Introduction

When I was first asked to review the Neural Impulse Actuator from OCZ I admit I was both sceptical and apprehensive. How on earth could something that monitored my brain be used to control, move and aim my guns in a game? Apprehensive? Well, yes actually. Would this piece of high tech equipment confuse my cranial commands and instead of fire my weapon, load up my browser and start searching for porn?

Testing this well made piece of kit was not going to be easy either, especially as we have nothing to compare like for like. I have reviewed and tested numerous products over the years and make no mistake, this was going to be different. I am also going to be straight with you. This review is for hardcore gamers, people like me who would only ever consider using this device if it gave me an edge. I`m not interested in it being “cool” or being “clever” which if the claims on the instructions are anything to go by, it really is both of those. I am reviewing it purely to see if it has a place in the competitive world of video gaming or if its about as useful as a fork in a fully tiled garden.

Overview and Packaging

As you can see from the pictures, OCZ have spared no expense and cut no corners when it comes to the packaging. The sturdy white box is both slick and well made and oozes quality. Flipping the lid of the box shows the interior made of high quality foam which encapsulates the NIA and its box of tricks. Removing the inner foam box reveals a CD, instructions and a warning to download the latest drivers before installation.

Upon removing the headband I notice it is made from a rubber based material in the main with the 3 contact points constructed using (what the blurb calls) carbon nanofiber. The instructions tell me that despite my apprehension of sticking these things on my forehead I wont need to shave any hair in order for the contact points to be good, though it does recommend using some of my “favourite lotion” as this sometimes improves signal conductivity greatly. After applying a large scotch to my forehead, I realised the lotion it talked about was possibly not of the alcoholic kind and more likely some form of skin cream.

At this point I confess to being a little lost. This wasn’t like plugging in a new keyboard or a mouse and I had my doubts about it working. I wondered too if it could detect doubt from my brain and decided to concentrate on proving it could work rather than pretending to believe and then finding that this could cook my brain for thinking bad thoughts about it.

Presentation wise, OCZ have got this spot on. You pay a lot of money for this and it feels like that when you come to open the box. I wouldn’t expect anything less from a company I have come to rely on for memory since 2000 in almost all of the machines I have built in that time.

Software and Installation

The software comes on a CD supplied, but it asks you to download the latest software and drivers in any case, so rather than go through the CD, I head straight for the NIA website. After a 100mb download I`m ready to install the software and the hardware. Plugging in via the USB lead supplied immediately alerts Vista to its presence and it duly installs a basic driver. I use the v2.00 of the software to update the drivers and follow the usual on screen prompts and once this is done apply the 9mb patch, also downloaded from the NIA main site. All standard stuff so far. Now comes the tricky bit. A good installation booklet means I have help and there is a decent tutorial system built in to the software which I will come back to later. For now though, like any eager gamer I just want to get in game and test this baby.

Setting up

Whilst getting in the game is important, like any piece of high tech kit, the NIA needs to be setup and calibrated. Its not that much different to a new mouse and considering this thing is about to take over from my mouse in terms of aiming, movement around the screen and firing the weapons, its only right I spend the time setting it up properly before diving in to the game.

The setup software is very good and is simplicity itself, which is just as well because the actual setting up of the NIA isn’t easy. For starters, I had the thing on the wrong way round. It doesn’t actually say anywhere on the headband that you should put it on a specific way, but having not been able to get the yellow line on the setup screen to go below the base line it insists on, I consulted the tutorial built in to the setup screens. From there, it explained that I had to have the wire on the left hand side and after correcting this little, but important mistake, I managed to calibrate the headband to a better standard. I also found, disturbingly, that if I earthed myself on the small metal box supplied, the signal was better.

I also ran a small test with the included game of pong, although this didn’t go too well. It’s the usual fare of a ball in the middle and two lines on the side. Losing 10-0 to the computer because my brain wasn’t telling the side bar to move at the right time or even not at all was a little frustrating to say the least. I once again consulted the documentation, which reassured me this was normal for the first time of use and that my brain would be attempting different ways of interacting with the software until it found one that worked. It didn’t.

By now, id had enough of setting up. Including the setup of UT3 (which I had to reinstall for the first time in 3 months) and the software, hardware and calibration, it had been almost an hour. If like me, you are one of those gamers who simply wants to dive right in, this piece of hardware is probably not for you. It doesn’t get any better either.

