The Verbatim Rapier V1 gaming mouse

I've spent the last few weeks checking out the new Verbatim Rapier V1 gaming mouse. Using and abusing it in everything from everyday tasks such as web browsing, to more demanding work such as Adobe Photoshop, from jumping around the Ogrimmar bank courtesy of World of Warcraft, to getting myself shot in the back via Counterstrike: Source.

On sale from Maplin this coming December, the Rapier V1 will be joined by its fellow sibling the V2 which offers a slightly lower tracking speed of 40ips compared to the 65ips of the V1, and comes in a different shape.

Verbatim

And after reading all of that, no doubt quite a few of you younger types are thinking who the hell are Verbatim? Well I'm thirty something, and it is a name that has been around for rather a lot of years, mostly stuck in my mind with associated images of floppy disks. To give you a quick bit of history, it was originally named Information Terminals when formed back in 1969, went public ten years later (changing its name somewhere along the line) and was bought by Mitsubishi in 1990. There, that's as interesting as Wikipedia can make it, sorry.

So anyway, when a company that specialises in storage (previously just magnetic and these days including optical and flash) announces a pair of new mice and mouse-mats, to a market so flooded with peripherals, you would normally expect them to take one of two routes. Either they do it cheap, or they genuinely try and offer something new, and Verbatim is clearly going for the latter option here with their Rapier mice. Now don't get me wrong, the company also offers a range of the little squeakers for regular desktop and laptop owners, but this little rodent sets it apart from others in that the feature list is heavily targeted at the world beyond the office.

Ergonomics

Gaming mice are often rather odd, they don't usually conform to the standard mouse designs floating around out there. Partly this is to encompass the myriad of extra buttons they often add, and sometimes this is just to make them look like the sort of thing "the kids" want to have floating around their mouse-mat at a LAN party.

The Rapier looks very much like its first design decision was to make it fit nicely in the hand. I suffer from RSI, brought about by overdoing it in my QuakeWorld days, and I'll admit at first finding the shape rather uncomfortable coming from a more basic Microsoft offering. But after a few days of use, those feelings went away and now it feels far more natural than my previous one.

Of the seven buttons, the right, left, wheel and centre are exceptionally well positioned. The main body which houses the left and right buttons is a gloss surface which combined with the matte almost rubber-like plastic sides makes for a nice grip. Your thumb and two littlest fingers basically hold and move the mouse without actually having to apply much pressure, whilst first and second happily sit relaxed on top with your first finger sitting neatly between the wheel and the middle button on the left clicker, and your right operating the right.

If you have huge hands, I suspect you will struggle with the Rapier, but no more than any other mouse. But don't worry, it just means God doesn't love you. Left handers may not like it either, however it is possible to hold it in the left hand if you are used to using your second or fingers on the mouse wheel.

OMG Blue Lights

This mouse is part of the recent crop to use blue LEDs instead of the more traditional and much brighter red. I have no idea if this is for any significant reason other than blue is prettier, which it certainly is. I already have a nice gaming mouse-mat which lights up blue, so this choice of colour just makes my desk look cooler.

There is certainly nothing in the performance of the mouse which might lead me to believe that blue is a bad choice, if anything it appears to work on more surfaces than the red LED optical mice I have lying around. Although this could just be because it is better made, I wouldn't like to say.

Teflon Feet

It's all very well having a comfortable design, with a funky blue LED shining out the bottom, if dragging it across most surfaces is like snowboarding on gravel. So Verbatim have gone for no less than Teflon coated feet, and boy can you notice the difference.

Gaming mouse-mat? It just glides effortlessly over it, likewise the plain desk. The back of my Nintendo DS? Just as easily. Leather case for me iPhone? Like a hot knife through butter. Verbatim sell a matching mouse-mat, which I didn't get a chance to see, but based on the way these feet slip and slide around everything to hand, any decent flat mouse-mat will do.

Weight Adjustment

Of course it isn't just the feet which help here, the overall weight of the mouse makes a big noticeable difference in how it feels. And this mouse is adjustable, a flap on the underside gives access to a compartment with five removable 4.5g weights inside. So if it is too heavy for you, remove a couple and try it again.

Initially sceptical of this, I soon found out when I removed them how much of a difference to the feel this made. It just turned out I was happy with the weight it came as, so taking them out made me pull faces. But it is nice to have the option if you prefer a lighter unit, or even like to change the weight as you change games.

Want a Bag With That Dear?

In case you like to travel with your mouse, they've even provided a black padded bag to put it in, with a separate smaller one included to carry the removeable weights. What more could you possibly want aside from a small leprechaun who pops out and sets it up for you?

