As I mentioned earlier in the week, Robey purchased me a Bamboo Capture.  What this is, is a little flat tablet shaped device with a stylus.  It allows you to use the stylus as you would a mouse, for either simple movements or for more detailed and focused artwork.  I don’t consider myself able when it comes to drawing.  In all actuality I’m horrible.  So if this makes me a more capable artist, well hell.  I don’t think you could get a better recommendation than that.     
As you can see from the image you have a rectangular tablet, with buttons on the left.  Those buttons act as the button on your mouse, however your stylus also has a toggle button along where your thumb rests.  The toggle button allows for easy click and drag when necessary.  
 
The software that comes with the device has this neat little option for handwriting recognition.  Unfortunately I’m still not used to it enough to finish going though the identification process.  When using my Capture my handwriting looks like a 7 year old’s.  This is mostly due to the fact that I learned to write always resting the side of my hand while using my fore finger and thumb for most of the pressure on the pencil.  As part of awesomeness of this technology is that the pad is ultra sensitive to pressure, the side of my hand totally messes with the recognition on the pad.  You can simply hold the stylus above the pad, but that is still an unnatural feeling for me.  
 
I’ve thought about trying it out with gaming.  I’m a little worried however that I’m so used to mouse/keyboard combinations that the change would be quite a bit of work.  BUT, I’m still going to try it.  I think it might be interesting to see how it works using a pen to play a little Tower Defense.