toys – Page 2 – Fooyah

July 6 2025

Recently Completed

I have recently completed a couple of nice little games that I thoroughly enjoyed. It’s quite rare for me to play games other than the “big three” – Gran Turismo, Minecraft, and Fortnite. These are my standard games and I probably play a little of them everyday. I tend to want games that I can jump in and out of and the time needed for a session doesn’t matter. GT7 I can play for a few laps or a longer race depending on how much time I have in the real world. Minecraft is a world contained on a server and so I get to play that whenever I want and I can do as much or as little as I feel like. Fortnight I play to be with the Legend and spend time with them.

I did recently play some other games and really enjoyed them. They weren’t too stressy and I knew they could be played for a little while and saved easily. Also, I didn’t really have to learn new controls – this is important to me as if I only play a game a little bit spread out over time I don’t want to have to learn a new control system.

Atomfall

This is a game of wandering around the Lake District in the early 1960s [it could be the 1950s I didn’t pay that much attention] and you have to survive and escape. I love the Lake District and had wanted to play this for a while, then I think the price was reduced and I had a half term break so decided I would go for it.

I played the game on easy mode and even then I died quite a bit! I really enjoyed the story, the scenery, and the gameplay. I think my favourite thing though was the occasional crashed helicopter and the militaria of the age. The whole game really captured the time period. It was a really nice game to play.

Under The Waves

This game follows Stan, a North Sea diver, and explores their journey after the death of their daughter. For me, the cut scenes were a little too long. I don’t really care about those things, but I know the story was important to this game. I enjoyed the pace of this game and each day I could swim around and do the jobs I was meant to do. There weren’t any time restrictions within the game as those can make things really stressful. So I was able to explore with ease.

I enjoyed the game. That’s the point isn’t it? To enjoy things.

June 7 2025

Gran Turismo – Rating Myself

Gran Turismo has weekly time trails using various cars around various tracks. I try to take part each time because it’s a good way to get credits and also rates your driving against the rest of the world. I normally get a silver award for these which means I’m within 5% of the time of the fastest in the world. Recently I got gold for being within 3%.

I’m also within the margin by over 1/10 second which I consider a good result. So, another 1.5 seconds knocked off my time and I’d be best in the world – highly unlikely. I only play for around thirty minutes a day so I’m never going to be the best. I’m also working on getting gold in all the master licences but that is taking quite a bit of time!

I go in phases with this game. Sometimes I play enough every day for the daily workout prize and then sometimes I leave it for a couple of weeks. I’m half and half at the moment because I’ve been playing AtomFall which I am enjoying a lot.

May 28 2025

Land Space Efficiency

I think we should consider vertical parking for more vehicles. Imagine the cars you could parking within a certain volume if you could store them vertically. There might be leakage problems I guess but those could be fixed. Oh, hang on – I’ve just remembered the standing seats for aircraft I’ve seen online recently – but, having googled, I think that while they exist people aren’t going to buy them.

As of writing this communication the first page of googled news results for these new “standing seats” are links to poor quality news outlets such as the Daily Mail, Time Out, Daily Express and The Sun. Ryan Air have denied they will be installing the seats. Industry news sites don’t have anything interesting to say. These seats haven’t been approved by the regulators. I doubt they will happen. We are easily in the last stages of the current capitalism model of running the planet and hopefully the world revolution will happen before we need these seats because infinite growth is a stupid thing.

I started this communication with the plan of posting my amazing parking within the game Fortnite. So here it is, very efficient:

May 26 2025

Video Upload Thing

In testing for video output and uploads on the PC I decided I would try flying a floatplane in X-Plane. I chose to take off from Rochester, UK and land on the river Medway. This is not as silly as it seems because eighty years ago the Shorts Brothers made seaplanes in Rochester and they slid down a gangway to the river Medway for their first flight. The whole area is now residential but you can still see the gangway which is a historical object. It would have been nice to still have seaplanes and floatplanes taking off from there.

March 23 2025

Gran Turismo Stuff

So recently the Legend got me a Lego Gran Turismo Car. I wrote about it here. I then had to play Gran Turismo and buy that actual car. Which I did. Here are some scapes photographs I took of this car.

March 18 2025

Lego 68 – Model 76923

According to this website the last Lego model I made was in 2020, it has been a while! I’m not sure why it’s been this long, probably my kids no longer need my help with Lego and I haven’t bought any – where do I put it? This model was bought for my cake-day by the Legend and it super pleases me. It covers two things I really enjoy; cars and gaming. This model is the Lamborghini Lambo V12 Vision GT Super Car which exists within the game of Gran Turismo 7.

Lamborghini Lambo V12 Vision GT Super Car

I need to go and buy the car in the game and then take some scapes photos with it. I will post those here when I have completed that side-quest.

I’m hoping the car drives well. I’ve got a few races still to complete in the standard section of GT so I will be working on that.

January 5 2025January 4 2025

Views Of Flight

I’ve been trying to fly in X-Plane a bit recently. I need to do more I guess. There’s a plugin called Volanta by Orbx which I’m using to track my flights and it has some challenges it can add to the simulator so that gives me things I can aim for. I recently took a dawn flight from Biggin Hill to Le Touquet and I flew under the QE2 bridge and alongside my village. In the second picture here you can see the village where I live, if you know what you are looking for.

June 11 2024

What A Shocker

You know how it goes. You’re flying along over the Netherlands and then BOOM, there’s a lightning storm in front of you. Fortunately for me I was already planning on landing before the storm but I don’t recall seeing lightning before in X-Plane.

T7 Red Tail Over Netherlands with lightning

You might need to click on the picture to embiggen it and then be able to see the lightning forks.

May 9 2024

The Portal

I have and have not wanted a PlayStation Portal since I saw they were released. There was a period of time that I had a notification from a stock checking site to try and buy one but I was always too late to the party. I nearly managed to order one from Currys but then the order got cancelled as they had run out of stock. So, I gave up on stock checking sites and just thought I’d be ok without one.

So, I had settled myself to not owning a Portal, I can always use remote play on my iPhone if I wanted to even though I really hate using screens as controllers. Then, one day, EE sent me a text message saying they were selling Portals in their shop. Even though I had mentally settled on not owning one, I somehow went through the entire order process and ended up having a Portal delivered to my home.

The above image is a poor photograph because you can’t see the main features of the Portal which would be the controller part of it. But you can see that I am logged into Fortnite. I have found that the Portal works really well on my home network. I haven’t tested it fully on another Wi-Fi network yet, but I am going to do so this weekend. So far it seems a great little device, as long as you have connectivity. If you don’t then it’s just a lump of plastic and electronics.

One of my main methods of connecting to my PS5 will be via my phone’s hotspot. I figured that I pay for quite a bit of data so I might as well start to use the allocation. However, when I first tried to connect to my iPhone the Portal said it couldn’t connect. I tried again and I still got an error message. I spent a little while using Google and I found a number of pages where they said it was not possible as iPhone doesn’t support the particular NATs or whatever. I was somewhat upset at this.

Then, through a random Reddit post I saw that someone had connected to an iPhone using manual settings in the Portal and so I tried that. It worked!!! I now have the best of all worlds. I am a happy chappy.