Preview: CM Storm Skorpion

The CM Storm Skorpion is a portable ‘mouse bungee’ – a little desk-mounted crane that holds your mouse cord up in the air and prevents it from dragging on the table as you game.

If you’ve never encountered such a product before, this is the kind of thing that will either make you roll your eyes and snort, or squee in delight. Personally I was in the former category, until I’d actually used the Skorpion for longer than five minutes. After that, I was bungeed into the latter category and haven’t looked back.

If you use a corded mouse, particularly on a narrow desk where the majority of the cord’s weight is hanging off the rear, you’ve probably noticed that the cord provides a whole lot of drag. If you’re playing a twitch-aiming first person shooter, or trying to trace accurate lines in Photoshop or Illustrator, this can become the bane of your wired-mousing life.

The Skorpion is a little scorpion-shaped plastic triangle, with a solid iron core for weight and three legs with non-slip rubber feet. A rubber ‘tail’ holds your mouse cable 9.5cm above the desk surface, and flexes when you reach the end of your tether to avoid unpleasant/cable-damaging jerks. It successfully gripped all of the mouse cables we tried it with, both plastic and fabric sheathed.

The result? No cable friction on your desk or mousepad, and no drag from the weight of the cable as you game. Mission accomplished.

The three legs and the ‘tail’ all snap off for easy transport in a laptop bag, and while heavy enough to remain stable on-desk, it’s portable enough at less than 200 grams.

The only downside we found was that the relatively meagre (and non-adjustable) 9.5cm cable height limits your effective cable length before it starts to drag on the desk again. If you like to use a large mouse pad and make great, sweeping motions, that might prove an issue. Otherwise, we’d recommend the Skorpion not just for gamers, but for anyone that needs to be very accurate with a wired mouse.