When I received this product, I was surprised by the weight. It was definitely heavier than any other mouse I've ever lifted. Doesn't matter, I was still looking to use this baby and my anticipation was growing. I literally ripped open the package and plugged in the AC adapter and the mouse cord as fast as my Asian hands could manage. The blue light turned on; I was ready to go.

Installing this technological marvel was similar to installing a program. One thing of note is that it required a reboot to continue with its installation program -- my guess is that it needed to initialize a few drivers. To sum it up, it was normal and no incidents arose. So far so good.

I installed the included WingMan utilities from the CD, which included a demo that showed off some of the force feedback capabilities. I started the program and was greeted with a simplistic layout consisting of a blue background with black blocks on the side and a red ball in the middle. Then I shifted from my normal mouse to the FF mouse.

The first experience with the mouse is the feeling that everything you do moves the cursor too fast. The sensitivity on the mouse is much higher than a normal one, because of the total area that the mouse can move. It has about 3 to 4 inches of movement allowed in all directions, which means that it has a greater ratio between desktop surface and mouse movement surface. After a few moments, I began to effectively move the mouse around.

I moved the mouse cursor to blue background, and the green line (paddle) became my cursor. I read the instructions on the right, and moved the line under the ball. I moved the mouse up to the ball, and to my surprise, I felt the weight of it. I 'tossed' the ball up in the air, and bounced it back up when it came down. It felt exactly as it should be!

Next, I proceeded to move the paddle against the black blocks. I felt as if I was against a wall, which I was apparently. It resisted me, and the white line stayed within the boundaries. Wow! This was getting way too cool.

I played with it a little more and moved on. I opened up the next demo..Shapes. It let me feel the shapes like the borders around the shapes and the smoothness of the insides. This was the missing component in a computer all these years -- the ability to 'feel' your virtual enviroment.

Moving on, I opened up the 'Feel The Web' application. To my surprise, it wasn't an application at all but a web page. As I read the instructions given to me, I began to get very excited. This baby had some real potential. I tried all the demos included in the page, which ranged from simulation of a car engine starting to what ice feels like to the individual strings on a tennis racquet. It had neat animated gifs that had force feedback applied to it, like this sailing one where you had to try to stay on the boat, and the force feedback was trying to throw you off. Really nifty.

Included in the package were some games, Heavy Gear II, Gruntz, and Railroad Tycoon II. I tried Heavy Gear II with the mouse and it blew me away. It's like the mouse was suppose to be there. It never felt out of place at all. The pull-back on the mouse everytime I fired, or the springy-ness everytime I jumped with my little 'mech was too much. This was one killer piece of a peripheral.

Real world applications for this mouse is that it could possibly help the handicapped. It included a program called Feelit! Desktop, which lets the user feel ridges and textures as well as resistence on everything you do in Windows. Everytime I dropped down a menu and scroll through my options, I felt a little ridge between each option. When I moved around a window so I could see something better, I had felt some resistence and springy-ness. One really neat thing is when I moved files around. Depending on the size of the file, I could feel variable resistence. The bigger the filesize, the heavier it would be.

To sum it up, the Logitech Wingman Force Feedback Mouse is definitely a hit. If you want the latest trend with a good piece of hardware sitting on your desk, or simply want to amaze your friends, better get this. It's an accessory that could increase productivity amongst workers as well as enhance gameplay. I give this latest incarnation of a mouse 9 stars out of 10. Why not a perfect score? Well, at times the mouse could be a little restrictive, since it had such a low moving area compared to traditional mice. The force feedback and the slew of games readily made up for it however, so it's still a useful and fun mouse to play with. Enjoy this one!

Requirements:

IBM-compatible PC, with Pentium or faster processor recommended
16 MB ram
15 MB available Hard Disk space
4X CD-ROM Drive
Available USB port
Windows 98
DirectX 6.1 compatible Sound Card
3-D Hardware Accelerator
Features:

Enhances your desktop and WWW experience
Comes with powerful WingMan Profiler software
Enjoy force feedback in a wide variety of mouse-controlled games
Joystick emulation mode works with many current force feedback titles designed for joysticks and wheels
Designed for Windows 95-98 USB enabled computers
Official game controller of the PGL





Recommended: Yes