Great big fun with little tiny rollercoasters...
Written: Jun 07 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Endless depth and replay value, more fun than you can shake a stick at.
Cons: Simple graphics, repetetive sounds.
The Bottom Line: Despite lackluster graphics and sound, RollerCoaster Tycoon is one of the funnest games ever, and an all time classic. I heartily recommend it.
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| Action_Snark's Full Review: Roller Coaster Tycoon For Windows |
If you enjoy playing various 'sim' type games, odds are you've heard of Microprose's ace game designer Sid Meier. Rollercoaster Tycoon is yet another of Sid's amazing works. The premise of the game is simple enough: Build and manage various theme parks. You have to micromanage everything from ride construction and maintenane, to the price of beanie babies at the souvenier stands. The entire game is rather primitive and simple by today's standards, but it's simply a laugh and a half to play.
Gameplay:
The entire game takes place from a 3/4 overhead perspective. You can rotate and zoom, but never really change your view from the default perspective. Management of various aspects of park construction and operation are controlled from both a toolbar atop the screen, and a series of popups. You can simply click on any ride, concession stand, or person, and a relavent popup menu will appear, with actions specific to that entity. The main consideration of the game is to keep the guests in the park happy, and spending money. A good quality park is essentail to your survival, as it will not only keep the people already in the park spending, but will attract other people, and their dollars. Ride construction is at the center of a good park. Without quality rides, your park will founder and sink quickly. There are 2 general categories of rides: "Track" and "Non-Track" rides. Non-Track rides are things like carousels, swinging ships, and ferris wheels. They have no way to modify their shape or structure. You simply select the ride from a menu and place it. Track rides are rides like rollercoasters and log flumes. These rides have the option of placing a pre-fabricatd ride, ala Non-Track rides, but they also allow you to build a ride from scratch. This is where the real fun of the game comes, as it's tons of fun to unleash your imagination on a rollercoaster and see what happens. The only downside to the amazingly fun 'do it yourself' rides is that there is no way to test how the ride will behave (Will it hurl passengers off of jumps, or make them extremely nauseous?) without actually building the ride first. A test mode where you could model the ride and get at least ballpark numbers on performance would have been much appreciated. Also, you must micromanage pretty much every aspect of the park. While this is fun, it can sometimes get quite boring. Trust me, sometimes I simply cannot go on playing the game after I have to drop a handyman (janitor) onto a puddle of vomit so he'll mop it up. While the micromanagement aspects of the game can be tiresome, they are far outweighed by the amount of fun and stimulation you get out of making a grand scheme of a park really come together and become successful. Pretty much everything in a park can be customized, which leaves the door open to endless replay value. If you want an alice in wonderland theme, simply research a new scenery/theming improvement, and go to town. This is yet another factor that combines to make gameplay incredibly engrossing. You really can make your ideal fantasy theme park. Of course, the game can also be very challenging, as you have to balance landscaping and ride building with limited finances, and of course, keep your guests happy at all costs.
Graphics: The graphics are a rather simple affair. The engine seems to be a member of the same family as that in the early Sim City games. It's a simple square based affair that isn't eye popping in the least. I found that the graphics were one of the low points in the game. My biggest gripe was that there are times when you simply cannot get access to something because it's hidden below ground, or behind rides. There are options to turn off scenery and make rides/ground transparent, but what the game really needs is the ability to fully rotate and zoom, rather than the limited rotate/zoom abilities it has now. The game has several avalible resolutions, from 640 X 480 all the way to 1024 X 768 resolutions in full screen. The game is also capable of running in a windowed mode. While the graphics are simple sprite based creatures, they are not bad by any stretch. They get the job done, and some of the graphics are quite whimsical, espescially the behaviour of your park staff. The graphics are quite colorful and crisp. They could have been a lot better, but they are adequate to the task in this game.
Sound:
Sound is another part of the game that is adequate, but not bad. Music is the standard calliope theme park fare, which deserves to be turned off ASAP. Sounds are also about what you'd expect to hear in a theme park, with more calliope music playing, people screaming, and the incessant chiming of cash registers. I found the sounds to be decent, but they get repetitive after a while, espescially the constant dinging sound that happens when your park earns money on something. As with the graphics, the sounds in the game are adequate to the task. They are not overdone, so they do not distract you from the sheer amount of fun the game gives you.
Overall:
This game is one of those nifty time wasting applications that seems to slowly creep in and steal your time. At first, the game seems kind of childish, a mere amusement. However, lurking just below the brightly colored surface is a vast well of both depth of strategy and gameplay. You will be surprised at how long you can spend trying to perfect a rollercoaster, or do something cool like make interlocking loops, and other things to that effect. The game is an insane amount of fun. It's simple exterior should not allow you to be put off, as it's definitely one of the best games ever. The sheer amount of fun you can have unleashing your creativity on an open space of land is unparalleled.
Recommended:
Yes
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Action_Snark
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