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RollerCoaster Tycoon

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: June 23, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game is awesome! It's so fun to create different parks. It really sparks your imagination! It also teaches skills on keeping a budget and not spending too much money at once. I would recommend it to kids 8 and older.

Addictive Personalties BEWARE

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: January 05, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This is a brilliant fusion sophisticated simming, and simple engineering. The ability to build roller coasters is easy to learn, and the levels increase in challenge as the players skill grows. Held together by an arcade style level structure, where after completing one challenge the player enters his or her name complete with score, this game can consume more hours then most of the world. Put both arms up, and get ready to scream, this is the best sim game . . . EVER.

Customizable customization, colors coasters details

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: September 17, 2001
Author: Amazon User

First of all, this is not Sim City, nor was it even made by the company, but that is a good thing in this case. The first difference is that rather than starting with some random piece of land to build your park, you pick a scenario to beat! The controls are far easier than Sim City and it flows more smoothly and there are far more details like walking people that get hungry, angry, thirsty, sick and tired. You must make sure they have fun! By building steel, standing, corkscrew, wooden, and backward coasters, yada yada, Ferris wheels, motion simulators, merry-go-rounds, log rides and you get the picture. You can customize everything in the game, the color of the ride, the speed of the ride, how many loops or laps everything has. However, you need to be careful of three things when it comes to rides. The excitement to get the people on the ride, the intensity to make sure they get a thrill and the nausea factor to make sure they don't throw up, but when they throw up, that's when you hire maintenance people who walk around cleaning stuff.

Be Prepared to Hog the PC

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: January 08, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This is an extreamly addictive game. Both my son (10) and I want to play and we are constantly trying to get the mouse from the other during game play. We have various sim city and sim train games but none are as fun to play as this one. I think this is for two reasons. First, the game is not one where you get frustrated because you go bankrupt every time you try to play. Second, ammusment parks are fun to go to and fun to build on a PC. You can build the park of your dreams! Additionally, the program is easy to learn, seems to be absolutely bug free and the graphics are great. It lets you change the landscape and build various tunnels and other things that you wish they would have on real parks (if they weren't so darn cost concious). If you like sim games or just want to try one to see if you like them, this is the one to get. Happy building!

If you still haven't played this game, you should

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: June 19, 2001
Author: Amazon User

There are many Simcity type games out there, but this is FUN! You just can't stop smiling whether your park get award or your rollercoaster crushes. This is a new game experience. I wish if the game had a rider's view point, so I could actually ride the coasters I built.

Really great game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: July 19, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This is one of my favorite computer games ever. You get to build all the rides you want and create your own amusement park. The one thing that I find really annoying is that you have to keep raising and lowering the ground, but other than that this is a great game.

And it'll even run on a Pentium 90...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: December 30, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Without a doubt, this is the most popular game I have ever seen. It appeals to everyone, from my friends who love RPG's to the ones who can't stop playing shooters. I honestly have not come across one person who doesn't like this game. You start the game with about 5 scenarios available in which you have to build up different theme parks to meet certain goals to unlocking new scenarios. You can control almost everything in this game, (and even more with the expansions) from how much a slice of pizza costs to raising the price of an umbrella when it's raining out. Not only that, but you can see what every single guest in the park is thinking, carrying, and doing; as well as pick them up and move them around or name them. There are also tons of rides, from Merry-go-Rounds to haunted houses, and plenty of scenery options and themes, but where the game really shines is on the construction of roller coasters. The game has pre-built ones for you, but you usually need (and want) to make your own. It takes practice to build ones people actually want to ride on, but once you get it down, it's awesome. You can spend hours and hours playing this game, it keeps you every bit as glued to the screen as Civ II did. Although the game doesn't let you build a park from scratch, the Loopy Landscapes expansion does, so that problem is solved. The only detracting flaw of this game is that it's sometimes hard to see what you're building if there are too many other rides around you, but you can usually fix that by rotating the view and making things transparent. Buy this game, you'll absolutely love it.

Still Playing After Over Two Years

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: September 18, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Yes, it's that good. Despite the lack of a sandbox mode (totally freeform play a la Bullfrog's classic Theme Park), RollerCoaster Tycoon keeps proving to be an interesting game with all kinds of fun behind it. Actually, I think it keeps proving to be interesting BECAUSE there isn't a sandbox mode. Since you have to do scenarios, each presents a different type of challenge. Having a sandbox mode usually means that you do all the cool stuff with the game first, then toss it aside waiting for the next piece of new software to come down the pipe. In RCT, you have to *work* for the good stuff. The wild Vertical coaster doesn't appear until you have worked through at least half of the challenges presented. Once you have gone through all 25 scenarios, more await with the Loopy Landscapes expansion pack, which has all kinds of new stuff to work with (including coasters that didn't exist at the time RCT was released), and stretches the game engine to the limits. Just remember, remain seated please and keep your hands firmly on the mouse and keyboard when playing. Enjoy the ride!

