Watch Review : Fortis Flieger Professional 704.21.11 L.01

Today I'm going to discuss my daily driver watch : the Fortis "Flieger Professional".  While not perfect (is anything?) it is certainly a cracker of a watch and well worth looking at in detail. There is a lot to appreciate in a watch that at first glace seems perhaps a bit plain.

This review has been a long time in coming, as I have been thinking about it for ages. In some ways I have felt a little indecisive about some of the features of the watch, so I wanted to see how a longer term experience played out. An example of this is the mixed finish in the band, with the high polished centre links. My preference is for an all-brushed look, and the high polish is "a bit fancy" for me, but what was it like in the real world? Well, read on.

Stepping back a fraction, let's start by discussing the brand. Fortis on the whole seems to fly under the radar of the watch world. This is a great shame as they have a long history and very decent model line-up. I will confess that a lot of their models do not appeal to me, they are too chunky, thick and complicated on the whole for my tastes.

Where does Fortis fit in? Well, it depends on your perspective, but it is generally agreed that they are a low to mid tier Swiss brand, or makers of a "Basic luxury Swiss watch". The prices usually have four digits. Things are generally made well, with ETA Swiss movements, sapphire crystal and decent if not high quality control.

It is a bit hard to categorise the watch accurately. There is that "Flieger" in the name, and it does have the fairly classic A-dial design with the triangle and two pips at 12 o'clock. So, it is a flieger, right? Well, hang on a minute. I would argue that it looks a lot like a field watch, and isn't large like a typical flieger at 40mm. And then it goes to 100m and the strap has a divers extension. It has in some conditions a somewhat dress air about it. So, which is it now? In the end it really does have some elements of a flieger, diver, sports, field and even dress watch. That may sound like a hot mess, but it is actually a good thing.

An acid test for any watch in my collection is if I can easily, quickly and intuitively answer this question when looking at it - "what is the time?". That might seem like a no-brainer when it comes to watches, but honestly there are a lot of designs on the market where this is significantly harder than others. Most people would summarise this simply as "legibility", but it is a subtle variant of that - the primary purpose of the watch over all other features. This is also perhaps why I am yet to own a chronograph, as the dial gets so crowded with subdials that telling the time becomes a challenge.

Anyway, back to the Fortis! With the arabic numerals around the dial (except 12 for the traditional flieger triangle + pips, and the 3 for the day/date aperture), it is trivial to see what hour it is. Next is the minutes, and the track there has smaller white markers every 5 minutes to assist with this.

One other important thing about telling the time is knowing your hour hand from the minute hand with absolute certainty. The hands here are mat black framed and lume filled. The hour hand is just-right (IMHO) length, just hitting the hour markers, and wider. The minute hand is longer and goes all the way out to the minute track. The second hand, for what it is worth, is a shock of orange and is easy to look at or ignore depending on if you need it or not. One subtle feature I enjoy is the fact that all three hands are matt black near the center of the dial, so there is no visual clutter there.

Overall the dial and handset work extremely well together and it gets a gigantic big tick for visual clarity. Note that I am not into military 24-hour time and so I am very happy not to have this on the dial. Some people may miss that if it is part of their life is to reference time in this way, but I have no need for it.

 In the car, what's the time? Fri 11th, 4:25

The dial itself is black, a deep slightly glossy black. There is a sort of sunburst to it, but it is very subtle and perhaps more of a sheen than an official spec sheet point. Where the pips for hour markers are there is a circular track of engraved lines, much like the groves in a record, except circular rather than a spiral. This is where the "Swiss Made" text is located around the six pip. This track provides a visual break to the sections of the dial, and quite a lot of again subtle interest. The more you look here, the more you see. The applied indices are lumed, and are even framed in black, which really is a fine and premium finish and give the dial a lot of depth and character. The lume is fairly good too, often glowing when I come inside from being in the sun.

The minute track around the outer edge of the dial is perhaps the plainest feature of the watch, in simple white (not lumed) and just markers for each minute. As an aside, I have owned watches with sub-minute markers and I always wondered what the point of these were, particularly when you have a second hand to read the sub minute time much more accurately. Anyway, the way it is here is my preference, although I also like the old fashioned "railroad" track too.

