Theme Park Roller Coaster get\'s good ratings!!

The most singular fun you\'ll ever have tinkering with roller coasters, burgers and balloons.

December 12, 2000

It makes fitting sense that Bullfrog would create a game in which your success depends on the amount of sugar you formulate drinks with, the amount of salt that goes onto French fries, or how much fat packs your burgers. And yet, once again, Bullfrog has worked its eccentric yet universal gameplay magic on us again with this new shiny remake of the PlayStation and PC game, Theme Park Roller Coaster.
Theme Park Roller Coaster, otherwise known as Sim Theme Park on PlayStation and PC, is the newly reworked, shinier, flashier version of the game for PlayStation 2. It\'s fun in the way that tinkering with a gadget is, compelling you to experiment and modify it until you find a winning formula. It\'s safe, non-violent, obsessive micro-management at its best. Theme Park Roller Coaster \'s not necessarily a brilliant use of the PS2\'s engine, and it\'s not revolutionary, but it\'s incredibly addictive, in its own particular way.

Gameplay
For those of you not familiar with any of the Theme Park games, the idea here is to create a thriving, successful theme park, such as Six Flags Magic Mountain, Disneyland, or Great America. The game provides you with the tools, the customers, and the all of the necessary money and equipment to start up a moderate to large-sized park, and then guides you into the right direction to developing it any way you want.

Specifically, you create the food and drink stands, the bathrooms, the staff, the paths, the sideshows, roller coasters and other rides that make up a park. The game goes even deeper with researchers, who think up new upgrades for your rides, new shops, new features, such as fingers, or mountains to decorate the park, and then lets you design your own rides. That\'s where the "roller coaster" park comes in. Once you earn enough money to make a roller coaster, you lay down the tracks, the loops, and you can even tweak the angles and slopes of the rails to personalize it. After that, if you choose so, the game enables players the ability to take on the first-person perspective and ride the coaster they just built. It\'s a kick to do, but what\'s more, it provides perspective for re-designing the coaster to make it more fun, scarier, or whatever.

The essence of Theme Park Roller Coaster is in the meddling of things. It should be called super-heavy micro-management park simulator (but then nobody would really buy it), which is a little more accurate. You get the big picture but you can, and must, tinker with the most-minute aspects of everything. Being a God-game, you can handle every little aspect, from how much salt is in the fries, the winning (or losing) percentage of the arcades, the speed and duration of a ride, to setting the patrol areas of mechanics, janitors, researchers and entertainers. It\'s quite simple to start up a park.

But don\'t think for a second that this game is easy. It\'s deep with gameplay that\'s amazingly fast and simple and yet complicated and multitask oriented. And it\'s got a moderate learning curve, too. Players shouldn\'t expect to score perfectly on their first, or even second, park. There are a lot of elements to take care of, from striking performers to rising employee costs to litter bugs, broken down rides, and fickle consumers. It takes hours to set up and modify your park just right.

Players of the PC version will quickly point out that a keyboard is much better for a game like this. Perhaps with Quake III it\'s true, but Bullfrog has come up with an ingenious "laptop" interface that\'s quick and easy to toggle through. You can instantly check on any aspect of the park, with no load times to fuss over. The four PlayStation buttons, triangle, circle, square, and X, are all mapped to a specific function, depending on where the analog button is directed. With nothing highlighted, the buttons enable general controls, Laptop, Build, Path, and Hire. The analog button enables you to move your field of view across the park, which then shows an outline around an item, which you can then select. The response time is immediate, and so is the quickness with which you zip through menu screens.

The laptop did leave me hanging a few times, though. The only thing that I really wanted to do is to pick up my janitors and place them in certain spots. I wanted to do it immediately and get back to work, but without a mouse or a "pickup button" I was out of luck. The other downside to the almost immaculate laptop interface is the voicemail system. It\'s easy enough to use, but with my "advisor" on, all of the troubles I needed to address come straight from his mouth; they\'re immediate. The voice-mails were useless. They are slow and can\'t be pinned down to a specific time, so you never know if they are relevant or out of date, and so they simply become redundant.