Gamers Toolkit

All of the remotely interesting settings for the mouse are handled via a piece of software called the Gamers Toolkit. This comes with the included CD, and is not a driver, you don't need a driver to use this mouse on Windows Vista or XP. All of the clever things this mouse does, it does internally, and all the settings are stored on the mouse itself.

This means you can set it up on one machine, then pack it away in the little bag, taking it off to some far flung land where it will do all the same things, and have the same behaviour, without having to install anything at the other end.

For the gamer who likes to move their peripherals between machines, whether it be because they attend LAN parties or hardcore competitive gaming events, this is really a very neat concept.

Adjustable USB Speeds

If your are a gamer, you'll know that quite a few hardcore FPS players swear by the idea that the more frequently a mouse sends updates on movements, the better it is. Who knows what the real physical limits are as to what maximum rate really makes a difference to your skill, I personally have no clue. However the toolkit lets you switch between 125, 250, 500 and 1,000 updates per second, which should be enough.

Adjustable DPI on the Fly

On the left side of the mouse, situated between two additional buttons that default to forward and back, is a sort of rocker switch. Flicking this either way increases or decreases the chosen DPI setting from one of four pre-selected choices. The four blue LEDs on the mouse indicate what is currently selected, and each one can be picked from 400, 800, 1200, 1600, 2000, 2400 and a mighty 3200 DPI. I narrowed the range within which my presets sat compared to the defaults, which seemed to wide and too much of a jump per step.

In addition to this function, it also acts as another programmable button, although you won't want to use it for anything that needs pressing in a hurry due to the travel required to activate it. But I digress.

You can maybe question why you would want to change the DPI in this manner, which is fair enough. I found it very useful when switching between Windows and specific games, and even more handy inside FPS titles depending on which weapon I had selected, if I was camping or running around small or big areas. Being able to turn slowly whilst in huge open spaces, and fast inside buildings, was handy.

Most titles will let you achieve this sort of thing via console commands, but not all do. Plus being able to alter how sensitive your mouse moves on the fly without needing to use a menu (or write an in-game macro) can also be good at times. I found some games which involve sniper scopes really benefit from this feature.

Programmable Buttons with Macros

Finally, we get on to the last major feature, the mouse is completely programmable. Using the Gamers Toolkit you can configure any of the seven buttons to perform one of three scripted actions, emulate a keypress, plus a load of other things that didn't make a huge lot of sense but were nice to have.

The most interesting feature here is the macro option, what with so many gaming keyboards offering them now it makes sense to let the mouse manage it too. Each macro can contain up to 256 steps, which cover everything from key presses, with up and down being separate parts of the macro, to pauses and delays. You can also include mouse button presses and even movements here, which make for some interesting ideas.

Options for repeating from a certain line, and pausing ready to carry on after a further button press, are all there too. The only thing it lacks is some sort of conditional operator, but this would inevitably require some sort of direct interface to the game you were playing, and is either not possible or practical.

The only real downside is you can only have three macros active at anyone time, which will be fine for most situations, however with 7 buttons available on the mouse it's a shame you can't have all of them using different ones or even the option of shift combinations.

With the features it offers, one might even consider the options to "enhance" your gameplay may give you somewhat of an unfair advantage. Take a game like Counterstrike, where some weapons are traditionally aimed at the target's body and given short repeating bursts of fire, whilst others are single shots to the head. After a fair bit of tweaking, you could probably right a macro that performed short bursts of fire and attempted to compensate for the kick back of the gun. Or even one that lets you target a body but jumps up to head height when you fired, and then returned the crosshair to from whence it came.

More sedate macros can be used to equip and fire grenades, perform weapon switches followed by instant fire. Nothing that some games won't let you macro themselves, but a nice advantage to have in games where you can't.

Profiles, Not Forgetting Profiles

Of course being able to configure everything is all very well if you only use the mouse with one game all the time, but different games often call for different settings. So thankfully the toolkit also includes options to save and load profiles, importing and exporting too.

Conclusion

If you've read all the above, you'll already know what I thought of this excellent new mouse from Verbatim. It ticks all the right boxes when it comes to features, comfort and handling. Despite being initially put off by the ergonomic design, I quickly grew to not only love its curves, but treasure the weight and feel.

It is even competitively priced, exceeding by some margin much of the competition when it comes to resolution and functionality. Definitely worth serious consideration for the gamer, and possibly even the non-gamer who wants to use the macro features in more work based applications like Photoshop.