For many, the 80s in the USA were a cocaine-fueled afterparty to the sexual free-for-all of the 1970s, and the Conservative Christians wanted to run a large-scale bust. Here is the underbelly of the 1980s revealing itself. The original name translated to Puck-Man in English, but market research suggested that most English-speaking adolescents within reach of a magic marker would swiftly convert all examples to Fuck Man. Japan’s Namco released Pac-Man to the world in 1980. It’s premise could elicit an audible “Huh?” if you put logic anywhere near it. Pac-Man was more like an 8-bit surrealist novel by Nikolai Gogol. Break Out, in which a ball bounces around knocking a rainbow of rectangles out of the way until you “break out,” was a high-concept game I loved. The more abstract the scenario, the more I enjoyed the game. I found Space Invaders, Galaga, Tron, Defender, Missile Command, Asteroids and other weaponized games jarring. I never did like blowing shit up with lasers. Given the presumed immateriality of ghosts, I suppose we can conclude that Pac-Man was a vegan, which is pretty wimpy for an 80s video game. Your yellow munching disc wandered a maze eating dots, fruit, and ghosts. I liked that Pac-Man wasn’t a very violent game. A Gen-Xer named Chad Fell set the current record in 2004 with a 20″ no-hands bubble, claiming that three pieces of Double Bubble is the ticket to really big bubbles. We all had a crush on her, and we all hoped she’d eventually earn a place in The Guinness Book of World Records for the largest bubble ever blown, which appeared to be her life’s purpose. Global warming and gentrification are now kind of reversing Buffalo’s fate, but in 1982 in the dead of a post-industrial winter there wasn’t shit to do on a Saturday, so we played Pac-Man until the mean teenaged hostess pulled the enormous wad of Bubble Yum out of her yapper and told us to get the hell out. I ran with a neighborhood crew who dropped countless quarters into the Pac-Man machine at Pizza Hut in Kenmore, NY, a suburb just north of the then fast-dying snow capital of the world, Buffalo. However, if you were a conscious American kid during the 1980s, you, like me, probably harbor mixed feelings about Reagan’s decade. The Casio Pac-Man unit under scrutiny here glorifies the 1980s by isolating one playful pop-cult phenom for nostalgic Gen-Xers like me to consume like so much medical-grade cocaine. If you like to pretend that $99 watches have redeeming horological qualities, I’m sure you can find a review with clever lifestyle pictures to support that fantasy. I expect that if I wore it daily I’d destroy it within a year. ![]() The bracelet looks cool but rattles like plastic. It’s a cheap-seeming thing that’s practically illegible unless you hit the orange backlight. If you’ve come here to find out if this watch is any good, then let’s cut to the chase: it’s not very good.
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