RollerCoaster Tycoon 3: Platinum!

Spend a lot of money to install your coasters! And make sure
your peeps pay through the nose to ride it, too - or else,
how will you make that money back?

Sometimes, you buy a game just because of one feature you really want to try out. I can’t say I wasn’t ever guilty of that, and in fact, I can think of quite a few games I bought just because I was intrigued about one thing I wished to test! Today’s game, for which the version I'm covering is no longer available on Steam, is one of those. The RollerCoaster Tycoon (RCT) games were a creation first of Chris Sawyer and later of Frontier Developments released from 1999 to 2004, and yet all of them were great examples of what computers could achieve at the time, even if some of them used interesting game dev magic to function. RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 was first released in 2004. It’s available on Steam under the name Complete Edition, which was released to online stores in 2020; but what I own is the Platinum! edition, which was pulled from online retailers in 2017 due to an ongoing lawsuit between Atari and Frontier. And, well, after Complete’s release, there's no need to bring it back.

I’ll review the version I have. This version includes expansion packs: Soaked!, which focuses on waterparks, and Wild!, which favors animal exhibits and shows. Let's manage some parks!

The Peeps are Back

Always gotta think of entrances, exits, and paths towards
both anytime you place a new attraction.

The core concept of RollerCoaster Tycoon is to manage amusement parks with different objectives. You may be asked to have a certain number of guests in your park, or to hit a certain park value; other times, you  tend to VIP guests and must satisfy them before they leave. The Peeps are as funny – and numerous! – as ever. But, I must be honest here, there is exactly ONE reason why I bought this game when I already owned RCT1: In 3, you can use the camera to get aboard the rides and roller coasters you place around your park, giving you a first-person view of all the excitement. So, as you can imagine, my first instinct when booting up this one was to go into Sandbox Mode and create everything I could, just to experience it myself right afterwards. That alone was worth the price.

Descending soon... WHEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAHHH!

Clint Bushton: Coaster amateur, ex-president, likes women
named Monica. All similarities with persons living or
dead, yadda yadda.

But! There’s still a game behind all this! 18 scenarios in the classic package, and an extra 21 (9 in Soaked!, 12 in Wild!) across both expansions, for a total of 39. All of them have objectives split in three ranks: Apprentice, Entrepreneur and Tycoon. You can’t move on to the next rank until you’ve finished every mission of the current one. On early scenarios, the later rank missions are just extensions of previous ones (ex. Have 450+ guests in your park for two months on Entrepreneur, when one request in Apprentice demanded 300+ guests for one month).

But! Sometimes, the requests differ. Several scenarios require you to repay your loan in order to complete the Entrepreneur rank; you can spend all your cash early on and build your fortune back by repaying the loan a grand at a time, or you can repay everything fast, at the risk of having to take more loans down the line, or you can try to spend as little as possible, which… well, it’s kinda your role to buy stuff and improve your park!

This is starting to look nice. A bit disjointed, but nice.

In this scenario, the guests are mostly teenagers who want
spooky stuff with high excitement, and will turn their noses
at non-scary stuff. Build wisely! Also, that big chasm
is pretty much a no-go for construction.

Some scenarios like to play around with what you’re allowed to do. Early on, you can’t set an entry ticket price for the park, and thus you can only make your cash from ride tickets and shop/food sales. Adding this possibility to later scenarios means another element to take into consideration. Raise the entrance price and lower the ride prices? Or vice versa? Some scenarios forbid modification of the land – no raising or lowering the ground to create little mountains, or to remove bothersome elevations. (Paths can be a little finicky to build on elevations, so do think of keeping some extra cash in case it gives you trouble.) Other kinds of limitation can be imposed upon you.

The trickiest thing, depending on your budget, is a mission requiring the installation of a roller coaster. They’re in the title, they're the centerpieces. Several scenarios open with one coaster in place, usually at a high ticket price. Even the cheaper and smaller coasters will take three thousand RCT dollars off your hands, and that’s without adding on the cost of building paths to and from it. Most roller coasters’ entrances and exits are located off the ground, so you'll likely need to build paths going upwards.

