Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Mayflash Max Shooter Review: Playing Xbox 360 With A Mouse And Keyboard


  • This is not going to be anything like playing on a PC. Ever. It works differently.
  • It's still easier to aim quickly at medium distance with a mouse.
  • It's easier to aim at extremely short and extremely long distances with the controller.
  • It's not going to improve your game if your strategy is still shitty, like mine, you'll still suck, like me. Rushing into fire and getting killed is the same with every method of controlling your character.
  • It's a fun and acquired taste. Precision snobs will hate it, but after getting over it's failings, I still like it a little better than the controller.
  • The wires really junk up your playing area.
  • Even though the Max Shooter is the cheapest solution, it's expensive ($70 - $100) once you include the cost of the Wired controller.
Okay, I've fantasized about doing this for years now, pretty much since I played Halo: Combat Evolved on the original Xbox; But I never really looked into actually trying it until recently. So, I'll admit, I'm a little late to the game here.  It turns out since 2008 (or maybe earlier) there have been a few options for gamers that want to play FPS's on their 360s with a keyboard and mouse: There is the XIM360 and XIM2, probably the most famous, and certainly the most expensive (priced from $150 - $250), which connects to a PC to control the mouse and keyboard mapping; There is the XFPS Sniper 3 ($80-$100) which is a standalone that connects only to your 360 and your mouse and keyboard (and also allows for a PS2 controller to be connected); There is the XFPS 4 Speed ($100-$130), which similar to XIM connects to a PC; and finally there is the Mayflash Max Shooter ($50-$90), which is really just an XFPS Sniper 3 clone.  The article will focus on the Mayflash Max Shooter.

I purchased the Max Shooter from Gamebaz.com for $65 total, whom I can't really endorse as it took a really really long time to get my product in the mail. This is mostly because it shipped from Hong Kong, but whatever, it took a month. If you want to get one, I'd get one off of Amazon. It'll ship faster.

The setup: All of the systems mentioned above require an Xbox 360 Wired Controller. Not a wireless controller with a Play & Charge
. This is because the systems pass the controller authentication request sent by the Xbox through to the real Xbox controller, which then sends the response back to the 360 saying "it's all good, I'm a real controller". Then the fun starts. Once this occurs, you simply plug in your mouse and keyboard.

But you're not ready yet. This thing requires a good amount of setup. A lot of fiddling in fact. To this point, I have yet to custom program my Max Shooter, I've had to use the default bindings, which are less than great. If I ever figure out how to program this thing (the instructions didn't help a bit) I'll be sure to post it here. Getting the mouse to a tolerable level requires going into whatever game you're playing, adjusting the sensitivity (probably to something higher than you'd play with a controller), then fiddling with the X and Y axis wheels on the side while in game to get it to where you want it.

So how does it perform? If you're looking for a spot-on PC experience, this will never work like that, I doubt an all-hardware standalone keyboard/mouse adapter ever will, you need a PC or something that runs software, and here's why: All 360 games, particularly shooters have a "dead zone" in the analog stick. This is a distance you can push the stick without moving your character. This is to prevent accidentally twitching your guy off a cliff or something, and really is just making up for how inaccurate an analog thumb stick can be by nature. This device (and all others like it) is sampling your mouse movements, then calculating a speed vector (i.e. how far did this mouse move and in what direction in what time frame). It's then translating that vector to an analog stick command. All of this means that if you move your mouse very slowly in any direction, it will not translate to any movement at all in-game, because a slow movement means a small vector which means a small amount of movement on the analog stick, which as we've mentioned has a dead zone.  The reason the XIM2 and XIM360 work better is they use software installed on the PC to account and adjust for this deadzone.

My thoughts on it: At first I was pissed and disappointed. This was because I was looking for a perfect PC type experience. What I realized after fiddling with it is it's just not ever going to be like that. It's a bit jerky, a little laggy, and you can't fine tune it enough to get perfect aim like you would with a mouse on a PC.

After I used it for a while in Call of Duty: Black Ops, I got angry and said, screw it I'll just use the controller.  And when I picked up the controller I noticed something. While it's easier to hone-in on a far away target with the controller's analog sticks and some practice, it wasn't as easy to quickly acquire the target. Meaning, at medium range, shooting at someone with the Max Shooter and a mouse was much more intuitive even if it was jittery. I immediately switched back to the mouse and keyboard and kept practicing, and within an hour I was starting to get more and more killstreaks and much better kill to death ratios. I'm a sucky player, and I still sucked, but I sucked with (slightly) better aim and it did show.

This was fun, but I will be trying to get a XIM in the future, as they should perform much better.

    2 comments:

    1. I played PC games for over 13 years and i use the max shooter on Xbox 360 and I did use it with MX 518 mouse and not to good then I got my razer lachesis and it is mint so smooth no lag up from mouse..

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    2. High dpi mouse and lower sensitivity in ms1 dead zone at min and its nice and smooth.
      Initial thoughts were not good until I tried the above and very close to pc now.

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