I don’t know if Magneto could lift up a Cybertruck without it falling apart. It’d get the job done, but it would be disappointing.

So Doom won’t even exist and it’s just another villain doing Weekend at Tony’s.

The sets are still clearly the previous male and female ones, but they don’t refer to them as such and you have access to both armor sets regardless of your character. The best part about it is that you don’t even have to commit to one, you can cherry-pick each individual piece from both sets.

It’s missing the third dimension. It may look like a circle, but it’s actually spiraling downwards.

I haven’t seen any credits yet, and they don’t mean much to me anyway. My time won’t be very telling either, because I’m taking my time. I’m an armor collector, so I’m not moving on until I have everything I want. And since armor is now unisex, I have both male and female sets to make!

Of course still playing Monster Hunter. So far only one monster I really don’t like. Hirabami is almost constantly afloat and almost all you get to see and work with is the end of its tail. And that’s by design, considering the tail can be broken 5 times in total. >.> Nu Udra is really cool though. I don’t know if the octopus frame has ever been used by another monster before, but it’s certainly very new and refreshing to me!

But with the random nature of grinding, I needed another game to fill short gaps in case a session ever ended early, so I started Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2. This decision may have been influenced by recent news, but I would never admit that. I was surprised that most of my muscle memory from decades ago is still intact! It also reminded me how unbelievable it is that the series every reached a point where the games were considered bad. It’s such a simple concept that still works, how did they mess that up so badly?

The bomb attack is weird because it doesn’t have its own timing. You set the timing yourself with Luigi and adapt to it with Mario simultaneously, which makes the rhythm as reliable as you yourself are. There’s about a dozen bombs you have to hit that way to get that Excellent and one of them tends to slip through.

My PC is pretty much in the middle of the minimum and recommended specs. But I spent a lot of time in the benchmark last month fiddling with the setting to make it work. But I also don’t need anything higher than 1080p/60fps to be happy.

I played some more Brothership. Mario’s Bomb attack is driving me crazy. As soon as I get the 30 Excellents for the medal I am never using that move again!

But most of my time has been and will still be dedicated to Monster Hunter Wilds. My main issue with the game right now is how story-driven it is. I don’t know what is was like in World, but I don’t like being kidnapped by the plot into areas I don’t want to go yet and locked out of the quest board. I like the quest-based approach I’ve gotten to know, I don’t need story segments before and after every single monster. It’s okay for some of them to be optional! As an avid armor-collector, I like to take things at my own pace.

But that’s a short-term issue, stories end eventually. The gameplay has been solid so far. My Switch Axe works beautifully, though I miss Soaring Wyvern Blade. It took some fiddling with the options and getting used to the controls to make the Seikret follow my orders properly. One wrong button and he starts automatically moving towards whatever the target is, which drove me crazy until I learned what the correct button is.

The one thing that really bothered me were the Soulflies, these little fireflies that highlight items and show you the way to your target. There’s just too many of them! You can barely see what any item is because they absolutely swarm them! Luckily, if you’re on PC, there’s a mod to remove them. I’m sure a future update will add an option to at least turn them down a bit, though.

What shocked me recently were the drop rates of the rare items. I came across my first Plate-type drop and I was excited to get one on my first try! Those used to have 2-3% chances to drop, depending on their source. What I have seen so far were drop rates of 5, 7 and 12%! I hope that’s just a Low Rank thing, because what’s the point if everything is served on a silver platter? I’m here to hunt monsters, why are you giving me less reason to hunt monsters?

Last week, you asked about the performance and I haven’t really had any issues. I even went from performance mode to balanced when I realized the game ran better than the benchmark led me to believe it would. I was wondering if that was ever going to bite me, but earlier today I fought Rey Dau, the thunder dragon. Lightning strikes and particles everywhere, the ground sparkling like mad and I didn’t notice any significant frame drops.

I did, however, have a few moments where the game just stopped for 5-20 seconds. I don’t think it’s a performance issue though, since it seems to happen at complete random, even in the middle of dialogue once. It happened 3 times in my 17 hours and the game doesn’t continue playing while it’s frozen (i.e. the monster has to wait, too), so it’s not actually causing any problems and I can live with that.

I prefer the wide game just to see the King run a marathon to castle up.