In Practice

Enough of the setup already! Time for some action. Id decided at this point that brain controlled pong (or lack of it) was more frustrating than trying to catch a fish with a  cotton real in the sea and that it wouldn’t hurt the overall test and review if I just had a little play inside the game. Some would even call this practice.

After the usual rubbish of having to create a login and waiting an inordinate amount of time for it to register and then login (is this the worst ever login system for a game I was about to play offline? I think it might be) I finally got to play UT3 and test out the NIA.

Before I had gone in to the game however, OCZ had kindly provided a number of preset user profiles for several popular games including our test game UT3. Sadly for us Cadred users there is no profile for COD, CS:S or TF2, but you can create your own if you have time to spare. More about source later, but for now we are using the “easy” profile for UT3 for our review purposes.

Once you go through the setup screens in the software, you hit the launch button and then go ahead and launch your game with the NIA software lurking in the background waiting for you to press CTRL and F12 to activate it. This is a good little tweak as the last thing you want to be doing is fighting with your brainwaves when the games about to load, so until you press the magic keys, its standard mouse and keyboard to control the menus.

I setup a first to 20 deathmatch game on Deck with 6 average bots. Usually I would clean up these bots inside 3 minutes without a single death, so how would using brain power only work out?

The first answer is badly. Forget the score on my first outing, I didn’t get a score and died 7 times by the time one of the very average bots managed to get 20 kills (12 minutes). Not a glorious first attempt admittedly but more worryingly was the lack of any cohesive movement, aim or firing. The weapons would seemingly indiscriminately fire themselves and then stop firing without warning. I could spend 30 seconds thinking that I wanted to fire the gun, but it made no difference to what was actually happening on the screen. I swear to god I have never concentrated so hard on doing one thing and one thing alone but it just wouldn’t happen. Perhaps I was trying too hard.

Movement was even worse. Occasionally my character would jump for no reason or sidestep but for the most part stood as still as a statue in its spawn spot waiting to be killed. No matter what my thoughts or actions inside my head, the character would not move, save for the odd jump. It certainly wouldn’t aim at anything, ever.

Back to the instructions and it seemed id probably not calibrated properly so I left UT3 and went back to the setup software once again, where I diligently spent 30 minutes going through every screen ensuring the yellow line was under the base line once more and the position of the headband was perfect and not blighted by my eyebrows (Dennis Healey would never have been able to use these) or had a stray hair under them. With all of that sorted, I went back in to the game for a proper test.

The Test

The test would involve going head to head with myself, one of me using the NIA fully and the other using standard keyboard and mouse. After 3 hours of playing around with the NIA I realised I wasn’t going to get anywhere near my standard score, but then how could I. This is without doubt a completely different way of thinking, literally. It’s a different set of skills and you almost have to unlearn everything you have ever learned about how to play a video game. I was however determined to give it a bloody good go.

So to the test server. Unreal Tournament 3 on DM-Deck for 20 minutes or first to 20 kills, whichever comes first. 6 Bots to be used on average. I admit to being a little rusty in a game I never really took to despite being a EuroCup champion in the previous iterations, so I know my way around and I can still top a public server. Using my standard keyboard and mouse I set a semi respectable time of 3 minutes 42 seconds to find and kill 20 opponents of the average variety. I had just 2 deaths.

On with the headband and after a further 30 frustrating minutes of looking like a reject from the TV series Fame and setting it up and calibrating it, I was ready inside DM-Deck once again. After several hours of practice, I had moved on from static spawn death to at least being able to move forward around the map and control my firing, to some degree. It wasn’t perfect, but combined with moving my eyebrows up and down I could decide when and where to fire my weapons. This isn’t what the makers had in mind I`m sure, especially as I looked like an escaped lunatic every time I wanted to fire a gun, but at least it was better than sitting in the spawn position waiting to be killed. I also found that winking gave me a modicum of control over reloading, or it may just have been a twitch, I`m not entirely sure. Whatever, one thing was certain: My kids thought I was a freak.

The sum result was a measly 2 kills and 11 deaths ending in 6th out of 6. Not good of course and not threatening my standard scores using the keyboard and mouse.

I decided I would test it in CS:Source before I packed it away to gather dust in the loft. One final go at a game I at least enjoy playing (unlike the horrible UT3). This also meant I would have to spend a little time creating a new NIA profile, which turned out to be easier than I had originally thought.

