u/Drillucidator

After a horrendous visit yesterday, my friend and I came back today, 5/16, and both crowds and ops were even worse. Apparently it’s Grad Nite, so we really just picked like the worst 2 days of the season to visit. We rode two coasters between opening and having to leave for O’Hare at 4 so I could catch my flight home.

Wrath of Rakshasa (Credit #134, ranked #20)

Ops were laughably horrible on WoR, and yet there was some that was out of their control. One train with slow dispatches and a piss poor balance between Fast Lane and the standard queue? Yeah, I can blame that on ops. A breakdown that left riders baking in the sun on the brake run and a vomit incident two trains before we got on? Not their fault. Once I finally got on Wrath of Nebraska after nearly 3.5 hours, it was pretty damn good. This was my first dive coaster, and while I don’t love the idea of them at most parks, this is one of the parks that really does benefit from it.

Maxx Force (bumped up to #6):

Maxx Force in the front row is an out of body experience, but this one comes with a caveat. After getting off of Rakshasa, realizing most of the non-clones were closed (including Raging Bull yet again), and seeing Goliath’s line, we decided we could probably reride Maxx today and have enough time to get to the airport afterwards, but this was almost a critical error. Managed to get front row, pulled out of the station, watched 2 fins go down, then pop right back up. For the first time, I was stuck on a ride that was down. I’m sitting there sunburnt and dehydrated while the ride op keeps saying they have no ETA, and it feels like an eternity. Watched someone from maintenance start walking towards us from Hurricane Harbor and it was like I had seen an angel. I think the breakdown actually added to the experience, going through an already insane launch after having sat there for what I assume was about 15 mins was incredible, a relief, and enough to bump it up a spot in my rankings.

At this point we had to head to the car to stop at a convenience store for a ton of water (and I guess gas lol), and head for O’Hare. We will absolutely be back, but we will never make the mistake of going to the park in May again. I did see a single test run for American Eagle today, but that’s unfortunately the only positive this visit has over yesterday’s.

This was not only a rough one, but unfortunately, quite possibly my worst park visit yet.

I see the potential for a fantastic visit at this park, but today was NOT the day. I’ve never seen so many school buses, several rides and almost every restaurant were closed, and it looks like only single use Fast Lane was available. Only ended up getting on four coasters before it became unreasonable to expect to ride anything else, but here are my thoughts on what I did ride:

Maxx Force (Credit #130, ranked #7):

If I only got one ride in today, this would’ve been the one even with one train ops and roughly 4 min dispatches. Words can’t describe that launch, intense feels too simple for what it is. If the ride wasn’t so short, it would be higher in my rankings, but it still blew my expectations away and then some. I really hope we see a resurgence of the air launch, it’s the best launch I’ve experienced and was worth the hour and a half wait, which I wish was the wait time for 70% of the park today.

Viper (Credit #131, ranked #17):

Just one spot below the original Cyclone, this thing is the real deal. Intense, a bit rough but nowhere near unbearably so, and this was one of the only two rides in the park with a decent wait time at roughly 20 mins, possibly due in part to the app incorrectly stating it was closed. Also one of the only coasters I saw running two trains, which I’m incredibly thankful for being that it was one of my priorities today.

Little Dipper (Credit #132, ranked #55):

Holy SHIT this is a smooth PTC. Not just smooth by PTC standards, but absolutely butter smooth, nowhere near what I’d expect out of a nearly 80 year old coaster still running buzz bars. This is my new favorite family coaster, and SFGAm should certainly be applauded for saving it.

Demon (Credit #133, ranked #53):

A solid Arrow looper by all means. Is it janky as hell? Yeah, but that’s half of the fun. The double corkscrew was probably the most intense I’ve experienced. This was our last ride of the day and while I’m incredibly disappointed in what we didn’t ride, this was a solid note to end on, and it helped that this was the one other coaster running two trains.