For the numerals for the seconds there is the "flipping" of the text between 15 and 20, and then again at 40 and 45. As the numerals are center aligned, this is the most common way of handling the issue. If you don't do this, then the 30 at 6 o'clock ends up upside down, and most people don't like that. I am not like most people though and I think this is the right way. I used to be a bit more passionate about this issue, but now I've softened my opinion after owning this watch. I appreciate the legibility does trump the aesthetic purity of the non-flipped numerals.

The text on the dial is really minimal, and all printed crisply in white. There is "Fortis" at 12, and AUTOMATIC at 6, and that's it. There seems to be a trend, seen easily in dive watches like the Rolex Submariner, where 3 or 4 lines of text at 6 o'clock are standard fare and denote some sort of luxury credentials. I am not a fan of this trend at all, and so again the Fortis wins with my preference on how things should be in a watch, it is another tick from me, even if a small one.

The dial has at 3 o'clock the day/date window, framed in a thin white box. The wheels are color matched (white text on black background) and blend in nicely with the rest of the dial. Sometimes it seems like the disks might have a slightly different black/matte than the main dial, but it is pretty damn near the same. I could now spend a long time going over why I love having the day and date at 3 o'clock, but I feel like I've covered that ground already. So, I'll just leave it at that - I love having the day and date on this watch and I think it is a stand out feature. Good luck finding another watch with this set of specs, look and the day complication.

On top of the dial is the glass, so let me talk about that for a minute. It is, as you would hope and expect, sapphire crystal. It sits slightly proud of the polished bezel, perhaps by a single mil or so. One of the few slip ups with this watch are with the AR coating, which is of the purple variety and works very well. The problem is that the glass is coated top and bottom, which means it can scratch off ... in theory. In practice I have had this watch for, gosh, is it a few years now? And in that time it has not scratched. Well, I just looked at the surface very carefully with a 10x loupe and could see under this magnification that indeed there were some faint scratches, and even wear at the very edge of the glass. But with the naked eye? You don't see anything.

 Action shot! Underwater...

One other quirk with the crystal is that in some angles of direct (sun)light, there are some internal reflections and a number of concentric light circles are seen on the glass. This only happens occasionally and I think is caused by light getting into the edge of the crystal and causing issues from there. Despite this, in normal use the glass and AR coating are very effective and the glass just disappears from view.  There is a glow from the inner vertical edge of the steel case, and this plays off the groove ring of the dial. It is all fairly fascinating to look at!

Next I want to move onto the case. There is a mix of finishes, with the top fixed bezel being polished, the mid case is brushed, and the screw in caseback is polished again. The brushing is horizontal on the sides and actually vertical between the lugs. This is only something an owner of the watch would notice really, but there you are. There are no bevelled edges on the lugs but they are elegantly curved at the sides and meet the case in a pleasing way.

The crown is unguarded, which looks right on this watch. It is a fairly chunky and knurled, signed and easy to operate. It is just push/pull, not screw-down, so you get the convenience of that and still have 100m water resistance, which is nice. The crown sits quite low down on the watch, when you look at it side on, but it does not dig into the wrist, although I wear my watches "above the bone". If you are all gansta and wear a super loose watch then it might be a problem and dig in.

There is a sapphire (I believe) window in the caseback enabling you to see the moment. I like this from the perspective that I sometime take it off to show people if we are talking about watches and I want to show them an automatic movement. It is surprising perhaps how many people have never seen one, and I am happy to gently educate when it is right to do so. However, the glass window is fairly small and the movement is really not all that special to look at, so it is not a huge advantage in this case. If they really want to see a nice movement I get out my pocket watch and take the back off that - the movement is open to the air and is even more impressive at over 100 years old, but that it another story for another time.

So I think I've covered the head of the watch now. It is a subjective thing, of course, but I find it a very attractive and neat package overall. It is well built, compact and functional.

Moving now on to the bracelet. This has a fairly bad rap online, when I was doing some research before purchasing the watch I read some describe it as "cheap, thin and rattly", which sounds fairly horrible. While I don't think it is perfect, by any stretch, it is a lot better than that. The links are slender, compared to some chunky watches, but in no way cheap or flimsy. There is a little rattle when taking the watch on or off, but none when wearing it. I actually like the sound it makes when I take it off and put it on. There are actually a bunch of positive things to say about the bracelet now that I think about it.