Designing the park is only the first step in making the park work. Reconsidering each and every aspect of the park is where the real work -- and strange, meddling fun -- lies. To make money you have to balance large and small rides with things like sideshows and burger shops. You see, making money isn\'t just about laying down a nice looking park, it\'s about real location, location, location. You have to find out where people buy stuff, what they buy, and what they won\'t. For instance, balloons work great in Halloween World. Two or three balloon shops will rake in the big bucks. But in my Halloween park don\'t try selling ice cream. I tried three times to set one up in various locations and I never sold a one. In short, the game makes you dig deep for the perfect spot; it\'s a true wonder in making obsessive, micro-management fun.

The game is quite hefty, too. Players can open up eight different parks -- Wonder Land, Halloween World, Lost Kingdom, Space Zone, Land of Dreams, Enchanted Island, Space the Final Frontier, Space: Star Park, and Halloween: Ghost World. Once they earn enough gold tickets (the game\'s so-called currency) for each park players can open up new parks. Secret goals will also be awarded for achieving things like cleanliness, design, and killer roller coasters, among others.

Graphics
Compared to the PC version, the PS2 version is smoother looking, and just a tad better looking overall. And since all of the items are small, the graphics aren\'t lavish in the way a game such as Final Fantasy or Madden may be. Here, everything is minute, miniaturized, and in a strange sort of way, super-deformed. Still, everything in the parks is nicely detailed, from the coasters to the strange features, such as mountains, trees, or smoke-spewing demons, to the visitors\' animated faces. The first-person perspective is also quite fun. I broke out with a big smile on my face when I rode my first roller coaster. It\'s good plain fun.

What I found particularly fun to open up were the different kinds of rides, each with a different set of animations. Each ride did something different and the little tiny details for each ride was fun to watch. Just opening up new rides was a compelling visual treat.

There are a lot fewer load times in this PS2 version than in the PlayStation version of the game. With one exception: Loading up each park takes almost an entire minute, a ridiculously long loading time for anything.

Sound
What the Bullfrog team did to improve this version over any others was to improve its sound. Players get a real sense of the waves of screams and yelps of glee that come from a theme park. Crowds of kids roar when they ride a roller coaster. When a ride breaks down, they all join together in a sigh of disappointment, a big groan. And just like in the graphics department, each ride has its own particular sounds. Several rides will instantly become your favorite just because of their unique sounds. It\'s also a good idea to listen to each ride as it\'s set up because it emits a little funny sound clip you won\'t hear again.

Each theme park also has its own theme music, none of which are particularly damaging to the ears. In fact, they are quite close to what you would expect to hear from that kind of park. Prehistoric world has primitive drums while Halloween World has spooky music. There is no alternative band selection here, nor is there any techno or old \'80s music, and no, there is no Rob Zombie. It\'s just good clean harmless musak.

Comments

Since Roller Coaster Tycoon isn\'t on the PlayStation 2, I can\'t recommend it for this system. But it does go one step further than Theme Park Roller Coaster by permitting you to play dirty tricks on kids, like throwing them in lakes and watching them die on a broken down roller coaster. It\'s a little more satanic than Theme Park Roller Coaster.

What PS2 gets is Theme Park Roller Coaster, a fun, clean addictive game that\'s intelligent and yet highly amusing. While complicated at times, it is a blast to play, a particular breed of fun, one that appeals to gameplayers with the knack for tinkering, modifying, and relentless revision. And although Theme Park Roller Coaster is a PC game by nature, the fast clip, the easy-to-use interface, and the constant lure to fiddle with everything, is universal to all gamers. Get it.

   --Doug Perry


 



Presentation
Sometimes annoying, othertimes rewarding, the menu system is definitely the best PC-to-console interface I\'ve seen in a long time.  8.0  
Graphics
Since it\'s a God-game, everything is little. But there is a ton od detail, and the game itself is cleanly programmed and shiny.  8.5  
Sound
Awesome sounds of kids on roller coasters and some great ride sounds, too.  8.5  
Gameplay
It\'s obessive, micro-management gameplay that\'s fun, once you get past the learning curve. Deep, silly, and fun.  8.5  
Lasting Appeal
The game seems endless. There is no real end. You just keep tinkering.  8.9  
OVERALL SCORE (not an average)  
 8.4