And considering the sheer size of 90% of available coaster
types, you better plan ahead and keep large, empty spaces
that you know you'll be filling up with one.

Money, Games, and Tests

Guys, get to cleaning. The park's nasty. We need it spic
and span or the guests will be angry. And the bosses, too.

Your park always opens with an inspector hired to comment on specific elements and serve as help and an indicator of improvements. Stuff at the information booth is too expensive/too cheap? One ride has been breaking too often? He’ll tell you. Aside from that guy, you also need to hire janitors; some parks you inherit have paths covered in puke and litter, so you can hire a few janitors to clean up slowly, since a dirty park greatly reduces your park’s rating, or hire many on the first few months to clean it all up and then fire a few. You don’t have that hassle for mechanics; you can just have one at first and then hire more as your park (and number of attractions) grows. Other employees you can hire includes entertainers and security guards, but while the first is fun, I haven’t yet run into a scenario where the guard is necessary.

Some parks are gorgeous but very limiting in terms of
ride placements and possibilities. Just gotta figure out what
to place and where!

Your park’s rating is determined through multiple metrics: The number of guests, how happy they are, the total worth of all your park rides’ excitement and intensity ratings, ride up-time, and general cleanliness of the park. Some objectives require reaching above a certain rating or keeping a high rating for a certain amount of time.

If the park you own feels small, some scenarios have areas where you can buy extra land, allowing for expansion. I see the appeal, but since my money fluctuates based on the peeps’ needs and whatever it takes to maintain the park, none of the scenarios I’ve played so far needed me to buy squares of land.

One thing I noticed about my way of playing is that whenever I get in a tough spot financially, I lower the amount of money I put into research monthly. Each scenario has a pool of rides and other park improvements that it unlocks over time based on what you decide to put your research money into, with the possibility to spend up to 500$ a month into research, or nothing or next to nothing. A bigger budget for research means rides and other park elements being discovered and added to the menus faster. Note that this includes everything from roller coaster types and all kinds of rides (including water-based ones) all the way to décor elements. It’s all about what you prefer to focus your research on, or research at all. If it feels like there’s a lack of peeps in the park, you could also invest in ad campaigns.

Hmmm... These are rookie numbers.
I can do better.

Build a park around a ghost town? Let's try not to
get haunted, alright? Uh... Ghosts ride for free!

Maximize profit, figure out which cuts to make (or, alternately, what will get you the most money back on investment), and most importantly – make it fun! After all, you might have VIPs to impress – and they might request to go on major rides in your park. Or see specific stuff, like firework displays – Oh right, you can set up those, too, and add décor elements to transport rides to make them interesting. The rides themselves are separated into themes (Western, Spooky, Adventure, etc.), and that, too, can factor into specific requests down the line! So much to think about!

Waterparks and Zoos

Skipping out on the Soaked! and Wild! expansions is foolish since they offer more than double the content available in the base game. However, this does mean learning to use features that you might seldom use in normal parks. I had some catching up to do to properly represent these features here.

This... might not be a safe water slide. Just a hunch.

The pool is looking kinda lonely back there, but really, you
don't need much around it for the first Soaked! scenario.
I bet the follow-ups have much trickier requirements.

For starters: Most of the extras in Soaked! focus on pools and pool accessories. Water rides set around the pool cannot charge the customers – only the entrance to the pool can. As a result, any waterslides and other stuff like this that you can set around can bring more visitors to your park, yes, and have more people coming to the pool, but you will need to adjust the entrance fee to the pool accordingly to justify re-earning the money spent on these attractions. Many of these are as expensive as roller coasters! Due to the waterpark angle, objectives focus on getting people into the pool – not that you can slack off on anything else, either.

I wished my waterpark looked more like a bowl of noodles.

Further testing out the waterpark features in the Sandbox Mode led to the Platinum! edition suffering from intense performance issues, with the game lagging anytime I moved the camera around, and sit got worse every time a new waterpark ride was added. The lag was worse here  than with just basic amusement park rides on the screen! I blame the water. Maybe it’s one of the things that were improved by the Complete Edition released in 2020.