The two-tone thing is interesting. As I said earlier, I would generally rather a fully brushed but this has grown on me a lot. For a start, in many lighting conditions and angles it looks like the same finish. If it was two-tone it would really stand out, but as it is silver/silver, you don't often see it, and when you do it adds interest rather than annoyance. I was also thinking initially that it would scratch but despite a lot of wear it is still fairly unblemished. There are plenty of micro scratches, but the brushed outer sections still look brushed, and the polished inner link still look polished. Overall it has worn really well.

The clasp, however, has taken a bit more of a beating and it shows. It is very compact a clasp actually, and low profile, but it is the thing that contacts when you rest you arm on a surface. Here is a question for you though - do you bite your nails? If you do, then the clasp is going to frustrate you no end, as it is not a push button deployment. Instead, there is a pressure fit fold over security clasp (high polish, with the Fortis logo, nice looking) which really needs a fairly healthy finger nail to use. Then the clasp opens, again, with a pressure fit. Whenever there is pressure fit systems the question is how MUCH pressure is needed, too much or too little is a problem. In my example they have got this pressure value pretty much just right, so it works. It is these subtle tactile things that do differentiate a
well made vs cheaply made watch. The butterfly section is milled but undecorated.

I would certainly recommend the bracelet over the standard strap BUT it does kind of depend on the price. When I bought the watch the bracelet option was actually fairly expensive thing to go for, adding perhaps $300 AUD to the total price. You can get a whole watch for that. So it does depend on your budget. There are pros and cons, but overall the bracelet is good without being great. It does suit the watch, and overall makes it an elegant package rather than the more rugged or utilitarian end of the spectrum. To me this is good, as it shifts it gently more into the every-day wear that I use this watch for.

This model is discontinued now, but you may be able to find new-old stock about still. The closest replacement watch, which I have not tried on, is probably the Fortis Aeromaster Old Radium, model Reference 655.10.28. I quite like this too, although I'm not sure of the thickness of the watch. Some of the Fortis watches are quite thick, which I am not fond of, so it is one of those specs I pay attention to myself. It is a different look, with the angled rehort, tan markers and missing minute numerals. But it is clean and nice too in my opinion, worth looking into.

Final thoughts. I've rambled on about various elements of this watch for long enough. If you have read this all so far, well done for you perseverance. I can summarize how I feel about this watch overall fairly easily - I wear it almost every day and it gives me a lot of pleasure to do so. When choosing a watch to wear I have to force myself to pick something else. It doesn't make the best dress watch, but it can hold its own. It doesn't make a diver watch, but it can go in the pool without concern. When I need to know the time, date or day, it can tell me without fuss. When I am driving and my arm is in front of my, I catch myself admiring various elements of the design. It is a watch that keeps on giving, the initial impressions might be of a plain watch, but there is honestly a lot there. I think this watch is really overall unappreciated in the watch community, and I think that is a bit of a shame as it really is worthy of more attention. If you are looking for a one-watch collection, this could well fill that role. A fairly easy recommend, if the few minor points don't bother you like they don't bother me.


Pros

• Perfectly legible and usable as a daily watch
• Attractive dial and indices. Minimal printing
• Thin and very comfortable to wear
• Day and Date complication, colour matched wheels
• Swiss movement and well built
• Compact clasp with 4 micro adjusts and divers extension

Cons

• Not applied logo on the dial, but is crisply printed
• Top (outer) coat of AR on sapphire glass can scratch
• Some fairly rarely seen internal reflections on glass in some light conditions (I call the "onion effect")
• Movement not very decorated or pretty
• Brushed surfaces a little blingy, perhaps
• Clasp needs finger nails to use

Best Games of 2019

Hmmmm. There was no Best Games of 2018, oh well.  It is the first year I've missed since 2012.

But oh man, another year almost down so that means it is time to press the pause button and give thought to the best games of the year. In a way, this is easy for me this year. I've known for most of the year which game was going to take the gong in this prestigious event (that's a joke by the way). This year I'm just going to get straight to the point and blurt out the winner, which is...

