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).

Exploring the Switch's Nintendo Classics #2

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I was planning on continuing these articles under the Nintendo Switch Online denomination, but then Nintendo decided to change it due to the upcoming release of the Switch 2; they are now known as the Nintendo Classics (...even though it includes stuff from the SEGA Genesis, and a lot of third-party games released on retro consoles). Oh well! I'll manage. Just a quick name change, right?

I was hoping to cover a different console for the second such article in a row, but as it turns out, the NES section has most of the shortest games among the Nintendo Classics, so – might as well do this again! For the foreseeable future, I might try to release full articles covering the short games from just one console, at least as long as it will be possible. I'll cover games from other consoles soon enough!

Sports

Go Canadians Go! ...Oh wait. Canada isn't one
of the two teams here.

Ice Hockey: Released in January 1988 in Japan and two months later in North America, this title is self-explanatory – you play a hockey team in a match against another. You choose your team (one out of six), then the opponent, the speed of the game, the duration of the match. After which, you can change the layout of your team of five; the goalie never changes, but the other teammates can be slim and weak but fast, average all around, or stocky and slow but strong when brawls happen. Yep, there can be brawls in this game. Aside from when you’re put in control of the goalie, you swing the hockey stick with A, and swap to another teammate with B. It’s a complicated game that requires way more skill than I’m likely to ever have, and I doubt I’ll play it beyond these first few tests. Though, I am told there’s a decent number of extra little programming details, like the crowd noise being louder when the game is a close one.

Spectrobes: Origins (Part 4)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4

We end this today!

Krawlosphere

Final dungeon looks like a dump and is just not
interesting to explore. Checks out.

Rallen and Jeena land their ship inside the planetoid and step out. The place is nothing but writhing Krawl flesh. Gross. No other way but forward. I mean it, too; this dungeon is nothing but one long corridor forward with larger rooms for battles. You have exactly one unavoidable battle in each corridor, and then one longer fight in each room. Multiple rounds of enemies topped with mini-bosses. Thankfully, the mandatory fights don’t return once they have been cleared, which means that you can go back to the ship at any time to save, heal your Spectrobes and swap your team around.

Rice balls! Pluck 'em right out of the ground, and eat 'em!
It's okay, they're clean! Somehow!

Kinda annoys me that there’s no other way whatsoever to heal your Spectrobes, other than when they level up. The only healing items in this game are rice balls, coming in four varieties that heal your player character 30, 100, 300 or 1000 HP. Nothing for your creatures. No way to bring them back into action during a battle after they’re fainted, either – no Revives here! Nope, the only controllable way to heal any of these battle beasts is through a save point. And, oh yeah, you can’t buy rice balls anywhere. There's only two ways to find some. The first is to find them with your searcher critter. The second is to discard a cleaned fossil, which trades it away for random items – can be minerals or rice balls, gotta be lucky. Not a very reliable thing. Kinda sucks when you're short and need many, quick, before heading out to fight a boss.

These charged attacks are pretty awesome to watch.
They're better when they actually deal, y'know, good damage
to the enemies and bosses.

And the Krawlosphere being what it is, you won’t find any fossils, crystals or healing items here. Any light patches to investigate will summon enemy encounters. Which, to be fair, makes the planetoid a perfect training spot if your team is still weak against what’s coming up.

Spectrobes: Origins (Part 3)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4

On to the next planets!

Sure, if you Slayso!

…I should have stones thrown at me for that pun.

While I'm preparing to attack this spider alien with a robot
in it, my shoes Spectrobe is kicking it left and right.
This is a weeeeird game sometimes.

After the stop by Wyterra to present the latest shard to Radese (and reporting on the planetoid-sized Krawl coming), Rallen and Jeena head over to Slayso, the fifth planet of the system, permanently covered by a sandstorm. Its only building is a thousand-floor memorial tower built right after the Great Krawl War, many millenia ago. Only two residents: Tidy and Scout, the robots who take care of the tower. On the ground floor we encounter a spider Krawl with a robot stuck in its body; after it escapes, the officers meet Tidy, who says that Scout was captured by that thing. It fled upwards, so we must go up the floors to rescue the robot.

Go on, lil' Spectrobe doggo! Fetch that elevator! Good boy!

No other NPC in sight, so this chapter is low on story events. We climb the floors using elevators. On several floors, there’s a puzzle to solve. On others, there are seven rooms with elevators, only one of which works, while the other rooms have Krawl encounters. Other times, an elevator is located out of reach, and so we send a child Spectrobe to bring it down after following a maze of pathways. So much of this tower feels like padding that an entire hour’s worth of floors could have been cut. The only perk is that, if you force yourself to do it, there’s a lot of options for level-grinding. Your beasts will need it.

There's a couple of decent puzzles in this tower. Lots of
fights, too. But damn, it's so freaking linear.
And so... damn... long...

Spectrobes: Origins (Part 2)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4

We’re continuing this quest in the Kaio planetary system!

Doldogo

Call it a hunch, but the river being turned into
Purple Drank isn't a great sign.

Eeyep, these Krawl are plants. Jeena, bring the flamethrower!

Rallen and Jeena land their ship near a village, only to see that the river going through it has run purple and poisonous. Upon meeting Gretta, the village's chief, we learn that her daughter has gone missing after going up to the Tree of Life, through the forest from the Verdant Village. The NPP officers head towards the Tree to investigate. They find Gretta’s daughter Salia, near the tree, attacked by plant-property Krawl. These aliens do adapt to the environments they invade! The monsters are defeated, and the girl is taken back to her village safe and sound.

These battles introduce status effects to battle, like poison,
or later, freeze, stunned, and so on. These are really annoying
because they impact your ability to fight, and there is
NO WAY to heal yourself from them, you can only wait for
them to pass. Poison will cause your character to stumble at
every couple seconds and lose HP as well. Augh!

Flying Spectrobes are only useful like this twice. Also, good
thing one species like it is so common on this planet! Or
else we would get stuck pretty badly!

However, the water remains nasty. Heading deeper into the woods, the heroes find large Krawl polluting the waters and harming the Tree of Life. The first two are dealt with, but the road to the third goes by a chasm they cannot cross. Jeena gets the idea of sending a flying child Spectrobe to the rocks above the cliff to break them and create a bridge. Using the C button, you can control child Spectrobes outside of battle in specific situations, to explore or solve puzzles like this one. Most Spectrobes are on the ground, but some are capable of flight. Later in this chapter, we control a walking child form through smaller holes in walls to activate mechanisms to open doors to new areas. The flying Spectrobe creates the bridge, and the officers carry through.

Little Komainu goes on a journey. Come back,
but only after you've opened the path!