Monster Hunter World is five years old and holds up great.
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bask in the sun halfway up the Ancient Forest with a Tobi-Kadachi (giant white electric flying squirrelsnake; chill until you hit it)
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climb up to the top of the Coral Highlands cat colony and watch the sky jellyfish float by in the sunset
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share a hot spring with snow monkeys in the Hoarfrost Reach
They did a great job of making the maps feel like a living system that goes on while youâre not there. (Sadly, this is much less true of the newest MH game, Rise, where the maps are full of traversal puzzles but the wildlife pretty much all exists only to attack you.)
Are you older? My parents moved near Traverse City to retire, since my family has done summer vacations up there for 70+ years. The year-round population in Leelanau and Grand Traverse counties now skews heavily older due to all the retirees, and also due to gentrification pricing a lot of families out.
This has mixed effects on health care in particular. On one side, a higher proportion of medical professionals work every day with the specific problems of an older population, and there are lots of relevant specialists. On the other side, availability of primary care can be difficult.
Iâm surprised not to see any of the Monster Hunter games yet! Maybe thatâs because most MH soundtracks are more a collection of individual themes than a unified soundtrack for a world, but a lot of those tracks are pretty great.
I donât know whether it is considered polite to link to youtube recordings of tracks here. My particular favorites from World are all zone themes: âRulers of the Wildspireâ, âDancer in the Coral Highlandsâ, âRoars across the Hinterlandsâ. You hear these tunes a lot - whenever youâre fighting something in that zone that doesnât have its own theme - so theyâd better be good. Fortunately almost all of them live up to that standard!
This is a story skip. Many forms of character progress in FFXIV are gated by that individual character completing the main storyline quests.
A story skip boosts the character to the beginning of the current expansion tier, so it is not possible to use this mechanic to compete with standard players on current content. I think the intended use case is alt characters (which are less necessary in FFXIV because you can play all jobs on one character, but many players still have them).
If you are looking for âlearn fight, get better, epic winâ without much of a death penalty, maybe look at Monster Hunter?
Itâs not the same as a Souls game - not much world exploration, not much plot, zero gothiness - but it is 3D Fantasy Boss Fights: The Game. With 14 genuinely different weapon classes to choose from.
And if you faint three times and fail the quest, all youâve lost are the consumables you spent on the attempt. (If you give up early and bail, you havenât even lost that.)
42055 Bucket Wheel Excavator.
It is physically very large. Larger than basically all cats and a lot of dogs. My daughter was 3 1/2 when I got it and it wasnât much smaller than she was then.
Iâve assembled and disassembled it several times. I think it takes 8-10 hours to get it together and not much less to take it apart. You really have to follow the instructions in reverse to get it broken down, and the pins make my fingers quite sore if I donât take it in stages.
The linked review is correct that the mechanics somewhat overtax the single motor, but I find the design so impressive that it doesnât matter.
This was the last âflagshipâ Technic set I ever bought. We donât have space in the house for more plastic toys this size, and I donât love the fact that the huge ones tend to be app controlled now. But I think this was a pretty high note to go out on.