Winner Best Game 2019 : Minecraft

Minecraft! Minecraft? Seriously? After all this time? Well, yes. It is perhaps the best value gaming experience ever, and somehow Microsoft have yet to stuff it up, which is a minor miracle. What I have been playing though is not the vanilla game, but instead heavily modified versions of the game. Modded minecraft takes it to the next level, or even several levels, of difficulty compared to vanilla. It also adds a huge amount of variety and challenge, something the game needs when you have played it for the many thousands of hours like I have.

If you have played modded minecraft before the immediate question is - which modpack? There is a very healthy community of modders who give, for free, wonderful themed mod packs. I use the Twitch launcher which, once you get the RAM settings sorted, makes the experience of playing mod packs easy. I have played quite a number of them this year, and want to give a micro-review of each in the order I played them.

One thing they all have in common are questing systems.  These are a great idea as they generally lead you though the various mods and give you pointers on how to play. You also get rewards and a sense of progress. The questing system gives you a reason to play, which can sometimes be an issue for a seasoned Minecraft player.

Stoneblock
I watched the youtuber GamesForKicks play some of this and the more I watched the more I wanted to play too. The start of the game sets the tone for this one - you are stuck in small spherical cave in and more or less have nothing but a torch. At the time this seemed like a fresh take on the restricted start, when compared to all of the skyblock variants. Some people find this claustrophobic, and it is a little, but it is fine really after not long at all. I also liked the idea of inverse building - normally you are adding blocks but in this it is all about taking them away. I enjoyed my playthoughs on this a lot. I think I did a few because I was not happy with my base layout or progress.

Where things started to fall over a bit was in the unlimited resource generation method chosen by the pack - chickens. You breed them up to being 10/10/10 and that is a bit of a chore, and then you have unlimited supply of resource x, whatever flavour that chicken is. I think it was this pack were I cut my teeth on a number of other mods I have not played before, like refined storage. Again, the questing system, discord and a bit of googling makes all this possible to get a handle on fairly quickly.

Forever Stranded
The Yogscast started playing this and as I watched I wanted to play too. This one is really quite hard in the start but you have a pre-build base in the form of your crashed shuttle-like ship, in the desert. This pack has a heat/cold mechanic along with the food, and getting resources initially is quite a grind. The mobs in this hit pretty hard too, and the sand can build up to allow them to climb over walls. Overall this is pretty hard pack, and just getting to the point of certain safety and enough food is a major milestone. Unfortunately, that is about as far as I played as it seemed to be the point of the pack to me. There is a lot more you can do, of course, but I didn't get drawn to it and about the time my interest was waning there was a new release...

Stoneblock 2
Feed the Beast released an updated Stoneblock 2, and as I had enjoyed Stoneblock so much I was bound to love Stoneblock 2 even more, right? Well, not so much as it turned out. It was OK, but I felt like I have "been there, done that". Again, I seem to enjoy the early game of just surviving an setting up the base, but once I'm comfortable continuing just seems to be a bit of a grind. By now too I was becoming more aware of the individual components of the mod packs, which ones I liked and which ones I didn't so much. For me it turns out I am not so fond of magic based mods, they just seem arbitrary and not always logical. I started looking for something different and found it in ...

Astroblock
Talk about a rough start and a change of scene. You start out suffocating from a lack of oxygen on a small space station. Fortunately you have a single tree that .... errr... grows in the vacuum outside without issue and provides oxygen. Yeah, well, accept that and move on. A space based theme seemed like a welcome stark change from the claustrophobic caves, and I enjoyed this pack a lot. There comes a time when you have to take a leap of faith and jump off the station. You have to watch your oxygen tanks, and the base power. You slowly build up resources and capabilities. Eventually you can build a ship and fly away to another planet, my first time with using any kind space travel, and it was fun to land again on Earth, which is of the destroyed cities variety. This was cool because you had to set up again, another piece of the early game cake I love so much. Then, you go to the moon and guess what, you have to set up there too, this time without oxygen so you have to bring all the gear to make that (that you got given it in the first base). And so it goes, with more an more space travel in the quests - but I more or less stopped there as I felt that I had achieved what I had wanted to. This modpack relies quite heavily on some machines that no other pack really use, compressing things rather than smelting them. I also discovered I really like having a jetpack. The developer was really cool too, and was often on the chat in Discord. Overall I had a lot of fun with this pack but the internet was abuzz about a new version of a kitchen sink pack, and I stopped playing briefly (I thought) to check it out...

