as it has the soft touch all over it. Somehow I wish they have some sort of rubber grips at the side – especially for the thumb, for some comfort in gripping. But no, Armaggeddon made some lines instead.
To say that this mouse has a clean design is somewhat misleading. If they’re trying to approach something cleaner, then maybe Armaggeddon will have to trim down on the amount of texts printed on the mouse itself. There are texts everywhere on the mouse itself – the side, the back, the front, everywhere!
Not to forget, there are many more unreadable micro texts beneath the mouse, and a super bright red LED, that left some burnt marks of my wooden desk!
Armaggeddon tried to do something that premium gaming mice does – that is the ability to add custom weights. I’ve tested a few gaming mice that has the custom weights, and truth to be told I found it to be quite pointless if the weights are not hefty enough.
There is a button that releases the latch and pops out the cover of the weight compartment.
[nextpage title=”Testing”]From that weight management thing comes my testing session with the mouse. The button to release the latch is something that I wouldn’t want to touch mostly as that is just way too difficult to press, and yet it’s angled.
Press the button and the door pops out, as in literally pop out for a good centimeter. Here we can find the 7 slots for the weights.
As I’ve said before, if the weights don’t have any heft in them, then there’s no point having this feature at all, and this is one of those cases. I don’t feel any difference with out without all 7 weights, neither in terms of the required strength to push the mouse nor the change in the Alien IV G9X’s center of gravity. Also, these weights are very difficult to be removed.
Now in terms of the clicking and navigation, it actually feels very good in the end after disabling the ring finger click button. The click buttons are put in a position that is suitable for both claw and palm grip, again depending on your personal preference.
Personally speaking, I got quite a large hand and I always opt for a claw grip since my fingers will be longer than the mouse buttons itself, and that’s very uncomfortable.
There’s also a button to switch the DPI on the fly, which they call it CPI (counts per inch) on this mouse, and an indicator to tell you which DPI you have selected is a nice addition. With the software installed, you can select two more hidden DPI levels, that is 4600 and 6400 DPI. They won’t show up on the mouse, but they’re there and you can feel it.
[nextpage title=”Software”]Remember when I told you that you’ll need the included CD driver at the beginning of this review? Obviously you have to use it now to get the driver up and running because the website does not have the driver available for download. I mean seriously guys, is it that difficult to upload a few megabytes to your site? You have the KAI-9 keyboard and many other products’ driver up online.
Firing up the driver you can see a very similarly designed main menu like the KAI-9, where there’s a falsely portrayed image of the product displayed. The part where I said falsely portrayed is because the DPI indicator light does not consist of red, yellow, or green light. It’s all blue.
Compared to the KAI-9’s software main menu, the Alien IV G9X doesn’t have any clickable buttons at all – not even the link to their main website. Oh wait – there’s one button that links you back, that’s the Support/Updates button at the top bar. Way to go, redundancy!
I have ruthlessly ranted about the KAI-9’s driver about it feeling like an alpha version, and has some very humiliating spelling errors on it. The Alien IV G9X however has a pretty solid driver. There are 5 profiles for you to chooses from, and each of them can have its own sensitivity settings. You can tweak the axis sensitivity, scroll wheel speed, the double click speed and also the acceleration.
After all your hard work, save all the settings somewhere safe so you won’t lose it when you reformat your computer. The catch is this – it doesn’t save my macros, light settings, or even my selected DPI, it only saves sensitivity.
The third menu is something interesting, as you can customize all of the 7 buttons – including the CPI button – to do whatever you want. Again you can customize the keys into 5 different profiles. My complaint about this is how there is no option to switch between profiles on the fly.
If I ever want to switch profiles, I’ll have to get into the driver menu to change it. That’s a hassle.
When I first installed the driver, this is where I headed first – that is to play around with the lights. By default, it’s set into breathing – or pulsing mode. I got into the menu and tweaked it to have a lower intensity as the light is just insanely bright.
So this is what I did – I clicked LOW intensity, selected pulsation to SLOW, then hit APPLY. Waited a good 5 seconds for the settings to be changed (yes, it takes some time) and yes, the pulsation did slow down but the intensity did not change a single bit. If it doesn’t change anything, why put it there in the first place? I expected the LOW intensity to be something like the KAI-9 keyboard,where the light is just dimly lit and comfortable enough to be looked directly when I turn off the lights in my room. The Alien IV G9X however had real “issues” differentiating between high and low intensity – and don’t get me started on MIDDLE intensity.