I get it now....

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: May 16, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I happened to play Sim Theme Park (STP) first, which I liked, but in which the gameplay was constantly interrupted by a need to fix the rides. And while playing it, I was thinking, "Well, if that wasn't part of the game, what would there be left to do?" Now I get it.

You can set up a park in Roller Coaster Tycoon (RCT) that basically runs itself. If you staff it well, you won't even have to worry (much) about the usual things that turn guests off (litter, vandalism, lack of facilities, etc). And what are you doing during all this? Planning expansions. Landscaping. Building roller-coasters. And it's surprisingly entertaining.

A comparison with STP is useful here: In STP I would repeatedly find some little detail and think "Well, that was cool." The artistry of that game is elaborate--but inside of a week or two of fairly casual play, I had seen all there was to see. In RCT, though, the sensation one has is of actually making a park his own, as opposed to just arranging elements that an artist has given him. (You're still arranging someone else's artwork in RCT, but the pieces are small enough tht it doesn't feel that way.)

STP has the ultra-cool first-person perspective option courtesy Bullfrog's ultra-cool Dungeon Keeper/Populous/Theme Park engine--and yet the graphics in that game are so gaudy as to be somewhat tiring. RCT's decidedly more primitive graphics are actually easier to look at after a while, and really encourage you to landscape your park! The two main drawbacks of the engine are that there's no first person view and that you can only rotate the isometric view by 90 degrees.

STP's free rotation and zoom would be welcome here, but RCT provides myriad different views by allowing you to hide different features of the park and terrain. In fact, the depth of various RCT tools are amazing, some of which I was surprised were left out of STP (which was released after). In fact, I find myself hesitant to state that there are tools missing from RCT because I've found so many of them after thinking "I wish the game gave me a way to....".

The game is not perfect, of course. What is the deal with handymen? In STP you could drop your handyman on top of six piles of vomit and he might just walk away. In RCT, he'll clean them up, but you'll wonder why he hadn't done it before. (The manuals even admonish you that your handymen are sort of clueless. I think it must be some sort of AI problem.)

The route-setting mechanism in RCT is more primitive than STP's (where you just have to drag your mouse around the area you want your worker to partol) but surprisingly RCT's works better in the sense that it's much easier to add or remove a section of the park from someone's route. Neither game has a feature for you to say "Who's patrolling this area?" which results in some drudge work when your park gets big. You can't rename your workers in RCT, either, which was a big help in STP for keeping track of them.

Also RCT allows you to do some very cool stuff with tunnels and bridges, but it's hard to patrol those areas. In an early game I ended up putting a roller-coaster very, very high up because of the way the terrain was, and I could =not= get mechanics to inspect the ride, resulting in the deaths of 16 poor little sims when the coaster suddenly flew off the track. (So much for that "Safest Park" award.)

Probably the most disturbing aspect of the AI in this game is how easily the guests get lost. One of the maps has a beautiful flower garden arranged in columns with one aisle going down the center, and guests entering that will never find their way out. You can build a perfectly feasible real-world map and end up with an RCT-world mess. Often a creative solution is available, though.

But again, most of these complaints feel like nitpicks. I can see why this game has persisted on the top ten charts for two years, and I'm glad I got it as a sort of "antidote" to "Black and White". It doesn't ask you any deep philosophical questions, and it doesn't really challenge one's ideas about what computer games can be or do: It's just fun.

Before I end this, let me add that this game is somewhat tougher to learn than Sim Theme Park. I could see 6-8 year olds playing STP whereas this game strikes me as having a 10-year old lower level.

Yes, it's realistic...live with it!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: April 11, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Now, come on! How much fun would a game be if nothing could ever go wrong? This is a sim game - "sim" as in "simulate" - a simulation of real life.

Yes - badly designed or old, worn rollercoasters will kill your "peeps". Yes, your peeps get tired of the same ride and will only go on it so many times before they're sick of it. Yes, you can overspend and go into debt. What's the problem, again? Build new rides to replace old boring ones, modify aging coasters, and assign work areas to your mechanics to fix these problems. If a valued coaster is getting old, only run one train on it to help prevent accidents stemming from station brake failure (which seems to be the most common cause of fatality in this game). Build carefully to avoid shooting the cars right off the track, and test thouroughly before opening the ride - people don't die in *my* parks anymore...

I've played this game for hours, once you learn what you're doing (go online and read some of the strategy guides people have written, there are several out there that tell you everything you need to know - for free!), you can build some pretty amazing 'coasters and parks.

I highly recommend getting the expansion packs (Loopy Landscapes and Corkscrew Follies) to go with this game - they add more features and rides, plus a whole new set of scenarios for each pack. HOURS AND HOURS of addictive gaming!

Only drawback - you can't ride the rides in a first-person point of view. :(

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