 Alright, so this is the wow cataclysm mouse and I've actually got one of my co-workers who moved to our Ontario office helping me with this little filming session. The first thing I noticed about this guy is it's huge. So there it is next to my incredibly beat up and rugged looking G9. So you can there's some distinct differences between the crafted sort of worn out finish on the cataclysm mouse and the disgusting worn out finish on my old G9. So the first thing I want to show you guys and the reason I have him here holding the camera so that I can actually operate the mouse while he points the camera at things. The first thing I noticed is it's really really large. So it's actually not, I'd say it's not quite comfortable for me to reach all of the buttons. Like I can't really reach that one. I can just barely reach that one and if you have slightly larger hands than me that's probably a good thing and you'll find this mouse quite comfortable I think. The overall shape is kind of like the Akari laser and one of the other things that I did notice is that not everyone cares about this but I have a hard time picking up the mouse to move it if I reach the edge of my mouse pad without mashing the buttons on the side. So that's something you're gonna want to watch out for. If you do have larger hands it might not be such a problem. I am downloading the driver package right now. It's 26 megs so I hope there's some pretty good functionality in there and I will show you guys that in a few minutes but this is just the initial impressions after putting it on my SX mouse pad which by the way it glides on like nothing I have ever seen before. It probably glides better on this mouse pad than my Akari laser, my G9 or any other mouse that I have thrown at it. Tracking is already dramatically better than the original Wow mouse which honestly I really didn't like. It's hard to quantify but I didn't really like the feel of the laser when it tracked whereas this one is quite smooth, quite responsive. They've definitely upgraded it a lot in that regard. Okay so the first thing that the driver installation did is it updated my firmware and then it installed itself so I've got lots of functionality here. So first thing I want to show you guys is some of the basic features. So over here the default CPI value was at about 800. I turned it up a little bit and then I turned the sensitivity down in order to get the movement just right for me. Like I said I love the way this mouse tracks though. It's very smooth and it glides great on the SX mouse pad. Alright so we've got the pointer speed, sensitivity. Okay so that's all of your basic controls. You don't have quite the level of granularity that you do with a more twitch FPS gaming oriented mouse from SteelSeries like the Xi or the Akari laser but you do have that basic stuff and it's still better than what you're gonna get with a generic mouse by a long shot. Now where this mouse really gets complicated is all of this stuff. So let's start with the colors. I wish I could show you guys this in the dark but I don't actually have a way to turn off the lights in my office. So here's one thing I'm gonna do. I'm just gonna turn that down so that we can actually focus on this. There we go so you can see the color intensity and pulsation. So color changes the well the color so you can see I have it set to red right now. Intensity changes the brightness and pulsation so I'm gonna show you guys like a low pulsation compared to what I had before. So you can see it actually turns off and then comes on quite slowly so that's kind of depends what kind of a look you're going for. Colors you have pretty much every option under the Sun so I'm gonna change it to blue. There it is blue. I'll show you guys a couple of the different colors. Why don't we do green. Let's see what like a bright green looks like. There's a green looks pretty cool. I could kind of do this all day. This is the kind of feature that I could like play with forever on a mouse. There's yellow. Pretty cool. Okay so here I'm gonna turn that back to normal. Alright and then there's a whole bunch of stuff here as well. So here are all of the different things that we can assign to buttons. So first of all you've got all of your built-in wow stuff because World of Warcraft has some pretty specific rules for how you are allowed to bind actions to keys and what is considered cheating and what is not. So this allows you to just simply bind World of Warcraft actions to the mouse buttons without actually binding like keyboard keys to your mouse buttons. It is built right into wow. You can actually configure this within game as well should you so desire. So you can bind game commands to a button. You can bind change CPI commands to a button. This is cool. Check this out CPI up CPI down. So you can assign that to whatever you want. Most gaming mice have actually here G9 is a perfect example have dedicated buttons for that and a lot of them don't actually allow you to change them to different buttons or bind those to something else if you don't really care about changing your sensitivity. So that's a pretty neat feature that they've built right into the driver. There's also change profile so you can set a button to change your profile up profile down or even assign them to specific profiles. So your profiles allow you to have up to 10 different sets of bound actions to your buttons on the mouse. So if I decided okay well I'm gonna use like let's say these two for like profile one and two that way yeah I sacrifice those two profiles but I allow myself to bind two entirely different sets of commands to these ones which are really more convenient to reach anyway for my hands and you know two things here two things here so it really gives you a lot more flexibility depending on how the mouse is most comfortably used for you. So that's a pretty cool thing too and then finally looks like the wrong thing finally custom macros so you can create new ones yeah yeah yeah blah blah blah wow you're not allowed to use macros and wow thank you don't show me that again so why don't I just create a mac you macro that's copy paste or rather copy okay so here we go okay so enter okay okay I don't have I don't quite have it figured out how the macro recording works so give me two seconds here guys all right I figured it out so there's a couple different ways you can create custom macros and really I don't play wow so this is the functionality that would pretty much sell this mouse to me okay so I've gone no delay I've created some custom macros all you do is type a name just click on the box press the keys you want and then click okay so I've created copy paste and cut you use the convenient little chart here to say okay which buttons go where and then you can just map them like this so if I click here and then click copy and I can change it to whatever I want so I want that to be a custom macro copy then I can have that functionality with that button so all that's really left now is to just show you guys the functionality that this enables for the average office worker yeah you might look weird for having one of these on your desk in the office but I mean come on okay I've already got you know g15 keyboard I have four monitors at my desk so I couldn't look much weirder so I'm not gonna worry too much about it so I type something testing this all right so I've built in copy cut and paste to my mouse should be no additional okay I hit copy right now there we are copy and then you know enter enter you know you could build in like you've got so many buttons here you could put enter you could put spacebar you could put anything that you use frequently just bind it to the mouse so I'm gonna click this button here and then I'm going to paste hee-hee that's so cool so yeah here you know what yeah I'm gonna show you guys real-time the the creation process so new okay so we're gonna make it enter I don't want any delays okay and then all I want is enter and then okay so now I'm gonna find a button that I want so I think button number four should be pretty good for enter then I go over to this interface here I click custom macros I go to enter apply okay so I have applied that to the mouse so now what I can do is I can press enter enter enter paste enter enter paste enter enter paste and then if I want to I can go up here I can I can actually cut instead of copying if I'm hitting the right one it'll take a little bit of practice getting used to where all the buttons are but then I could press enter enter paste so hold on let me try that again cut oh I don't know if I don't know if I mean it might have bound cut wrong but anyway pretty cool hey guys so that is my overall impressions of the SteelSeries MMO gaming mouse the new cataclysm edition basically I think it's just so much of an improvement over the old one which I looked at back at launch in terms of the software as well as the hardware and I actually really like this I may just find myself replacing my trusty well-used g9 for this at work because the the productivity of this just looks phenomenal oh yeah not to mention there's memory on board so you can save your profiles and carry them around with you pretty sweet don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other computers and gaming hardware videos