I want to ride on an elephant! This looks so awesome!
I'll settle with watching the zebras and grizzly bears.

I also tested the Wild! expansion. The focus is on building animal enclosures and animal-themed events. The first scenario alone shows a large field on which guests can ride on elephants. Enclosures are fences of different types, for keeping animals of different levels of risk away from guests (wooden fences for zebras; electrified ones for grizzly bears; etc.), each category of animal needs its own house within the enclosure. And, of course, each enclosure needs its own viewing gallery, so that people will pay to safely see the animals from closer!

Sure, can't build rides in the free-roam area of the animals,
where the elephants are walking - but we can fill out the
areas around that, easily!

There’s a cost, of course; each animal has its price, and you need plenty of animal keepers to clean the poop away and care for the beasts. Not to mention any money you can spend on animal toys and food. Peeps can pay an “adoption fee” for an animal, which just means they love it enough to spend a little extra, however much you request, for it. But remember, on top of everything else, you’ve still got to build rides and create interest in your park! These mechanics are a lot easier to learn and get used to than in the waterpark expansion, and the missions are straightforward (in the first scenario, I had to finish with a park value of 125,000$, which just takes time).

Final thoughts

Even after all this time experimenting and using the Sandbox
Mode, I still love trying out every ride in first-person view.

In the short timespan I had to write all this (not to mention the project I’m working on for July), I did not have time to play through the whole game. But everything I’ve seen made me love this one and want to finish it. Yeah, I loved the classic RollerCoaster Tycoon, but this one is special. No, not just because we can embark on the rides (though, to be fair, I still see that as a huge selling point for a retro PC game from 2004!), but because it’s not too stressful of a management game and has a ton of things to keep a player invested. Sure, since then we've had Planet Coaster (and that one is in my backlog, too), but it’s good to come back to the classics from time to time. And RCT3 does not disappoint.

Appropriately for the genre, the scenarios start easy, but begin throwing curveballs your way as you progress. Missions progressively introduce and teach the new features, before making them trickier over time. A lot of objectives start off easy to attain, but are tougher down the line, especially once you are asked to balance multiple goals at once.

Lots of variety in how scenarios play out, how peeps react
to what you set up, and what you're asked to do.

Construction isn’t always that simple; terrain can be very finicky to work with, especially when it comes to building paths, and I did run into issues on occasion where path tiles would refuse to connect even with my best efforts to level the terrain. Making themed attractions and areas can be tough since the requirement for such a goal is nebulous at best. In fact, some would say that scenarios here, while varied, are simplified compared to what you could face in previous entries; I don’t think it’s much of an issue personally, the challenge is still there, and there’s the expansions in case one wants more variety. The game may have suffered from performance issues back when it was first released in 2004, but it runs great on modern hardware – though there are still issues here and there, especially when water physics and mechanics are present, which RCT3: Platinum! struggles to handle.

This is a screenshot from a sandbox park I started long,
long ago. Look at how BIG this thing is. So many coasters.

This edition came with extra tools to edit your peeps, create new scenarios, or design coasters or buildings. The scenario editor lets you pick which rides and elements can be accessible from the start, what can be researched, how the park starts, what the objectives are, and so on – so there’s an impressive level of customization here, just like in the other modes. This, on top of the Sandbox Mode where you can build to your heart’s content, makes RCT3 feel like a complete game with lots to do in the base game, and a lot of options to create on your own!

I would say this game is worth it if you love management sims, but – as I said at the very beginning, the specific Platinum! edition was never re-added to digital platforms. Allow me to recommend the Complete edition instead. When that one was released, I think people were hoping that it would have even more content to offer, and were disappointed that it had few to no changes, aside from some cosmetics and brand removals. Still, if you’ve never played any RollerCoaster Tycoon game before, and you’d rather go for a classic for nostalgia’s sake, then this is a solid entry and worth trying.

On this, I’m going back to writing about… Pokémon! That’s what my anniversary review will be about!