The masterpiece that spawned a wave of mostly crapy Tycoon games, trying to rip-off its innovative features.
User Rating: 9.4 | RollerCoaster Tycoon PC
As one of the biggest PC hits in 99' and clear into 2000, Rollercoaster Tycoon sticks out as positive step towards the true theme park sim experience. As the title states, you will be making Rollercoasters, but the game is really about designing, managing and building an entire theme park. With all the factors you'll be constantly figuring and acting upon, Roller coaster Tycoon will be very time consuming, in the good way though. Management is a huge part of Rollercoaster Tycoon, you'll be hiring and firing mascots, janitors (they mow grass, take out trash, clean up vomit and trash, and water plants), and security guards to help keep your theme park in working and enjoyable order for your guests. You'll have to make sure that all your rides are in working order by enough mechanics to get on the situations as soon as they happen. Also, if you want a successful park, you'll be running different ads and sending out coupons to attract more visitors to your park. The most important part of management in Rollercoaster Tycoon is the surveying of how many customers your rides are bringing in because guests will get bored of rides the longer the rides are commission; though sometimes rides will retain a certain level of respect and will be ridden by people even with fair prices. All this management is made much easier with tons of stat tracking features. You can even track what people are thinking at that time, for instance, if lots of people are complaining about getting lost in that comment's category, you should react by making less complicated paths and by supplying more maps around the park. Basically every stat about every person in your park is traceable, like the amount of money they have, how much they spent, what they are carrying (maps, food, map, toys, ect.), and as far in detail as showing how happy they are, their nausea level, how much they have to go to the bathroom, and their energy. The park rating also gives you the total average of what your guests think about the park, also certificates and awards will help you see what parts your park is excelling in. The stats are really just amazing and provide feedback that is very helpful in creating a successful park. Another great addition to the game is the amount of customizable rides that this gem sports. Of course, you can manually build Roller Coasters; along with train tracks, go kart tracks, toobing rides, raft rides, monorails, chairlifts, ect. (Most of them have awesome preset rides you can just plop down into your park without the labor). Those are only some of the manually built rides there is in Rollercoaster Tycoon, on top of all those categories, there's basically all the rides you can think of at almost any theme park, aside maybe a few oddball rides that you might not find. All the rides can be colored to your liking and can also be named what ever you wish them to be (you can name everything in the park, including each guest). There are also improvements that you can get for your rides by the means of scientists, which is also how you discover new rides through out your parks life. Included in the rides category are food stalls, which can be customized just as the rides, though the each food stall will only sell what it's name suggests (A pizza stall for example). The graphics and sound in Rollercoaster Tycoon remain as a great insight to the whole theme park feel. The isometric view is a nice choice, considering it brings out the size of things with a 3d view, but without the graphics ever being 3d themselves. Each ride is well detailed with color and texture, as are the landscapes, which are fully customizable (you can raise and lower land, put tons of different plant, trees, flowers and decorations around, and make lakes and ponds if you want). Though each square land piece is either at a 45 degree angle or perfectly parallel, it's still full of life as grass grows and your decorations pile up all over. I like how the graphics leave nothing to imagination; if a mechanic is fixing a ride, you'll see him walk in and fix it; if people pay to get in a ride, they'll walk through the gates onto the ride and you'll be able to see each individual person on the ride. The sound is overall authentic to real life theme parks, but after playing the game for hours on end, you'll get kind of tired of hearing the same sound affects being played, like when one faint voice of a child says, "Flora Flora Flora". It's a good thing that the music that radiates from some rides can be toggled on and off, because if you have tons of merry-go-rounds, you won't want to hear the music all the time, though it changes enough to blend into the background sound fairly well. I've really only began to scratch the surface of the game's many options and features. Rollercoaster Tycoon is one of the most addictive games I've ever played, and should be yours as soon as you can snag a copy of it. As close as you'll ever get to owning a park, without actually doing work.
