More toys

Just went to Goodwill with my brother and he picked up a Hotwheels electronic Powershift Garage Playset, which I get to keep until my nephews birthday.  I am definitely going to have to get this puppy assembled and put on the decals.  Unfortunately the only electronic part to this thing is sounds, I believe.  It is outfitted with a joystick and it would be awesome if you could actually control something with that.  The box also makes it look like it came with track pieces that lead away from the garage, but if it did those are gone now.

Speaking of my nephew, he has started to figure out the diverter switch and trap door on his wall track.  Which is great, but he likes to line up about 10 cars and let them all go at the same time.  I am more of a "let it go and do not touch it until it reaches the bottom or flips off the track" player.  Therefore we get into these scuffles.  Which is mostly him just yelling at me for not doing it exactly how he wants it, then I pick him up, lift him as high in the air as I can, and pretend I drop him.  He then asks if we can do that again like it was the best thing ever; to which I reply, "No, can you focus on watching me play cars.  Mkay thanks."  Okay, that is not really true, I mostly just pick him up a few more times and then set a car on the track in the hopes that he will be too distracted to catch it  He catches it every time and then he tells me to help him line more up behind that one.  The funnest part is that after I have helped him line the cars up, I sometimes have to pretend to snooze with my body at the bottom of the track.  Therefore I can jump after the cars crash into me and say surprised, "Hey what just happened!"  The command to do execute this is "sleep".

It is rough not getting your way.  It is even worse that I cannot bring my own toys to play with because they will get claimed.  That is not all that has got me down though.  After a little thought, I have started to realize the Hotwheels wall tracks are not as interchangeable/connectable as they first seemed.  They use a common wall mount/connector piece that pretty much every piece of track will lock into, whether it slides over it like a vintage track piece or hooks in with a matching + connector.  From the tracks I have seen they also all seem to be designed to be laid at the same angle.  Therefore if you have two wall mounts on the wall to hold a piece of track any piece that does the same basic thing from another track will snap into it.  The four basic pieces are left to right straight pieces, right to left straight pieces, left to right corners, and right to left corners.  Left to right describes the direction the car travels down the track and straight or corner is the shape of the piece.  A straight piece could easily be replaced by a flat piece of track while corner pieces are a little more complex.  They basically drop the wall track down a level and invert the direction of the straight pieces.  For example, if the track starts out left to right straight piece and runs into a left to right corner, the next logical piece would be a right to left straight piece This would basically create a sideways V on the wall with the open end facing the left.  Although after having said all that one could theoretically create a track that goes left to right straight, left to right corner, right to left corner: in which case the track would look something like a 7 except the top would be more slanted and the stem would be more zig zag or wavy.  I will probably have to explain that better, but it would require pictures.

My point is, the track designs are sometimes too tight.  And despite quite a bit of interchangeability some corners might need to be redesigned to maintain functionality in an elongated system.