E3 06: Thrillville Impressions

LOS ANGELES--Theme parks have occupied an extremely popular management subgenre ever since Theme Park arrived. However, lately they have tended to be increasingly complex simulations that appeal to the hardcore market. With Thrillville, Frontier Developments is aiming to make the genre more accessible to the family. It is releasing the fruits of its labor through LucasArts in Q3 on the PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, and the Xbox.

Thrillville offers the chance to build a complete theme park to play around in, and you can run around the park on foot to experience it through the eyes of your visitors. Roaming around the park, you can talk to more than 1,000 different visitors and find out what they think of the park. If you make the effort to respond to their demands, they will spend more money in the park and you will ultimately run a more successful operation.

The game is less concerned with micromanagement than it is with allowing you to experience your park and use it as your playground. The single-player game advances via missions that will reward you with more money, but these missions often take the form of minigames that will take place on your rides. Once you've built things like go-kart tracks and minigolf courses, you will have to play on them in the form of minigames. This extends to more rides than you might think--if you set up a Hollywood SFX attraction, you can play a game where you're the star of the show, and you will play a novelty first-person shooting section.

One of the other major features is the roller coaster tool, and as you'd expect, you can make some pretty outlandish rides for your visitors. The main attraction at the park we saw was the "hyper twister," which is one of 25 different types of coasters that you can build in the game. Other varieties include old-fashioned wooden coasters, ones that hang down, log rides, and kiddie coasters. You don't have to worry about meticulously building the coasters either, as you can simply drive the track where you want it to go and the game will automatically choose the pieces. If you want to add an advanced piece such as a helix corkscrew, you can drop them in from the menu. Designing coasters is only half the job, though, and you will want to ride them from a visitor's perspective to check that they're up to snuff. You can select a number of views that include a first-person perspective, a cinematic view, and one placed from the nose of the front car of the ride.

Separate sections of your park can be given one of 15 individual themes, and the one we saw was a fantasy setting with an animated ogre statue at the centre. The graphics are fairly rudimentary at this stage, but the game has clearly been tailored to the family market, so the game will automatically deal with things like foliage so you don't have to design the park down to every last tree. The most important thing that you do have to administrate is your visitors' happiness, so you will have to charge a fair price for your rides and make sure that there are ample refreshment and sanitary facilities dotted around the park. Secondary considerations include how you are going to market your park and the security that you will employ to stop vandalism.

Thrillville is quite a diversion for LucasArts, but it looks like it has plenty of good ideas. If the developer can make the minigames enjoyable enough to make you want to visit the park regularly, it may well find a receptive audience in the family market.