RollerCoaster Tycoon

The Good
Roller Coaster Tycoon has a wonderfully short learning curve. You don't have to be the Supreme Roller Coaster Designer or Fortune's CEO of the Year to get started building your first successful park. The game comes with plenty of pre-built coasters that you can just plop down in your parks (if you have the cash), and the business management aspects of the game are extremely simple and easy to master.

Of course, if you can master the art of building a good coaster, the game becomes even more fun. It's really a blast to make an exciting coaster with lots of visual appeal and then watch your park guests zip around your creation. Once you start making your own coasters, the game becomes a challenge of trying to top your last design, or trying to make a good coaster within the limitations of the scenario's landscape. (One of my favorite custom coasters was a small wooden coaster that I built entirely inside a small hill.)

The Bad
The pathing management for your park employees is really a pain. I would love to have the ability to highlight just the path that I want my groundskeepers to walk instead of having to lay out a 4x4 grid everywhere. The 4x4 grid makes it very difficult to get proper coverage because you can't always keep your staff out of areas with a zillion intersections. And it's far too easy to miss sections of path if it's on a bridge or if there's a level difference between the path and the surrounding terrain.

The designer of the game, Chris Sawyer, seems to be extremely anal retentive about 3rd-party, fan-created add-ons to the game. He's released a couple of patches that served no purpose other than to thwart the existing crop of fan-created add-ons. And the programs he's most opposed to are the programs that allow you to create your own scenarios, or that let you play in "sandbox" mode (i.e. just a blank landscape without any scenario restrictions or requirements). In short, Sawyer gives the impression that he's a control freak who's determined to make sure that you can only play the game the way he wants you to play it. Fortunately, the fans have not yet been thwarted to any permanent degree, so these programs are still available and still work despite the efforts of Mr. Sawyer.

The Bottom Line
Despite my gripes, the game is fantastically fun and addictive. I recommend it highly to anybody who likes SimCity type games or who likes going to amusement parks.

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
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.