hm8080's Full Review: Sim Theme Park for PlayStation 1
SimTheme Park.
I read a preview of this PC game from Bullfrog (Electronic Arts) in a PC game magazine last year. I was so glad a sequel was coming out, being such a huge fan of the first Theme Park. I made up my mind to buy it as soon as it came out but I only recently found a copy sitting on a shelf at a software store after about 5 months of the game's commercial release. I first played the first version of this game when I was in senior year at high school. I was so hooked on it, the game followed me on my laptop to my freshman year at college. Back then it didn't come on CD-ROM, it came in four 1.44 high density floppy disks. Imagine that! And my laptop was a 64-shade grayscale DX-33 with only FOUR megabytes of RAM! Besides running Theme Park flawlessly on it, I also ran Microsoft Office 4.1 on it. Yes! On just 4MBs of RAM (today you cannot even load ICQ into less than 10MBs of system memory).
Game basics
Basically, the game's purpose is easy to grasp, build the best park you can and manage it, keeping your cash flow on the positive. You can build anything from the smallest of shops, sideshows to the tallest and craziest roller coasters. SimTheme Park tries to keep the game engaging and less monotonous by challenging you to meet targets and rewarding you when you achieve certain goals. For example, building the best of the best in specific categories will earn you golden tickets. Meeting the target number of visitors at any one time in your park will also reward you with tickets. These tickets will allow you to purchase mystery rides for free.
There are 5 themes to choose from, you begin with a golden key which will allow you to open the door to a park, e. Lost Kingdom, Halloween. In order to advance a new level (start a park with a new theme) you'll need to build and maintain your current park to earn more golden keys. You need at least 5 keys to open and start building the Space theme park.
More basics
When you start a park, make sure you plan carefully the placement of the shops and rides. And when you hire new workers, assign their patrol path right away so you won't have to find them all wondering around at random spots. Build lots of food stalls and research balloon and costume shops first, these are very popular and give a certain idea of how popular your park is to see how many kids are buying the stuff. You have to hire researches and set them working in your R&D department if you want to come up with upgrades for better rides and new shops etc. Should you run out of money, take a bank loan! I don't wnat to give away too much else of the basics, just know that the learning curve for this game isn't too steep, you'll enjoy it, first timers too!
Slow on slow systems
Funny how just a year ago my system's still considered pretty fast, now it's "outdated" compared to all the current PCs. When my park becomes about half the size of the largest possible park-size, my PC starts to crawl. What with all the noise and sound that goes on and the animation, my AMD K62-400 with 128MB of RAM just can't cope fast enough.
How's gameplay
After a while, I got really bored with some of my existing parks. With so many rides to maintain, I just don't have time to sit back and enjoy the scenery or take a ride in my own park (you can ride the rides by clicking a icon in the ride information screen, this gives you a first-person video-cam view of what's going on). And the many advisor messages about this going wrong or that going kaboom, it soon becomes a huge messy affair. I wish there was a way to slow or hasten things, if there is, I have yet to find it.
Graphics and sound
Seems like most games these days support Creative's Environmental Audio. When I turned this on (I have a Soundblaster Live Value and surround speakers), I didn't find any noticeable difference in the sound ambience etc. Overall, the sound is good and realistic with kids screaming at the right time whenever the roller coaster takes a sharp turn or starts tumbling down. The advisor's voice gets very annoying after a while as he tends to repeat the same stuff over and over again sometimes. Thankfully, you can turn this off. Graphics is great, I especially like the option of taking a ride in your own park, you can see a nice 3-D view of the whole area and things fade out to the distance. Try building a really high roller coaster and take a ride on it, the view is great. I also love taking aerial rides of the whole park, it's really something! Naturally, graphics is light years better than the first Theme Park, but it takes a fairly powerful video card and CPU to run things smoothly at high quality. You can also zoom in and out of your park by using the arrow keys which is nice. Either use aerial view (top to bottom) or zoom close up to a kid buying ice-cream.
Overall impression
There just seems to be so much more to do in this newer version of Theme Park. The first version that came in just 4 floppy disks was always very enjoyable everytime I played it. On the whole, I like Sim Theme Park, I like the idea of challenges given every now and then and using keys to advance to newer parks. Also, you can publish your masterpieces should you feel like it over at the Theme Park website. I cannot remember the URL offhand but that is a great idea, to be able to share your work with other fans over the web. I just wish it wasn't so power-hungry as I don't plan on upgrading my PC anytime soon.
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