Project Ozone 3
This pack is really big, and takes a log time to even start up, about 4 minutes on my PC. There are a number of start options but I took the suggested "Garden of glass" which is more-or-less a skyblocks scenario, which I had not played for a while now. There is something to be said for creating everything from nothing, or almost nothing. This pack has a number of quality of life additions so that often the grind element can be bypassed and you can get to the fun bits, eg vein-mining. There become quite a lot of dimensions to explore - Hunting Dimension, Deep dark (good to go to fairly early for resources), Twilight forest, Erebus (first time for me for this one, think land of the bugs) etc. There were a few mods I didn't like so much in this - Embers, Lordcraft and Pneumaticraft to name a few. But I played through them fairly quickly and moved on to the stuff I did like more. I built a mob farm and storage systems to deal with all the loot. The infinite resources from this comes mainly in the form of Mob farms and Mystical Agriculture crops, and I collected almost every seed there is, which is quite a feat (chore?). In this pack I played a fair way into it, reaching some of the late game content of extended crafting and Draconic Evolution, which starts to get a bit silly after a while. I also did most of the armours, which is also a massive grind. So, I gave this modpack a great go, and got fairly powerful by the end, both in terms of my base and also gear. It's a top tier pack, worth playing for sure, and is fairly beginner friendly. The RAK reward system is a really gamble, and adds some spice. You do want to save up for the swords though.
At one point a "John Cena" creeper blew up a fairly huge hole in my base, and JUST missed destroying my AE2 hard disks. I am diligent with backups (before every play session) but did not ragequit because all my stuff was OK, so I played on and rebuilt. You end up with hundreds of thousands of ingots, diamonds etc. It is a lot of working on base power, layout and storage systems and then a bit of exploring.

Sevtech Ages
At this point I was feeling pretty cocky, and wanted to try something a bit more challenging and could go the distance, and I tried Sevtech. Boy, is this a contrast to PO3. You spend hours and hours playing before you can even get to a crafting table. The low-tech start of the game I actually didn't find all that great. I also dislike having such crap storage systems like open chests that only hold a few things each. I played to the start of the third "age" and gave up. This pack beat me, in the sense I couldn't be bothered carrying on. I had survived, and was in the process of building a large base building, but it just all seemed to hard. I have seen others play through this modpack and it is a fairly serious grind at times. I certainly would NOT recommend this as a first pack to try. If you can make it all the way through the ages in Sevtech, my hat comes off to you.

Omni Factory
I read about this online somewhere and it sounded intriguing. It had some "expert pack" like qualities, which means it was fairly hard, but promised to be like a factorio in minecraft. At this point I was fairly sure I didn't like any magic based packs, and this modpack didn't have any in it. Further, combat was not important and even could be played in peaceful mode. I chose a start in the ruined cities environment and I think that this is the best choice (perhaps the sparse cities is even better). I started in a river bed next to a road, and I followed this a short way to a large building, which was to become my base... once I cleared it out. For a pack that claimed combat was not important, clearing out a building when you hardly have any resources is a lot more challenging than you might think. It is worth it though - the building makes a good base and there is a lot of loot. You want to find the boots which allow you to have no fall damage. Once you get a safe space, and a bit of food going, you can start to work on the quests and the factory. You need power and you need machines to make parts, so that you can make more and better machines. This is a road that goes a LONG way, and I had a great time with it, some of the best minecraft gaming I've ever had, and that is saying something. Every step forward feels like a real achievement, because it is.
One thing I really like are the HUGE vein ore deposits, so mining is not really something you have to worry too much about. If you can find a vein, you are more or less set for life as you can hammer a 3x3 strip into it and get a few stacks of it in no time. Later you get vertical diggers and other things which make ore collection less and less manual. This does not use refined storage but AE2, which is different but you get used to it. Pretty soon you have a huge number of machines linked together via power lines and item and fluid pipes, and it is all working away. When AE2 gets going you can start to order the system to automatically make things for you, creating all of the components from raw materials and assembling them. This is just as well as by this point you are starting to go a bit crazy with some of the micro crafting of crap like screws.
I'm a big fan of this modpack, and I have started over a few times just to play it more. One major problem it has is that eventually the game starts to lag with all the machines working at once. It is somewhat immersion breaking to have to make design decisions of your base to minimise lag. As a new pack, there are also some minor bugs and balancing tweaks needed. As of writing this the version is 1.2.1, and there is rumour of a version 1.3, but the developer may have either fallen ill or lost interest in the project. He seemed to be distracted too by a "Kappa" version of the game, that is, a super hard variant. I don't think it needs it myself, it is plenty hard enough as it is. You can spend hours tinkering in your base and not even step outside, my save files were tiny as I have explored very little. The ultimate goal of this modpack is to make the creative tanks so that you can re-do your base and then make create drawers. At that point you are effectively playing in creative mode, being able to make infinite amounts of anything. I never got to this, the furthest I got to was LuV power.

