Coaster
The steeper the drops and downward motions the coaster has, the higher the Positive G's. The steeper the ascensions (like after the drops), the higher the Negative G's. The sharper the curves, the higher the lateral G's (banked curves cut these down). A coaster with any one of.
Rollercoasters, essentially, are a curious concept. We go to the little ticket box (or if its a pay-at-the-gate theme park, join a queue that disappears into the horizon and quite possibly crosses a few international time zones), pay an extortionate sum, stand in a queue, caged into columns like cattle, then eventually, you reach the station, dozens of people bundle off the train and disappear out of sight ('Exit the train to your right!'), and with a sense of joy and adventure we step onto the train, and anticipate what will follow.
Smooth, fast loops, hurtling drops into psychadelically lit tunnels, and waterfalls and lasers dancing on every slow uphill section. Sounds like fun. Immense fun.
However, what invariably does follow is between 30 seconds and 3 minutes of being hurtled around corners and loops of varying intensity, and if you aren't the exact height of 5'11', you will find your head and back being battered off the various lumps on the seat. Then you jerk to a stop back at the station where you arrived, step off feeling jaded and slightly cheated, and feel obliged, nay, forced to part with £3.99 for a Souvenir Photo and/or key-ring from the little shed next door, becase it's a 'once in a lifetime oppurtunity.'.
And the theme park makes money from this, because they know we'll all go on them. We need rollercoasters because we're weak.
Ride
Which is why, with some glee, I inserted the Rollercoaster Tycoon CD into my drive and launched it...
To give me my own chance to create the next RattleSnake or Space Mountain beater, something that the customers would love so much that they would offer themselves up to my park to be slaves, or at least to purchase an 'I went to Nacho Land and all I got was this stupid mug' collector's souvenir. Joy!
The game is a fantastic piece of work. Several non-coaster rides are available, including old favourites like merry-go-rounds, haunted houses, and swinging ships, as well as more modern rides such as the Launched Ascent Ride (more commonly known as the PlayStation Ride if you've been to Blackpool). Then there are water-based rides such as slides and rapids, and go-karts and mini-cars, and so many other rides I can't be bothered listing them all...
You have the freedom to tailor these rides to levels of detail that border on the trivial, such as the colours of the rails and the maximum waiting time at the station. But some of these options prove very important. For example, on some varieties of rollercoasters (and yes, there are different kinds - inverted metal, wooden wildmouse, steel mini etc), there are different launch methods, including the traditional 'kick-start', the powered launch (up to 60mph at the start, combine it with a sheer drop for an extremely intense ride!), and the intimidatingly named but frankly useless 'Reverse-Incline Powered Launch Mode'.
Rollercoaster Tycoon Pc
And you can actually 'theme' your park. For example, in the second mission, Dynamite Dunes, I produced a park with three zones, using Roman, Egyptian and USA Mining scenery and objects. These can be researched and placed all over your park, along with trees, fountains, statues, benches, lamps and litter bins.
Crash!
Of course, you have to ensure that your rides are safe, which is where the test mode comes in.
You see, when I first got the game, I spent around 10 minutes building a steel coaster, and itching to see the little people hurtling round on it. I opened the ride and the park just to see what happened. Big mistake. I had produced a hump near the middle of the circuit, but unfortunately the train wasn't going fast enough at the time to clear it, so it simply rolled back down the hill. Into the path of the next oncoming train. An explosion followed, and several people saw their vital organs splattering off in the other direction, as they flew through the air. Not good...
Of course, as well as making a really thriling coaster, you must make sure the people aren't too scared to board it. There are three main coaster ratings - Nausea, Excitement, and Intensity. You have to ensure your intensity remains between 4 and 6, the Nausea around 2 to 4, and the excitement as high as you can get it!
And lots of things contribute to this, not just loops and corners. For example, a coaster over water is more exciting than a coaster over ground. Coasters going over and under other riders will prove exciting too. And, of course, speed, duration and turns contribute, as well as the complex lateral and vertical G-force.
Staff
The shops and staff are the most disappointing aspect of this otehrwise superb game. The staff system is near-identical to the one employed in Theme Park, including Handymen, Mechanics, Security Guards and Entertainers.