There is no excuse for the park to have operated as poorly as it did today. We opted to wait to eat until after we left because the lines were so horrible for the two restaurants open. Raging Bull was constantly cycling empty trains, American Eagle didn’t make a peep, Whizzer is closed “for improvements,” Rakshasa was on one train and had no less than a 2.5 hour wait any time I checked, X-Flight was one train and a 2 hour wait, Goliath was one train and a 1.5 hour wait, and I saw Condor cycle twice.

This was the beginning of coaster season for me, the first time I’ve seen one of my best friends in a year and a half, and it’s been a total shitshow of a day. I think we’re going back tomorrow if for no reason other than there’s very little else to do in Gurnee, but my hopes aren’t high for round two either.

Never in a million years did I think we would have One Piece sets, and yet here we are. I almost felt bad buying a knockoff of this one because I truly do love the series that much, but $140 for a 1376 piece set is ridiculous.

Really my only issue with the set is that the technic pieces for the masts suck at staying straight. This means the ropes don’t actually attach on one side, but at $30 I can live with that. The doors are also just standard Lego doors unlike what’s supposed to be included, and two tile pieces are rounded instead of flat and therefore the stickers don’t stick properly, but they’re inside the ship so it’s really not an issue.

Minifig quality ranges from decent to really damn good, minus the fact that they have shitty square leg holes instead of the standard ones. Sanji and Luffy are pretty much perfect, Zoro is just missing the arm printing for his short sleeves, Usopp has his arm printing but the pink from his bandana bleeds into his hair, and Nami is missing the short sleeve arm printing and her hair looks like two separate pieces glued together. The mini wanted posters all turned out pretty great as well.

Next up is Venusaur, Charizard, and Blastoise, then a long overdue passion project.

I bought the Cavegod UCCS Sandcrawler and built about 85% of it 4 years ago, decided it was pointless to continue as I was moving in a couple months, and since then it’s sat disassembled in a box for 4 moves…until now. Good lord I will never purchase a set of this scale again. It’s a gorgeous finished product, especially for a MOC, but I unfortunately have more complaints than I’ve had with any other set I’ve built before.

The body of this set doesn’t actually seem to attach to the base with the treads, but I somehow managed to (VERY carefully) get it to fall into place before I added any more exterior panels beyond the rear two. Those panels rattled, and it was driving me crazy, but this was resolved by some extra detailing on top being added, oddly, several hundred steps after those panels.

The vast majority of my complaints come with building the front end, and holy shit am I glad I chose that end to be the one facing a wall. Nothing wants to align properly, attaching the panels is more easily done by removing certain pieces and forcing them back into place afterwards, and you’re best off leaving the ramp down until the front end is done. The front is full of gaps and misalignments, and I got incredibly lucky that the panels facing outward aligned themselves correctly…sort of, which leads to my next issue.

A lot of pieces flex slightly out of place. Personally, with a giant space junk trailer, I think it gives it more character once done, but it’s incredibly aggravating when actually building it. The visible front end panels are only aligned because the main piece that attaches them to the frame is only halfway attached. There’s also a major alignment flaw with the top middle cover that required me to make some modifications, which is EXTRA annoying with that section because it’s supposed to be easily removable in order to access the Hub brick that powers the motors. It’s fine though, because 3 of the 4 tread motors decided that they were going to completely give out. Truly, I’m lucky those ones were the ones that chose to die, because the ramp can’t close or open otherwise.

Overall I really don’t know if I can recommend this set. I wish I could tell 2022 me not to buy it, to me it wasn’t worth the aggravation by any means and I’ve never been so thankful to finish a set. Very much looking forward to my next 2 sets being roughly 10% and 50% of the size, and both being clones of official sets that went through quality control. I think this one set has put me off of buying MOC clones for a very long time. I mean absolutely ZERO disrespect to Cavegod, it’s a phenomenal MOC, but it’s also just…a lot.