Dungeons, Dragons and Space Shuttles
This is the pack I'm currently playing. It is a fairly massive pack again and fairly hard in places, and a greater emphasis on exploration. Some things take a fair time to craft, and the Nether is fairly brutal. A fairly good mix of mods, and some I'm getting into that I've never bothered with before, like Pams Harvestcraft for cooking. Mobs hit fairly hard (especially skeletons) and I always seem to be out of gold. There are a fair number of interesting buildings and creatures that are not in any other mods I've played. I'm not sure how far I'll go with it and I'm perhaps half way through all the quests, but it is a lot of fun so far.
One thing I have done to make my life bearable is to claim the chunks around my base so creepers don't grief when they explode. Also, I tend to adjust the Blood Moon mod so that I can sleep through it, because honestly, I don't enjoy it. I'm trying to play this game without making a mob grinder of any sort, but I'm starting to think that I might need one, particularly for gold. There are some magic mods in this and so far they have been bearable.

And more!
You'd think the above list was enough, but I've actually played more still.

• R.A.D Rougue-like adventures and Dungeons. A bit too run and gun for me, but still fun.
• Glacial Awakenings. Start buried in ice. Once you get the surface, it is an snow world
  
• DigSite. Fixed map with a lot of story and hand crafted locations

So you can see just how many hours of entertainment this game still gives me, each and every week. With these modpacks it is like playing whole new games over again, with the familiar framework of the minecraft world. I still think it is all incredibly cool.

Runner up 2019 : Noita

This was the surprise game of the year. This little game has some things about it that I really, really love and wish was in more games. For a start, it launches really fast, like in seconds. The soundtrack is amazing. The game is being honed and balanced with each update, and is still early access and quite beta, but is very playable and takes considerable skill (and some luck) to succeed. What I like about it too is that there is no hand holding. You develop your own techniques for the challenges you face. Initially you are likely to try and kill all the enemies you meet, for example, but this will likely wear down your health and the choice of running is often wiser. This is where a lot of the satisfaction in the game comes from - discovering how to play it well.

The game has an overall vibe which is kind of unlike anything else. Yes, the stand out feature here is the per-pixel particle simulation, and it does have effects you can take advantage of, but it is only a part of the gameplay. Much of the game is spent searching for new wands and traits to enable you to face the deeper levels with some hope of surviving. It does get hard quickly, if you are stuck with your starter wands on the third level you are pretty much toast. I will admit that despite dying about 65 times (it keeps count), so that's how many games I've played, I'm yet to "win" the game. That may seem hopeless and dreadful, and perhaps it is but I don't care at all. I am generally improving each time I play and get a little (or a lot) further. Deaths can be varied and fairly entertaining in themselves, and usually you learn something - even if it is "don't do that again!".

However, the reason this game has not won this year is that I can see that it has limited playability. You restart each game in exactly the same place, and it does get old fairly fast. Each game lasts about 10 minutes, perhaps more and perhaps a lot less. But it has a bad case of ground hog day. If they can add a decent amount of variety to the start, then this game will be elevated to another level. I am not aware of any plans to do so at this point, it is just a thought I have. Please don't get me wrong, even with this gripe/limitation the game is an absolute blast to play and an easy recommend to try out.

Best Mobile Game 2019

There is none this year, as far as I'm concerned they all suck. Even PvZ has taken a turn for the worse in recent updates with intrusive ads and that is crap. I have not exactly been looking at all the games, but have not come across any worth mentioning. Booo.....