The main difference is that you can assign jobs to people now. Handymen in Theme Park, no matter what the state your paths were in, tended to walk on to the grass and begin mowing. Thankfully, in Rollercoaster Tycoon you can turn this option off on individual Handymen, as well as being able to assign 'beats' to all of the staff, ensuring every area is well covered.
Little thought has been given to the shops either, despite the fact that they are integral to your park's progress. The usual spiel of placing food and drink, toilets, and souvenir stalls is in place here, like in Theme Park. However, Information Desks are an original idea, selling maps, pointing out directions, and providing umbrellas if it rains.
Your guests are fickle folk too, who on occaision don't spend anything in your park and leave after a scant look around, although if you have placed rides and buildings well, they should look after themselves. You can follow their thoughts and spending, and even lift them up and move them to new locations! I tend to punish angry guests by making a pit in the middle of a lake with the superb landscaper tool, and dropping them in. [Um .. is that legal? - Ed]
Conclusion
Rollercoaster Tycoon is extremely impressive. This one is great for strategy fans, SimCity lovers, and anyone hoping to produce the next Disneyland. Great work from Sawyer and the team.
And when you have finished with the original game, why not check out the website which, especially for a non-multiplayer game, is extremely good. You can download new track designs for every kind of coaster and track ride, made by the game's creator, Chris Sawyer, and even upload and download custom rides made by other people. Fantastic.
Eye Candy
8 /10
Ghost TownGhost Town is an expert scenario that is a paid rides park. You start out with a medium sized empty park, the goal is to have 10 different types of roller coasters that are each 3,937ft long and at least 7 excitement. Considering the size of the park, and the fact that half of it is mountains, this goal is quite ambitious.
Since I knew building 10 large, exciting roller coasters would be no small, or cheap, task, I started by building a solid base of thrill rides. It also turns out that most of the guests had very low intensity and nausea tolerances as well. In the bottom right corner of the screen shot above, you can see I put a one way sign, keeping all the guests in the upper half of the park. I did this to eliminate the need to staff the lower half of the park until I started building rides there.
After spending half of Year 1 building the north end of the park, I moved down to the south end, and built that up with thrill rides to bring in additional guests and increase my income. I knew I would need at least $10,000 to build the first ride so I could use more guests in the park generating money. Towards the end of Year 1 guests start getting hungry and thirsty, and as you can see I built a strip of shops for them to access. I spent a few months researching shops because I did not have the Cash Machine, or more than two different drink stalls, however after a few months of no results, I went back to only researching Roller Coasters.
As you can see, I finished the first roller coaster halfway through Year 2, I was limited by how much money I had, and I did not want to have to take out a loan to pay for it. It is a fairly standard looking Wooden, I made the Station big enough to hold the maximum number of trains and cars, to help maximize the profit. Even though there was a minimum length requirement, I tried to keep the overall size of the ride down, to allow the other 9 roller coasters ample space. I think it was successful because the majority of the ride is very compact and in a corner of the park that would be hard to utilize. Since the excitement was so high, I could charge a lot for this ride, however I decided to charge $6. One reason I didn’t charge more was because of the lack of Cash Machines in the park.
Guests really liked the Wooden coaster and it started generating tons of cash, which allowed me to get started on the second roller coaster. I chose to do a Floorless because it has become one of my favorite types. I had similar goals as the previous coaster, try and keep the overall size down, while still meeting the required ride length. I did this by having a very compact, but lengthy, helix section at the beginning. I also wanted to get more excitement from having proximity to the Wooden Coaster, so I have lots of track adjacent to it. My favorite part of this ride is the parallel corkscrews that go over the Wooden’s track, I think it looks really cool.
I had researched a few good roller coasters during this time, all steel based, so I switched to researching shops again, hoping to get the Cash Machine. In June of Year 3, I finally did, and I put them everywhere. At this point, the Wooden roller coaster was making almost $10,000 per hour and the Floorless was making $20,000. The Floorless has the advantage of 3 trains over the Wooden’s two, and had a little bit more excitement.
During this time I also took care of some upkeep problems, such as not enough shop and staff. The park was growing quickly because of the giant roller coasters, and keeping up with the increasing guests while still quickly building roller coasters became difficult. In between each new coaster I would check the paths and guest’s thoughts to make sure the park was still in good condition.