I also decided not to give total control to the NIA this time and instead just bound some of the NIA’s abilities to movement forward and back, jump and primary fire. The mouse continued to be my main aiming instrument (without a fire button) and the keyboard also acted as my left and right (something I wasn’t very good at getting the NIA to do via my brainwaves).

As tests go, it wasn’t too bad. My forward and back was pretty good and certainly indistinguishable to other players that I wasn’t using my hands to make the movement. Firing also worked fine and I didn’t seem to have to move my forehead muscles nearly as much as before. Within an hour or so id even managed to produce 3 or 4 bullet bursts which proved very accurate thanks to using the mouse alongside. There was something oddly satisfying about killing other players without having used my hands to press the fire button, but beyond that, id much prefer to play using a standard keyboard and mouse. I did have on embarrassing moment however with a server full of players (40 player server) and almost my entire team dead, I had a chance to plant at A on Dust2. I rushed in to the site with a hail of fire going off around me, killed two players by the site and then had to switch to the bomb. By this point, id worked out how to scroll through weapons, so this was fine, except I hadn’t worked out how to get “use” to work and sadly sat there crouched down with bomb in hand and nothing happening for a good 7 seconds whilst my brain tried to work out what the heck I needed to do to plant. I was put out of my misery by a single slash of a blade to the back of my neck and we lost the round. Cue : “noob bomber” comments.

I wouldn’t say I noticed any particular increase in reaction times, although they didn’t seem any slower than normal once Id had a little practice. The one thing I did notice after 5 hours with this kit was how tired I was. Phew, I didn’t realise moving facial muscles and generating brainwaves could be so tiring!

Conclusion

There is little to shout about the NIA from my tests and setup woes, especially when you compare the scores between using a standard mouse and keyboard. It’s plainly failed on a massive scale both in terms of delivering what the experience promises and more importantly for our little review, supplying a genuine alternative to keyboard and mouse for a competitive gamer. On the basis of me being an idiot and having an odd shaped forehead and using scotch to clean it, perhaps we can forgive the NIA its failings during our tests, but that also misses a significant point. Who on earth has 3 hours to set this thing up, especially if you are a competitive gamer. I can just see Warclown turning up to the next lan and asking for extended setup time from the admins so he can fit the NIA and calibrate it right. Not.

It failed spectacularly as a competitive gamers alternative control system that much is clear, but it could still be a worthwhile piece of kit, especially for a fun night with mates and a few beers, except, it really cant do that either. It’s all made well and the instructions are clear and helpful and the idea is sound, but its just too hard to get working and takes far too long to setup. Any peripheral for a PC that takes up the time this thing did in setting it up is doomed to failure (especially considering you have to calibrate the damn thing EVERY single time you use it) and I find that sad but inevitable.

It won’t be replacing our mice or keyboards any day soon, but if you are prepared to spend a few weeks learning how to use it fully and to its full potential and you don’t have great reactions already, it may just prove to be a valuable addition to your gaming setup, but that’s stretching it. At best, it could be used to compliment your mouse and keyboard and at worse it’s an expensive headband and not very pretty (according to my daughter). At over £80 it’s not overly expensive (about the cost of a decent keyboard and mouse combo) but for the casual gamer who doesn’t have time to spend learning how to use it, the price would probably extinguish any vague thought of them giving it a go.

No doubt OCZ have spent money developing this and it may well have its practical applications in the real world one day, I have little doubt about that, but it has no place in the immediate future in either serious or casual gaming. If it is to have a gaming future OCZ need to spend time making it less sensitive, especially for people with large eyebrows and odd shaped foreheads. They also need to remove the need to calibrate the damn thing every time.

It’s a serious piece of kit and should be taken seriously because at its base, it works. It just doesn’t work the way you would hope it should and it isn’t nearly good enough to replace a high end professional gamer’s keyboard and mouse.

Marks

2/10

Positive – Well constructed, great presentation, good software.

Negative – Far too sensitive, takes weeks to master, not for the serious gamer, doesn’t work as you hope it would.

Test Rig Specs : Intel Quad Core at 2.8ghz, nvidia Geforce 280GTX, Fatal1ty XFi sound, 4GB OCZ Ram.

Software used : Vista 32 & Unreal Tournament 3 (patched to 1.3), Counter Strike : Source.