The original Boomslang came from the era of Xbox’s bulky Duke controller. We had just barely made it past the N64’s beloved three-pronged abomination. At a time when “ergonomics” was a novel idea to be explored instead of a defined concept, this design was a lot more palatable.
It’s still a gaming mouse in theory, even if the vast majority of them will spend more time on a shelf than on a mousepad, so I do need to talk about whether it can game. Shockingly enough, it’s not that bad. The shape is unusual, yes. Compared to a standard mouse, the Boomslang is low-slung and wide. It feels like it was designed for an Elite from Halo to hold, their two central fingers and a thumb on each side. It is bizarre and ancient feeling, but it’s not bad.
Putting your hand on this mouse, you have to rethink where everything goes. Your thumb curls underneath the main hump, and your pinky mirrors it on the opposite side. There’s enough real estate on the two main buttons for all three fingers to sit comfortably. If you’re like me, and you tend to rest your middle finger on the right mouse button, it’s exceptionally odd. Instead, your middle finger really wants to rest on the mouse wheel. It feels natural after a few minutes, but you’ll need to adjust.
To properly test this mouse, I paired it with some of the heavy hitters from back in the day. Halo CE, Counter-Strike, Quake 2, and Half-Life. To get any agility, your hand is pretty much forced into a fingertip-only grip, where your thumb and pinky slide into the crevices of the side buttons for added stability. The mouse wheel is set fairly far back compared to a standard mouse, so putting your fingertips at the edge of the mouse means your middle finger can’t easily use the mouse wheel. Instead, with your fingertips sitting directly next to the wheel, the palm of your hand is left hanging off the back. I would imagine everyone who uses this will have a newfound appreciation for how far ergonomics have come over the years.
The largest struggle I had with this mouse was fine controls. The large head and weight means this is slightly more prone to maintaining momentum than most that I’ve tested, wanting to swing around like a battle axe when being used precisely.
The truly strangest aspect of this mouse from a modern perspective is the side buttons. They sit in what I can best describe as the “armpits” of the mouse, curving underneath the front section and sitting exactly where your thumb and pinky intuitively want to be. Both of them have a strange, creased shape that follows the lines of the mouse’s two halves, and require a good bit of force to be pressed down, meaning you won’t accidentally press them during regular use, but this also means they’re easy to forget about.
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