The next roller coaster I built was the Vertical Drop, which is very similar to the Floorless. I had quite a bit of money at this point, and I decided to try and build it in the same area as the other two roller coasters, to help save space for the other 7 that I still needed to build. I tried to have as much adjacent track to gain excitement, as I wanted the only inversions to be the two loops after the first drop. This turned out to work out perfectly, as I went over the minimum length by quite a bit, which definitely helped me get the 9 excitement rating.
Using the remaining space on the flat side of the park, I built a Corkscrew Coaster. This one didn’t work out as well as I expected. The intensity was really high, and the excitement was just over the minimum. This is most likely caused because of the number of inversions, I should of used more big drops instead of more inversions. The amount of adjacent track is ample, but clearly not enough to get a higher excitement. If I redid this, I probably would have big hills and big drops initially, and then some cork screws and helixes, rather than a combination of all of them throughout the whole ride.
The next ride I built was a hypercoaster. I have almost no experience building these, but I knew I’d have to have a huge lift hill and have a few good drops. The first two drops did a good job of this, and then I used helixes above the other roller coasters to build excitement while also having extra points for proximity to other pieces of track (this also helped increase the excitement on the Corkscrews Coaster).
Since I was running out of room in the flat area of the park, I decided to build the next roller coaster (number 6) underground. I prefer to use Mine Train rollercoasters underground because of their excellent helix abilities, and they seem to be more exciting on this ride than some others. Also higher lateral G’s seem to be tolerated more. As you can see in the screenshot, there are a lot of helixes that are adjacent to help build excitement. The first drop goes into bunny hills that go all the way across the park, turn around, and come back to a second, very short, lift hill, and go into what you see on the screen. I was really expecting a higher excitement from this, because it is underground and a fairly long ride. While not my best Mine ride, it did pass the requirements for the scenario.
This Twister turned out almost exactly like I expected. I used many inversions to get the excitement up, but also used many helixes to meet the length requirement. The only cool thing about this ride is the first drop goes into a corkscrew that goes through a loop, other than that this is a pretty straight forward ride with inversions.
I usually avoid building Flying Turns (Bobsled Coaster in RCT1) because they are very difficult to do correctly. The single cars do not hold speed for very long, so you have to have excessively tall lift hills to make sure they make it back to the station. Luckily I had essentially unlimited money at this point, so I just build the ride above all the thrill rides at the north end of the park. It does feature a second lift hill halfway through the ride to make sure the cars make it all the way around, but other than that this is a pretty boring ride. While building it I ran into many problems with the Enterprises below, because they require a lot of vertical space, therefore I was not able to make large hills or drops like I wanted to. This resulted in mainly helixes, which was most likely the biggest reason why the excitement was just barely about 7.
About one month later, the Flying Turns ride crashed, so I shut it down for the remainder of the scenario. It did meet the requirements for the 10 roller coasters, however it was negatively impacting my park rating, so I kept it, but left it closed.
For the 9th coaster I built a Hyper Twister, which is basically just a normal steel style roller coaster. This had a very tall lift hill, which allowed me to have this ride above the Twister coaster and still have large drops (the air time is 7 seconds!). I used the helixes as long turn around pieces, so that the length would be above the required length, and on the way back to the station I had it go through the Twister’s loop. I was really surprised that it worked, as there was already a corkscrew going through the loop. Now I know that two pieces of track can fit through a single loop, very cool.
Shortly after building the Hyper Twister, I received the award for Best Custom Designed Rides, pretty sweet!
I had one more roller coaster to build, nearly $100,000 and had almost half of the park to build it in. I decided to try a Giga Coaster.
I had a super duper huge lift hill, and had a few big hills at the beginning of the ride. Then several huge stacks of helixes, some turns on top of the other roller coasters, and then a short underground section with several helixes as the turn around area to get back to the station. I was really surprised with the excitement on this ride, because it really was a fairly simple ride. I’m sure it cost a fortune, but I had so much money I wasn’t really paying attention. Also, having a length of 10,000 feet definitely helped.
Once I opened the Giga coaster I reopened the Flying Turns ride to win the scenario.
This scenario was a lot of fun, because I tried to keep all the roller coasters as compact as I could, which definitely helped their excitement to be higher, as well as gain more experience on how to build several coasters on top of each other. I think the final park looks really cool because of how much track is in such a small area.
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