RollerCoaster Tycoon

(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.

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.

Allow me to preface all this by saying that, while I have a lot of criticisms about the game, it’s still very impressive. For its day, the isometric view almost feels like 3D, although it actually isn’t. To see every single piece you’ve put in place be flipped by 90 degrees when you change the view, however, helps to maintain the illusion. Let me remind you that, by the end of a scenario, your park will be gigantic, and yet every single piece will stay in place. The software will run at full power no matter how many animations are going on in your park at the same time, and that includes both rides AND the potential thousands of visitors… and would run at full power even on less capable computers, too! It’s a marvel of programming, really. Not to mention, the physics engine for the roller coasters is great! And you have to take said physics into consideration when you build your own coaster. Too high a climb for the speed at whuch the coaster is going? Whoopsie, the train is going backwards now!

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.

There are other issues with the peeps; among others, they can hold only one item of food or drink at a time, but still feel the need to pass by every food or drink stand you got and go, “I already have food”. Constantly. Endlessly. There is a menu that will let you see the most common thoughts among your park’s visitors, and sometimes it’ll be trivial thoughts caused precisely by these issue in the programming of the A.I. A peep may have had a grand time at the park. but if they have spent all of their money, want to leave, and can't find the exit, you'll see that appreciation level decrease.

I don't need the grass to be mowed, you dense imbeciles!

Speaking of the A.I. of “human” characters… The employees. For the most part, they’re fine. Make sure you’ve got all the employees you need, extra mechanics, extra handymen, some security and some entertainers. Mechanics will get fairly quickly to rides and repair them. Handymen… well, they do whatever job they can do around the park, and are automatically set to do every possible job they can – which includes mowing the grass. For the record, growing grass changes nothing to the gameplay whatsoever, and mowing it serves little purpose aside from making the park look a little better. Since every handyman you hire has “mowing grass” automatically set, then any handyman can go off to mow the grass, even though they should have more important tasks to do like sweeping the paths. Later RollerCoaster Tycoon games have “mow grass” unchecked on every handyman you hire, though you can check that option on each one. I mean, the A.I. is smart, usually, but it’s got some skewed priorities sometimes.

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!

On to the rides. There’s a wide selection of them, although very few parks actually include all of the available in-game rides. Most rides will become available over time, though, through research and funding that can be done in every park. Many parks have prebuilt rides as well, so you’re not empty-handed when you start.

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!

Not that building rides is that easy either, mind you; every scenario happens in a piece of land that you must level appropriately, because most fields will have mountains and crevices and it can severely limit your ability to build rides and paths- thing is, leveling the field is very expensive. And it also costs money to remove scenery items like trees and ruins. You can easily spend most of your budget leveling the field just the way you want it. Then, there’s water. You can remove water from the area, although it’s necessary to build some of the rides and a pretty cool place on which to put a roller coaster – but it can also be bothersome since the ground underneath the water isn’t level and it makes building rides very difficult.

Water rides are like roller coasters, right?

But of course, the biggest downside is the whole aspect of building roller coasters. Oh yes, it’s great to build your own thing. But as I said, it’s a park management sim first, a roller coaster constructor second. You can easily spend an in-game year, maybe even two, building your roller coaster – but it’s very expensive, and involves a lot of experimentation. You need to choose between paying attention to your park and paying attention to your construction of a roller coaster. That’s why most players will use prebuilt coaster models first, and only start work on a custom roller coaster once they’ve completed a scenario and reached the sandbox part of a park.

Some memorable scenarios involve building 10 roller
coasters. NOW that's the spirit of this tycoon game!

Last but not least, the scenarios. They come in all shapes and sizes, each with their own park and their own requests. Chris Sawyer and the other developers of RollerCoaster Tycoon did their best to think up many creative scenarios, some of which go out of the ordinary. The first parks have fairly basic goals: Have X people in your park by the end of year Y, have an approval rating of X by the end of year Y, have a park value of X… It’s all simple. Then, you’ve got some “special” goals that force you to think outside the box and try new playstyles. One memorable scenario involves making a certain amount of money… only from selling food and drinks. I also mentioned the horrible parks that start with catastrophes, forcing you to start with a terrible reputation.

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.

The worst part, though, is how restrictive some parks are in size. The smallest park measures only 13X13 squares, and considering most regular rides are from 2X2 to 4X4 in size, it’s VERY limiting. It’s a memorable scenario… for all the wrong reasons. Other parks are also similarly small. On the other hand, a park can be so large that you might never completely fill it with rides, especially if you don’t want to use more than once the same kind of ride.

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!

Here’s the worst part, though: Look, I respect Chris Sawyer, this is a great game and I enjoy it despite its flaws, but one thing annoys me. According to this game’s main developer, the only way to play the game is to complete the scenarios. There’s just something that bugs me about developers wanting to dictate how people play their games. It’s a pet peeve of mine, especially in games like this where creativity is a big part of the gameplay – it’s a Roller Coaster tycoon with built-in roller coaster design software, for God’s sake! And you tell me that, by wanting a sandbox mode in which to let my creativity loose, I’m “doing it wrong, I need to do it right”? Sawyer was so opposed to sandbox modes that he wouldn’t even let players add "sandbox mode" mods in the RCT2, and inserted code preventing said mods from functioning properly. Apparently, sales got really bad for that one after this controversial decision. A sandbox mode was added to RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, but Chris Sawyer wasn’t the only major developer for this one. That’s the thing: Having a Story Mode isn’t a bad thing in games like this one, but gamers are creative people. If they get a game that offers some form of creative expression, and no way to actually enjoy it unless you slog through the Story, of course they’ll be disappointed.

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.

My favorite level: Arid Heights. Endless money, no time limit, all I need is
to get 2,000 guests in the park without lowering the park rating below 700.
Most rides are available, you can level the field as you desire, and you get
one of the largest pieces of land. It. Is. Awesome.

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.

I guess it does feel rewarding when you succeed in making
a park profitable.

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.