(Title card coming... whenever I can...)
Even though it’s a genre I don’t play as much, I quite enjoy games in which you build your own enterprise. When it comes to simulations and tycoons, there are games for just about every stype of enterprise out there. Amusement parks, in particular, seem to be a pretty popular theme for those, probably because it’s so easy to personalize your own park and make your own roller coasters.
Even though it’s a genre I don’t play as much, I quite enjoy games in which you build your own enterprise. When it comes to simulations and tycoons, there are games for just about every stype of enterprise out there. Amusement parks, in particular, seem to be a pretty popular theme for those, probably because it’s so easy to personalize your own park and make your own roller coasters.
In the first year of this blog, I reviewed
Thrillville: Off The Rails DS, which offered some level of freedom in building
your own park... but not that much. Today’s game is the OG
Amusement Park Maker, with 100% customization! But it’s also pretty tricky.
Being slightly closer to reality means having so many more elements to keep track
of, resulting in a game that is very, very complex. Want to feel like an actual
amusement park manager? Want to know the deception of never being able to build
your dream roller coaster because you have to focus on literally everything
else?
Thus, Hasbro Interactive, MicroProse and Chris Sawyer
brought to us Roller Coaster Tycoon, which is sadly less about making awesome,
epic roller coasters than it is about managing parks. But hey, it’s a part of
the package. The game is sold on Steam for 5.99$ USD with all the original expansion packs, making it quite cheap
for a “Deluxe” edition. Then again, the game IS many years old (it was
originally released for home computers in… 1999. Wow, I wasn’t expecting this
game to be that old).
There’s not much of a plot here: You’re an
amusement park manager. You just got that very big piece of land, usually with
raised areas and trees and other things in the way, but not a lot of rides just yet.
Build attractions, make your own park, add roller coasters, and reach the goal
you’ve been given!
The very first park, Forest Frontiers, once I completed it. |
Some parks also have prebuilt rides, most of which are in great working condition. Some others, however... |
Allow me also to say that most of my criticisms are
fairly small, and don’t really impede on the game’s quality… although some of
these points are more annoying or noticeable than others. Many of my problems with the game, the first in the franchise, have been corrected in later
installments – I’m saying it now instead of saying it at every paragraph where
it applies. So, don’t be afraid to try this game or its sequels – especially the sequels
in particular, which may have corrected some of these issues.
Before we move on to the rides, let’s start with the
“humans” of the show: The employees and visitors. First, the visitors, which by
the time of the sequel had been nicknamed, by the fandom, “peeps”.
Yeah, “peeps”.
Hmmm, that marshmallow-y goodness. Maybe it has to do
with the guests’ intelligence and mob mentality. For, you see… while there is
much to be impressed about the artificial intelligence of most NPCs, there are
parts where they could have been made smarter. First off, a major element is
how, as you build your park, you have to build your network of paths
around the rides and attractions. The peeps are intelligent enough to follow
paths, but will choose a way at random when they encounter a fork in the
road. They’re usually smart, but they can get lost in a park with enough forks.
Especially if, say, you build a path two squares wide and the peeps start moving
around in circles, considering every single square to contain multiple forks in
the road. They could literally get lost in a 2X3 rectangle.
I dunno where that train of thought was going, but it crashed on the way. |
I don't need the grass to be mowed, you dense imbeciles! |
Thankfully, the game is designed so that you can use that stupidity to your
advantage – guests will buy a lot of stuff around your park. And if it’s
raining, they will rush to get an umbrella. Each and every single peep. You can
just raise the price of umbrellas, hope for rain, and see those profits
increase like crazy.
Do I want to shake them up, make them sick, or scare them with a high fall? So many ways to make them hate you! |
Although, depending on the current scenario, prebuilt rides can be bothersome – one scenario is specifically made so that one of your major prebuilt coasters crashes very early on and makes you start with a bad reputation. This is also known as Station Brakes failure, and it’s as sudden as it can be random in the game. It’s what happens when the train of a coaster doesn’t brake properly upon returning to the station and crashes into the waiting trains. Even if you repair said ride, it can ruin your chances of victory as people will deem your park unsafe, resulting in less peeps in your park and less money in your wallet.
