Although this is a roller coaster sim, and the only roller coaster sim for the PSP, it's not really good at all...
User Rating: 5 | Thrillville PSP
Ever since I began using a Mac, I have been extremely disappointed at the fact that Roller Coaster Tycoon was not available for the Mac, so that pretty much meant that I was looking for a good coaster sim for a LONG time. When I heard the news of Thrillville for the PSP, I was incredibly excited since I just may have found that roller coaster sim that I was looking for... Looking at gameplay, I would've waited a little bit to have this game more polished that it really was. I found that the controls were a little clunky. It turns out that Thrillville tries to cover the lack of two analog nubs by making the camera control itself. As many people know already from earlier games, camera with a mind of its own = bad, very bad. This is the case here as well, the camera is horrible. Also, the minigames and "chat sessions" seem like they were just tacked on at the very end. The one thing that they had seemed to ahve gotten right was the control scheme for the FPS minigames, which, being my first time experiencing FPS gameplay, made me fairly satisfied with the gameplay that I was skeptical about in the first place. Another good thing is the coaster building. The one thing that I really wanted in the sim turned out to be the best thing. Back to the bad news, the loading times are like death. Be expected to wait up to three minutes when going to different parks, finishing coasters, and beginning the playable minigames. I usually praise the graphics of most of the PSP, but I will have to bash this one. Although the coasters are fairly detailed, the rest of the game plays with really generic graphics and the frame rate can actually get a little choppy, which really shouldn't happen with such mediocre graphics. There's not much sound integrated into this game. There is a radio in the background with original music, but I turned it off 10 minutes into the game. The "chat sessions" don't even offer real "chat"! Most of the talking is through reading text screens. Llllooooottttssss of text screens... There isn't much else to the sound other than the fact that you can scream while you're on the coaster. The one thing that a roller coaster sim can truly offer with no strings attached is value, the thing that keeps players coming back and back for more. After you finish the mission mode at one of the parks, you can treat it like a sandbox, building new coasters and keeping your park up. This game will last really, really long time, as long as you don't play minigames or try to talk to anyone. This is a PSP game, am I right? This is NOT portable. If you want to hop on a bus and build a coaster and leave, then you had better have 15 minutes to spare, since the coaster building takes at least that much time. You could always hop in and play a minigame or two, but if you look up one paragraph, you wouldn't really want to. This is a barely passable as a game, and I would've really have liked to have seen this game more polished than it really is, buuut, this IS a roller coaster sim, and I can't get Roller Coaster Tycoon, sooo, it works for me, but I don't think that it would work for anyone who has access to Roller Coaster Tycoon.
