I hate gimmicks.  I also have a strong dislike for playing console first person shooters with traditional controllers.  That said, I went into my appointment to see the FragFX V2 with a healthy dose of hesitation.  Due to some interesting interpretations of our meeting schedule (which basically means Doc told me the wrong day for the appointment, but they worked us in anyway!)

Keep reading to find out what I thought of the gimmicky looking FragFX V2…

Since the guys were working me in between other scheduled appointments, I got taken to the “behind closed doors” area first, to see what’s coming down the pipeline and while I can’t really talk about what’s coming, they were set up with a FragFX V2 in that room as well and I got some quiet time with it (without the crowd of people behind me looking over my shoulder that you get on the showroom floor.)

Let me say this now… HOLY CRAP this thing is awesome!  I want to be clear, they didn’t give me one (or anything besides a press kit) in exchange for an endorsement.  I’m ordering on myself later this week.  If you prefer using a mouse for aiming in FPS games and you game on the PS3, you owe it to yourself to try this thing out.

Let me clue you in on some of the things you can’t figure out just from looking at the FragFX.  I mean looking at it, you get a pretty good idea what this thing does, but there are many things it does that you simply can’t tell.  We’ll start off simple… it allows you to assign auto-fire to buttons at variable rates.  The quote I was given by the current top COD4 leaderboard holder was “it pretty much makes any pistol a machine gun.”  Okay, I hear you saying “Cheater!!!”  He also said the top 50 or so players on the COD4 leaderboard for the PS3 all use the FragFX.  He followed that by saying “If they tell you they don’t, they’re lying…”

The FragFX hooks up to your PC for reprogramming.  You can tweak the thing to your liking and then upload your settings from your PC to the FragFX.  One thing I really found neat was the sensitivity options.  If you crank up the sensitivity in your game, you can really move around the screen quickly for aiming purposes, but you can also assign the Frag button (which is an analog button) to dial down sensitivity.  In effect, imagine your mouse moving you very quickly but as you reach your intended target, a slight pull of the Frag trigger slows down your aiming.  I literally watched someone accustomed to the FragFX pull off four headshots in a row in a fairly frantic game environment.

So whether or not using this in online competitive matches represents an unfair advantage, I want one of these for playing games through their single player campaign.  In my short time playing with the thing, I got quite comfortable with it.  I even saw one guy on the show room floor fully reclined, using his leg as a mouse pad (and he was kicking ass!)  The price for the FragFX V2 is $79.99 and is available at many retailers (including BestBuy.com).

I want to reiterate, I get/got nothing out of this… this is an unsolicited testmonial.  With all the guitars and drums around my house, the last thing I want is more controllers, but the FragFX V2 delivers.