Taking a Bite Out of the Opposition with the SplitFish Frag FXShark

I am a console gamer, through and through, but it wasn’t always that way. There was a time in my life when the vast majority of my gaming time was spent on my PC, squeezing every drop of enjoyment I could from PC Gamer demo discs, shareware floppies and bargain bin shooters. When I got a job and with it a handful of financial independence, I migrated to the colorful world of console gaming, and never looked back. For many, this move consisted of fumbling with a controller, lamenting the lack of a mouse, and eventually succumbing to the analog sticks as a chosen form of input, but for me, it meant giving up on entire genres that I felt required a mouse and keyboard. Yes, it’s true: at one point,Shooter-hating SeanNOLA ran a local tipline for games like Quake 2 and Rise of the Triad,but when I abandoned PC games, I more or less gave up on shooters altogether. I’ll pick one up from time to time, but they just never feel right on consoles to me.

When I was contacted about by Split-Fish to take a look at the FragFX Shark mouse for the PS3, I was intrigued. I had seen similar product sbefore but my pre-conceived notions about 3rd party hardware, mixed with my new-found apathy toward shooters made it easy to ignore them, but as a consumer advocate, I felt like it was my duty to at least hear the guys out.  They sat me down with a copy of Modern Warfare 2 and a Shark and gave me their pitch. I bought every word of what they were selling. For the first time in I can’t remember how long, I was thoroughly enjoying myself, playing a first person shooter – and with a mouse that feels like a real mouse to boot.

The concept of the Shark isn’t exactly new: you have a sub-controller in one hand with a D-Pad, an analog stick and some buttons, and a mouse in the other hand with standard Playstation buttons where your thumb lives. Each piece requires 1 AA battery, and can run for up to 50 hours, if you use the included mousepad, or about 30 hours if you don’t. Taken at face value, I suppose one could say that I am simply advocating the idea of a mouse for consoles, but the few unique tricks that the Shark keeps up its sleeve are pretty enticing. For starters, its wireless, which sounds like a double-edged sword to someone who owns one of many wireless third-party controllers that no recently stopped working with the PS3, but the nice folks at SplitFish assured me that they worked very closely with Sony to ensure that their products will have a long life with the PS3.  The left-hand sub-controller also allows players to remap the buttons on the fly. This is an improvement over previous models, which required you to use a PC to set your controls, but I didn’t find this feature particularly useful. I could see how more skilled players might feel the need to change the right click button from “grenade” to “zoom” when sniping, or something along those lines, but for me, leaving the triangle button as a triangle button was generally successful.    

After a decade of FPSs dominating consoles, it still remains to be seen how the online community will react to mouse peripherals. It certainly won’t win you any friends when you roll up to a local CoD tournament with your mouse and demand to use it, but if you are just playing from home, think of the Shark as performance enhancing steroids for shooters. The Shark allows for an impressive amount of sensitivity, which in turn gives players heightened reflexes and spatial awareness that is simply unavailable with an analog stick, and that could mean that some wheredown the line, some shooter communities will cry foul at players using non-standard controllers. Is it ethical?  Who cares, it’s just a videogame, but if you’re deep into the tournament scene, I would ask your tournament organizers about it before you drop $90 on a controller that will ultimately ruin your analog sticking skills.

If you play a lot of PC shooters, and are tired of your PS3 collecting dust, then the Shark might be an option.  $90 is a pretty steep admission price for a console controller, but the Shark is certainly featured enough to warrant the cost, if you’re into that sort of thing. The FragFX Shark should be in stores later this month, just in time for Call of Duty: Black Ops.