Occasional Tales

I’m just repeating what I’ve seen via various sources. Feel free to say, “You have nothing new to say, you dribbling git.” Release date confirmed. All right, I’ve bought it. The whole thing. Well, best to do it while I’m feeling rich. Well, not too indigent. The price is exactly what I predicted it’d be, although I feel that I ought to get a discount for buying all the Horizon 5 dlc. In due course, watch me be unimpressed by the expansions. Progression will mean something to the old lags who were around back in the day. I was never there, but I was an old lag anyway. Players will start the game as a tourist (shades of FH5 difficulty settings) and need to qualify to enter the Festival. Wristbands, which sort of made a vague appearance in FH4 if I remember correctly, are back. We’ll need to do some showcase to complete a tier to go up to the next wristband, with gold wristband granting access to Legend Island, where there’s meant to be a bunch of stuff to do. The question is how grindy w...

Treasure hunt. MB C63, Mulegé jump. Treasure near the drowned church. I now have over 130,000 FPs. And here’s something which, I hope, FH6 might address in some way. We only have a limited number of skill points, which are easily wiped out, but a grind to recover. Perhaps we could use FPs to buy skill points or something else in the game. The weekly challenge in the 2008 BMW Z4 M was a straightforward affair. Is FH6 going to persist with the Festival playlist? FH5 slightly fixed things by ditching the vexatious Showcase Remixes from FH4 and removing some of the grindier elements of the playlist, but the consensus seems to be that the playlist needs to go. Took a picture. Got a red suit. Gods, do I look like a sleazy lounge lizard or what. PR stunts. I tried the DS with the 2003 Porsche 911, but immediately expected that it wouldn’t have the power. I took a guess that it required an engine swap, but I also added AWD and off-road race tyres because of the terrain. These were good ideas, ...

 Do a DS in the Caterham, they said, implying that you have to jump 500m. Perhaps I only needed to do a DS in the Caterham. I now have over 120,000 FPs. No issues with the weekly in the 1987 Pontiac Firebird. In an aside, there seems to be an epidemic of idiot players stopping in the middle of the road to block the AI traffic. That used to be an occasional thing in FH4, but I’ve barely ever seen it in FH5. It’s annoying. Stop doing it, you complete plonkers. I one-shotted the DZ and DS, and took a couple of goes to complete the TB (lack of practice, but I just don’t… What is it, Jenkins? … We’ll talk about Japan later . …ever do these things unless I’m required to). And how was I rewarded? Rubbish, rubbish, and more bloody rubbish. I took a photo of the Datsun in the stadium. I won a pair of lacy knickers. Now I’ll be the sexiest boy in Mexico. [ You silly, deluded old git . –ed.] Eventlab (1). Edel Circuit . DUBS’ favourite custom-built circuit. Pity it has to use that horrid road...

 The weekly was in the 2013 Shelby GT 500. I may have retuned one of the cars, but I’m sure the S2-class car was just there to do zoomies. Take the photo where the danger sign over the river is. Went to Playa Azul to check out the hot babes… [ I don’t think you’re allowed to say “hot babes” on the Internet these days . –ed.] I mean, crash into ice creams. I think the game miscounted again, and doesn’t always appear to register events done in quick succession. I did quite a bit of rewinding to complete the TB in my Hoonigan RS200. I know what to do, but as I don’t bother with such things, it’s always trial and error. The SWS was one-third very good. I knew the SZ would be a pain and it was a pain. Again, I know there’s a technique (which is drifting round the U-shaped section). The SWS was one-third good; the wheel spin afterwards when I went up a level was better. (Cries of “Shame!”) I PB’ed the ST on the bridge for a one-third good SWS. Eventlab (1). Sherwood Forest Raceway . This...

...and Chinese government truths. Since blogspot is blocked from Mainland China, but I can still post here, I see no overt reason for not being a little more forthright about this country. We gave our pupils the first progress test yesterday. The last question in the written part of the test is a short paragraph on some topic. This is what one boy wrote: Taiwan is one island of China. long long ago, Chinese go to this island and live on it. But now some people want to put Taiwan leave China. It is a bad job. We can't agree with it. Taiwan have many people from China at first, they like get back to China, because they want to see their family together. So, China must be stronger and we must study heart and soul to put Taiwan back to China. This is typical of the sort of unthinking nonsense that the mainland Chinese believe. As foreigners tend to do, because we acknowledge Taiwan's separateness, I once unintentionally referred to it as a distinct political entity to one of the pu...

Nanny might be about to have a turn. I've just seen this article in The Guardian about Shinzo Abe's vow to reform the Japanese constitution, allowing the country to be more active militarily if need be. I've just checked the China Daily site, but it's trumpeting the news that RMB is on the verge of exceeding the value of the HK$. I'm sure Nanny will have something to say about Abe's plans, although in the form of creative suggestions from a friend. I'm sure there will be no hint that Beijing thinks it can tell Tokyo what to do. After all, Nanny's policy is not to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries.