RollerCoaster Tycoon

The Good
Roller coaster tycoon was the only reason that I kept playing Theme park simulators. Because after I had out played the game Theme park I thought that I would never be able to play a theme park simulator again. But I was wrong.

The graphics that are used in Roller coaster tycoon are beautiful. On the Merry go round you can see the shadow from the sun and it looks like it is always early morning and the sun is just coming up over the hills. And the rides themselves have a lot of detail, but not to much detail because even though this game has reasonably good graphics it is not a game where you need the most souped up computer to play. The people are simply portrayed with just showing the colour of their clothes and whatever prize they might have won or if they had bought any souvenirs or food.

The sounds of the park are like you are actually controlling a theme park (even though these people never go home.) You can hear if someone is having fun on the new roller coaster you just installed and you can hear if there is someone throwing up after coming off the new roller coaster you just installed. Another great thing about the sounds of the park is that there are specific sounds or songs that go with specific rides. So there is not just one kind of music that you hear from one side of the park to the other, instead if you have your screen above the haunted house you will hear creepy sounds and if you have it above the Merry go round you will hear happy little music.

The game play is simple to learn but it is hard to master. Anyone can put rides in and hope that people will come in and not complain about the prices, but you actually have to think about what you are doing if you want to turn a profit while you are making your park prosper. But after you have made all your prices right and have made sure that you are making as many people as you can happy, from then on it is reasonably simple. You just have to keep checking on your park every so often and make sure that you have not had any disasters and that is about all that is to the game play. So in a word, simple.

The Bad
The most annoying thing about Roller coaster tycoon is probably the fact that after you have finished making your park and controlling your prices etc. you have to wait about two years more until you finish the level. And these years don’t go rolling past like they do in some other games, the years in Roller coaster tycoon would take approximately and hour a year. So that’s still about two hours of waiting after you have finished building your park.

There is nothing really bad about the graphics in the game apart from some flickering here and there. But apart from that there is really not much to complain about.

The sound of the game might try and sound like a real theme park. But the fact is that most of the sounds are then made up of screaming. Not just little screams either, this is ear piercing screaming that does not stop for the whole level. So every time I play Roller coaster tycoon I have to either have my sound muted or nearly muted other wise the sounds of the people screaming and shouting tends to drive me insane.

As I have said, the worst thing about playing Roller coaster tycoon is the fact that if you play a level and then finish your park in the first year or so you will still have (in most cases) about two or three more years to wait until you can be done with the level and move on to the next one. The only other annoying thing I can think of that is wrong with the game play is that if you have handymen (not mechanics) and you give them an area to patrol, even if the area is small they seem to have trouble cleaning up anything and in most cases I have to pick them up and drop them where I want them to clean.

The Bottom Line
Roller coaster tycoon is a simple game and it has some quite nice features, such as the infamous jumping fountains. So if you don’t mind taking about three hours to finish a level then this game is a nice bit of fun. So in other words this game is great for a person with allot of time on his/her hands.

The Good
This game has everything. If you want a realistic simulation of running your own amusement park, that also manages to be a heck of a lot of fun (I found myself playing this thing for 5 hours straight. Really), then Roller Coaster Tycoon is definitely for you. The detail to which the designers went through to make the simulation realistic is amazing... You can click on any one of the tiny little guests that enter your park, purchase your food and merchandise, and, of course, go on your rides until they throw up, and find out exactly what they're thinking, what they're carrying, and how much money they've spent. In addition, the ability to create your own track layouts is a lot of fun... You can make almost any kind of roller coaster you can imagine.

The Bad
I was frustrated by the inability to start your park completely from scratch. There's no way to create your own terrain, or buy your own land. You have to start from one of the precreated scenarios, and work towards a preset goal. Another thing I found annoying was the music... The same darn merry-go-round style organ music plays over and over and over, until it gets really irritating. Fortunately, it only happens when you move your screen near a merry-go-round.

The Bottom Line
A really spectacular game. Great graphics, and top notch gameplay combine to form the absolute best theme park simulation game of all time.

The Good
I normally hate this kind of game. I never liked any of the Sim games. This one grabbed me though. I think the management aspect of the game was easy enough to handle but still challenging enough to make it fun. The graphics and sound are nice and it ran well on my PII/233, even when I had an enourmous park with a million things going on at once. The rides were interesting and there were enough roller coaster designs to keep the game from getting stale. It's also kind of fun to make a deathtrap roller coaster that kills a few people every now and then. Though the physics of the game aren't perfect, it still takes things like gravity and speed into consideration. I also like the fact that you need to put a lot of bathrooms and garbage cans at the exits to the rollercoasters so people can throw up in them. Otherwise you get this gross little splotches on the pavement that never seem to get cleaned up.

The Bad
The perspective is a little skewed and at times it's hard to manipulate land when you accidentally lower it too far. Customers get lost much too easily and frankly, they're annoying when they whine about how they can't find the park exit. I like to think that in real life, someone just might figure out that the park exit is not going to magically appear in the 20 square foot area they refuse to leave. And in real life, maintenance men are not that lazy. They're probably teamsters but I am constantly having to make them clean the place up and it really distracts from the parts of the game that are fun. And the park guests are the biggest weenies I've ever seen. Sure the coasters look scary and I would never ride them in a million years, but don't you think that when you let someone design a rollercoaster that will never materialize in the real world, they're going to make it as scary as possible? Half of my coasters are never ridden because the guests are too chicken to get on.

The Bottom Line
I guess it would be best compared to a Sim game but I hate those and love this so draw your own conclusions. It's really like nothing else out there.