at last

Had something of a breakthrough with Anno last night.

A big part of the reason I was playing it so much was that I was effectively flummoxed by the fifth chapter in the campaign. For some reason, the 5th chapter seemed to increase exponentially, both in terms of difficulty and time taken.

The breakthrough was that I finally completed it last night on my third go. Don't get me wrong, I've been enjoying it and I still like the game, it's just that it emphasises again the disadvantages of both the lack of a manual and the way the missions in the chapters aren't quite like tutorials.

The difficult was that it kept adding more and more stuff to do or achieve. This meant that were you'd gone all out to achieve the last mission, any errors or silly things you'd done to get it done in a timely fashion then became a bit of problem.

For example, you ended up finding that the wheat fields you'd placed to finish mission 3 where then right in the way of you completing mission 4. But there was now nowhere else to put them unless you removed all of your hemp fields. But you couldn't do that because you desperately needed ropes in order to complete mission 2 :/.

Since there were so many complex mission, as I was getting to the end it kept getting to a stage where it was an almost impossible task to finish. Well, without completely redoing all my towns and when you're faced with that option it seemed better to simply restart and plan better from the beginning.

Anyway, the point is I finished the chapter and I think there's a chance I may be happy to put Anno on hold for a while until I can knock some other stuff on the head.

I also discovered last night that two of the things I'd recorded and not had a chance to watch were actually totally unwatchable. Why were they unwatchable? Because of this bloody weather. The wind and rain is playing total havoc with my reception and it's getting beyond a joke now.

I just don't understand why it's so bad - it's like my normal reception is just on the cusp of being okay and any little thing tips it over. This would actually make some sense if I'm honest - the reception on normal terrestrial has never been that great.

Roll on digital switch-over. When they finally do that, the broadcast signal strength will be turned up (if it was on maximum now it would interfere with normal telly, apparently) and so it should get a lot better.