german grand prix

German Grand Prix this weekend.

It's not normally that interesting a race.  The German actually alternates between two circuits and this year it's from nurburgring, but it's not the ring that you think of when you hear that - it's a custom built track that's basically alongside it (well - it might use a bit of the original).  It's certainly not the miles and miles of track version.

We also get to see what happens with the tyres.  As I understand it they've tweaked them so that they should be stronger and tougher, but they want to do more significant changes which aren't possible in the time available.

I have to confess I found the whole tyre blow out thing really quite scary.  In open-wheeled racing like this tyres are one of the big weak-points that remain.  Touching tyres often leads to the worst sorts of accidents, with cars flipping in the air.  A sudden puncture or deflation when you're in any car is a disaster, but when you're going nearly 200 miles an hour it is a very dangerous thing indeed.

I'll also be trying to watch lots of anime so I can get it on e-bay.  I may actually try to play some of the games I need to get through.  I've played quite a bit of SimCity these last few weekends, but I think I may have gone off it somewhat.

I'd mentioned I'd got some really good tips off of YouTube and they'd helped me play the game a lot better, but the problem was that therefore meant I got a lot further into the game.  What do I mean by that?

Well, basically up until recently I hadn't ever got to the stage of wanting to start a great work or being in a position to unlock the more interesting ones or have the resources to stand a chance to build them.  Instead I'd abandon the region and start a new one, hoping to make a city that was better at whatever.

However, with my most recent region I basically had some rocking cities that meant I had all research done and was pumping out the resources needed by the bucket-load.  I therefore decided to do the solar plant.  I started this in my electronics city and sent it all the processors.

I then thought I'd do the plastics, only to discover that my petroleum city didn't think the solar plant had been started.  Indeed, it even let me buy the solar plant again.

Oh dear.  Well, perhaps it was just a synching thing?  I came back the next day... and there was no change.  And my metals city couldn't see the Solar plant either and again let me buy it.

My tourism city could see it and I started a city I'd always been intending to use to do trade and that could see it from the get-go (I'd wondered if maybe it was a game calendar thing, but that put a kibosh on that).  What I therefore ended up doing was going to y petrol and ore cities and sending the required resources to by trade city where I could then send them on to the solar plant.  So my petrol city can't help build the plant, but I can send the resources to another city that can then send them to the plant.

Well I stuck with that process (man was it fucking tedious waiting for it all to happen) and eventually completed the solar plant.  And my other cities still couldn't see it.

A quick search of the interwebs confirmed this is a fairly common problem.  We're now on version 5 and something that is surely fundamental to the regional, multi-player gameplay that's supposed to be what the new SimCity is about still doesn't work.  And wasn't 5.0 meant to address the region play?

So I may play some other games.