For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a PC gamer. When I was a kid in the early 90’s, while my friends were powering up and playing their Master Systems and NESes, I was powering up my Amiga A500+.
Of course, my friends’ consoles would load quickly and could even save their progress thanks to cartridges, while I had to wait for my Amiga to slowly read one (or two, if it was an ambitious game) floppy disks, and I would need another blank floppy if I wanted to save my game, but deep down we all knew the Amiga was the best machine.
It had better sound and graphics, I could use it to type my homework, and there was an app in the Workbench OS that would read any coarse words you typed. There were better games too. My friends at Sega and Nintendo might have Sonic and Mario, but I had Zool.
Okay, bad example. But I had games like Lemmings, Shadow of the Beast, Xenon 2, Monkey Island, and many others that offered complexity not only in graphics and audio, but also in gameplay, that consoles couldn’t compete with.
At this point, regular readers are probably thinking oh great I thought he was going to talk about a smartwatch but he’s just talking about the Amiga again, but bear with me.
The Amiga offered a huge range of experiences compared to consoles. In addition to playing games, we could make artwork in Deluxe Paint and script our own games, leading to a thriving demo scene. It was also overly complex and sometimes a pain in the ass – with some games throwing indecipherable error messages after you patiently waited for it to load. It was the perfect gateway to PC gaming.
When I had to juggle 12 floppy disks to play Monkey Island 2, I decided it was time to move on and switched to a Windows-based ‘Multimedia’ PC that came with a real hard drive! And a CD-ROM drive! And a floppy drive, of course. I couldn’t break the floppy habit back then.
This gave me access to games like Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Command & Conquer, and Theme Hospital. And that was it. The damage was done, and I knew the life of a PC gamer was for me.
Lots of PCs, upgrades, Blue Screens of Death, RTS, FPS, RSI and various later Windows versions, and I’m still a PC gamer at heart. But I didn’t quite understand how deep my PC game (it’s a word) ran until I found the Razer X Fossil Gen 6 smartwatch on my desk and tapped my wrist.
fancy player
Look at him. It’s beautiful. It’s also hideous, corny, over the top… I love it.
I’ve actually been using the Gen 5 fossil a few years ago. It was my first smartwatch and it appealed to me because its rounded edges made it look more like a traditional watch (unlike the Apple Watch), and it would work with my Android smartphone (again, unlike the Apple Watch).
I really liked it, even if the battery life wasn’t brilliant, and sometimes it felt a little awkward when trying to charge. Still, it was great for quickly checking the time, jogging, alerting me to messages when my phone wasn’t around… oh, and telling the time.
I was perfectly happy with that, so when the Razer X Fossil Gen 6 smartwatch came out, I wasn’t all that interested. The Fossil Gen 6 didn’t feel like a big enough leap over the Gen 5 for me to upgrade, and I managed to convince myself that the Razer brand didn’t interest me, despite my desk being covered with several Razer products.
A few months later, though, I got my hands on one. Or should I have one in my hands? Anyway, the design that I had dismissed as ‘disgusting’ and ‘cheesy’ was, well… gross and cheesy. But it was, I realized, I. My taste is disgusting and corny, and it’s time I embraced that.
With my previous Fossil Gen 5 watch, I used a metal chain to pretend I was grown. However, the rubber strap of the Razer X Fossil Gen 6 felt much more comfortable. The fact that it comes with the word RAZER engraved on the buckle, and comes with an even more offensive look to the eyes light green strap was just the icing on this sick cake.
The watch’s configurable faces range from minimalist to decadent, most of them with the Razer logo of course. There’s even a watch face called ‘RGB’ that emulates the – you guessed it – RGB lighting seen on more degenerate gaming rigs.
When I put it on my wrist I thought to myself am I really going to use an RGB clock? I looked around my desk, where my PC spewed out rainbow lights (which were now even brighter since I put in a damn RGB SSD there a few weeks ago). My keyboard, mouse, and gamepad throbbed like a dying clown’s heartbeat, and my headphones gleamed in the corner, finding increasingly offensive colors to mix in.
yeaI thought to myself. Yes, I will use an RGB clock.
You know why? Because I’m a PC gamer. ‘Subtle’ is not part of our vocabulary. Everything needs to be bigger, faster, more powerful and ideally brighter than an explosion in a Christmas decoration factory. Looking inside your PC case must be like opening the Ark of the Covenant. what’s the point of having RAM if it doesn’t come with enough RGB to melt your face? (Please don’t write, I really know what is the point of ram It’s).
After fully embracing my inner PC player, I opened up a box of Nanoleaf Shapes that I was thinking about putting in sometime and I put my wall up with them. Now my house was RGB enabled.
My wife hated it. But as I sat under the glow of a hundred flaming components and peripherals, my own rainbow constellation, I didn’t care. I went House.
*this is exaggeration