Put that aside however, there is also profile customization available for the lights, which I would say good! If I’m switching to games, I’d like my mouse to not be lit up at all – that’ll just distract me from gaming.
I really wish that I don’t have to install two separate drivers for the mouse and for the keyboard. If these two drivers are unified, I’d be so damn happy as these two separate drivers are taking two separate spaces on my system tray.
The other thing I wish is for them to expand the size of the driver menu window so that all settings can be shown in one page. If I am to configure my mouse, I’d like to set everything for one profile at one go, not tuning Profile 1’s sensitivity and save it, then go on to button settings and save again, then onward to lights and set again.
[nextpage title=”Tarasque”]
The Armaggeddon Tarasque is a product which I can’t find any information about – even on their website. The product doesn’t seem to exist at their website at all. That doesn’t stop me from reviewing it of course.
Being a mouse bungee itself, the Tarasque is not without some lights. Armaggeddon claims that the Tarasque’s active illumination will enable “easy location of Tarasque in the dark”. Yes it does, but I wish that this thing has a physical switch to switch off the lights entirely. It’s not very bright, but it does distract me from my work sometimes since it only has cyclic breathing mode.
The Tarasque is powered by a mini USB cable, and has two USB ports on each side.
At the bottom there is a large piece of adhesive to stick the Tarasque permanently on the desk so that it doesn’t move. Also, there’s another large piece of adhesive included in the package should you need to replace them.
The bungee functions quite well, since the lift bungee is made out of a soft rubber material and is relatively flexible and can tolerate some strong mouse pulling before it jams there. The cable holding slot on the rubber bungee is very tight and once I got the Alien IV G9X’s cable in there, it do not move at all. Excellent!
Since the bungee is made out of soft rubber, the usual suspect that will make it go ugly is obviously dust. Fret not, Armaggeddon has designed the Tarasque to have the bungee removable so that you can wash it and keep it clean.
One thing that might actually be worth using other than the bungee itself is the 4-port USB 2.0 hub. I don’t expect some crazy speeds to come out of a passive USB hub, let alone a USB 2.0 one. However, the USB ports are actually very convenient to be used since I got my computer locked up in some very inconvenient place anyway. Two thumbs up for the USB hub.
The build quality of the Tarasque does have its flaw, and this one is just like any other of the Armaggeddon products that I’ve used – that is the backlight leakage.
Now don’t get me wrong. It’s good that there are lights coming out around the edge of the USB ports, but it’s just not bright enough for me to really know where it is when the lights are off, which is why I’m categorizing it as light leakage rather than illumination.
[nextpage title=”Wrap up”]So here’s what I have to say – the Alien IV G9X is pretty good as a mouse. The weights doesn’t affect the way I use the mouse at all. The driver is much more solid that the KAI-9, but still needs improvement to the UI and some functions. Lights are great, but are too bright, and the driver is disappointing as it doesn’t change the light intensity one bit. The product does come with a 2-year warranty like the KAI-9 keyboard, but please upload the driver to the website.
As for the Tarasque, it does do what it does – light up the mouse’s cable. Armaggeddon didn’t stop there and included a 4-port USB hub on the bungee base itself. The bungee can hold cables securely, but I still rather turn the illumination lights off.
Rating for Alien IV G9X : 8/10
Rating for Tarasque : 9/10
For RM129, the Alien IV G9X is a decent mouse – but there are issues still with the driver, and some ergonomic issues. Weights don’t affect anything either, so I wonder why they’re there in the first place. But then again, these are my personal encounters with the mouse.
The Tarasque will cost quite a heavy RM99 for it, but it does what it claims to do, yet with very good performance. Sure, it’s not the cheapest mouse bungee around, but if you’re looking to get one with something more useful than a piece of thing to lift cables, this might be it. Be sure to get a right-angled mini USB cable for some neater cable management though.
For a limited time period, Malaysians can purchase the Alien IV G9X and add RM1 for the Tarasque. Now, that’s a bargain!
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I’m having trouble opening the case for the weights xD Any tips?
I guess we have the same issue here. I{ remember what I did was prying it open, and scratches are definitely there :/