The "Real Life Parks" extension gives us fully-created parks, based on existing ones. Ony downside is, as the owner, your loan is humongous. In the millions of dollars. |
Then there’s ride aging. Levels last up to 4 in-game
years (when there's a set ending date, at least), yet your older rides in any level will become less appreciated by peeps.
You can set a fee for peeps to pay when they want to go on a ride, but as time
goes they’ll want to pay less for older rides. And then there’s everything else
that can happen with older rides…
I have this huge lake right there, with tons of potential... I could build a roller coaster or a water attraction... BUT NONE OF THE PREMADE ONES WANTS TO FIT THERE! |
Water rides are like roller coasters, right? |
Some memorable scenarios involve building 10 roller coasters. NOW that's the spirit of this tycoon game! |
One of the main ways to raise awareness of your park and get more guests is to lead advertisement campaigns, but some scenarios forbid them. I mean, how
do you advertise a park that just had some people die on your roller coaster?
“Come here, we promise nothing bad will happen if you don’t go on the coaster”? "Now 98% crash-free"? "All of our other rides are safe"? "Peep-tested, Jackass-approved"?
When it comes to tiny parks, some people get VERY creative. |
Then there are scenarios where the guest count or the
park rating are harder to raise – but unlike catastrophic scenarios as
described earlier, you’re usually not told about this beforehand when that
situation occurs. And there’s sometimes no apparent reason for that! In other
scenarios, you’re forbidden from deleting scenery items or leveling the field.
Even worse, other parks limit the height at which you can build rides, making
it basically impossible to build roller coasters. Put all of those together,
and you get the hardest, most annoying level ever. Some are more fun, you have
to build 10 roller coasters in the same park – difficult and expensive, but the park is
usually pretty large.
A park in an iceberg? Sure! Nothing's too crazy in RCT! |
Okay, I guess my rant is over. In fact, I think this
review is over. I covered everything that I could discuss about the game, and…
well, is it any secret? I quite enjoy it. It’s a tricky game to talk about
because I know it’s a beloved title, with a lot of strengths, and any
criticisms I may have are still fairly minor compared to all the positives I
could tell about the game. You know the saying; “The devil is in the details”.
But if they’re just details and not major flaws, it’s not so bad, is it?
Honestly, I recommend this game. It certainly plays well and looks very
impressive, and the fact that it can run at full speed even on weaker
computers makes it even better.
The version of RollerCoaster Tycoon available on Steam
already contains every single expansion pack. There’s the base game (21
levels), the expansions Corkscrew Follies and Loopy Landscapes (30 levels
each), 3 real parks and 1 Extra. For the record, that’s 85 levels, each of
which may require 2 hours or more to beat. If you’re a completionist and you
love this game, you’ll be kept busy for a LONG time.
And I do mean a long time… Later games in the
franchise would add options to speed up the game, seeing things go 3X or 5X as
fast. And RCT3 included the possibility of building stuff while the game itself
was paused. RCT1, unfortunately, forbids construction when the game is paused,
and has also no way to speed things up. You’ll slog through every level, or so
it seems. And since many levels have a set ending date (like October, Year 3 of
the park), you can’t just reach the desired goal and finish there, you have to wait
till the last month of that level.
All in all, it’s only the first game in the franchise,
of course it suffers from some issues. The game would be refined through its
sequels, especially RCT2 (which brought many ameliorations to the base
mechanics, mostly removing a lot of annoying elements that RCT1 had… at the
cost of making every park only a pay-for-entrance or pay-per-ride type) and
RCT3 (which brought actual 3D to the game, at the cost of a lesser performance
on weaker computers). The less we say about RCT4 for Mobile and RollerCoaster
Tycoon World the better, but that’s beside the point. RCT1 is the game that
started it all, and it’s really damn fun.
Next week: I dunno. Something completely different, I
guess.
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