Great if you like Rollercoaster Tycoon 1. For you see this is literally Rollercoaster Tycoon 1. Only worse.
Rollercoaster Tycoon however was literally about the only concept of simulated construction I could stomach, and indeed, I adored it, largely because there was brightly-coloured scenery and little whoosh noises galore. The idea was simple: you began with either a failing amusement park, or just an arid stretch of terrain, and you had to convert it into a successful theme park, reaching a target of guest numbers or a satisfactory park rating, or both, within a set timeframe. You had all manner of rides to build, from haunted houses and monorails which people only really bothered queuing for if it was raining, to extreme thrill rides which would literally tear the nausea from your guest's stomachs as soon as they hit the exit path. Of course you also had to balance food sales, information kiosk placement, loan repayments, handymen and security wages, advertising costs, research delegations, landscaping etc, and all that dreariness, but the meat of the game was in the rides.
Specifically, a certain more stress was found in this game, more so than say, Theme Park World, in rollercoasters, hence the title, for you are a tycoon of them. Whereas in other amusement park construction simulators, you might get to build simply a ride under the name "rollercoaster", or in an expansion pack, "bigger rollercoaster than that last rollercoaster", in Rollercoaster Tycoon there are dozens, multiples of dozens, of different sorts of rollercoasters, from traditional wooden ones to sideways hanging vertical steel contraptions which just look like guests are going to spend £3 to have their feet quickly removed.
You can build your own rollercoasters too, very simply, although try my hardest my efforts were always shunned by paying visitors for reasons I didn't understand, no matter how low I dropped the cost. It was only after I looked into the analysis of the ride and found the thrill factor was dangerously high, to the extent passengers wouldn't so much feel the wind in their hair as they would swallow their eyes, that I realized why and had to demolish my creation, but that instilled some realism at least. And I still was able to club my mawkish meat-hooks together and giggle vacuously at all the bright noises and whoosh scenery whilst knowing someone else out there was on SimCity sternly furrowing their brows and chewing on the end of their pencil with increasing frustration that the calculations of the anomalous electoral candidacy campaign were all askew.
So the first Rollercoaster Tycoon provided me with hours of entertainment in my youth. It was the only game in which I built something for others' benefit and wasn't constantly praying for them to burn. No no, not Rollercoaster Tycoon, burning guests lowers your park rating I've found, just a little tip. I largely enjoyed it for the anticipation of your researchers discovering new sorts of rides, and original and differently-challenging scenarios to be unlocked, as the game progressed, and the journey from your first paltry little park in some wooded clearing which consisted of a merry-go-round and a bin, to the final challenge of the game where you could eventually pan out over an enormous stretch of shimmering ride movement, to the echoes of thousands of guests and constant transactions. Awesome t'was. And so I was most excited to recently invest in the following instalment Rollercoaster Tycoon 2, made by that same rollercoaster nut, Chris Sawyer. I was most eager to discover what sort of new attractions Mr. Sawyer had dreamt up in the years since the original's release. What could you look forward to between different SimCity offerings? A new sort of nuclear fission generator? A 'Tax Regulation Special!' expansion pack? Please..
Unfortunately, it turned out that in this time Chris Sawyer appeared to have been spending almost all of his time not designing games but probably sitting on a chair in a room in his house staring out of the window and eating whipped cream, straight from the can. The effrontery to release this sequel as an entire standalone game is almost as extreme as one of these backwards underground full-frontal deviant-twist rollercoasters Sawyer has devised. From the outset the only discernible difference appeared to be that now all the guests had individual names, for some reason, and they also now all understood the concept of money, requiring you to now build ATM machines. Sawyer clearly saw that as a decent couple years work, shipped his brand-new output off and went back to playing with Lego whilst touching himself. At first upon seeing the new and fairly innovative ATM idea, I did release a little "ooh!" of surprise, and then I built one, went "oh", and tried to find something else to do.
Many of the "new" rides too are simply slightly flashier, or just downright differing, versions of old ones. It became slightly deflating to be told I had found a new 'Cheshire Cat' ride, for instance, and scrabbling to the menu to find what it could be, perhaps a huge bouncy castle in the shape of a cat, or a 3D 'Alice in Wonderland'-style ghost train carriage ride, and then just find.. ohh it's.. it's the 'Car Ride' from the first game except.. except this time they're all riding little cats.. This trend is found constantly throughout; you just have to look at all your available water rides, and rather than any exciting new genius creations, it's literally just 8 different sorts of pedal boats, except with guests riding swan pedalos or bumper boats or dinghies shaped to look like rectums or whatever, and all labelled as entirely different. True to form there are somehow even more varieties of rollercoaster forms to choose from, now so disorientating that even if I offered a very funny joke as the title for one it would just underexaggerate some of the dizzyingly ridiculous possibilities that are now featured. There are a couple of truly original options which are fairly inventive and fun to discover, but it's simply not enough to justify releasing a whole new game for.
This would almost be satisfactory if Sawyer had just left it there, maybe he should be cut some slack, he might have thought that had been a lot of work, it COULD have genuinely taken him years to format, possibly he wasn't as sharp any more, possibly all that rollercoaster riding had made him a bit.. funny. But although the rides have only been made fractionally better, the scenarios in which you build the rides have actually been made worse! For one, I immediately discovered, all the levels in Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 are available to play from the beginning, unlike the first instalment in which you unlocked further levels upon completion of others, because that Chris Sawyer, is how, games, work. With this new one you've basically completed it as soon as you open it, there's nothing to play for. You fool Chris Sawyer, all these years spent accelerating and being upside down have turned your fragile brain to gravy! Lord knows what Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 consists of, maybe the whole game has just one scenario and when you click to open it it's actually just a video of a monkey dancing. And it's £29.99. And only Chris Sawyer is allowed to play it. "Huh, monkey" Chris guffaws dimly, splattering his hand against the computer monitor as his brain, beaten through a lifetime of rollercoaster abuse, struggles to keep up with his motor functions. "Yes Chris, a monkey!" his nurse remarks brightly, trying to spoon-feed him custard with one hand and insert a tube into his genitals with the other. Man, sorry, I have deviated very far off track, where was I? Oh right, yeah the scenarios.
The levels, also, are simply huge. They all are. This is not as beneficial as you might think - admittedly it's a welcome change from the cramped locations of the first Rollercoaster Tycoon, which necessitated buying more land space and painfully deleting each individual tree which filled it, but almost every scenario here is so vast it takes you a month of gameplay time to scroll from one side to the other. It's impossible to keep track of a park so huge and dense, and when eventually you're just about to built Toilet #212 and you have what looks like a small ocean of mechanics working for you it can all become a bit too much. With more space for rides comes more elaborately labyrinthine queuing systems required to tie everything together, which becomes fiddly and frustrating and before you can amend that your sixtieth swinging ship has broken down and one of your million guests is lost, and a small part of you is wishing for something comparatively simple like formatting January's private sector income surplus in SimCity, and praying Chris Sawyer's nurse's hand would slip.
Also, the objectives linked to each location are oddly specific, such as not permitting your park to build any "tall" rides for some cursory reason, or insisting on a sufficient monthly income from food and drinks stalls. One park limits you to literally only building rollercoasters, which just caused great canals of puke to run down the paths of my terrible rollercoaster hell within the first year. Although kudos for shaking up the previously slightly rigid objective system of needing x amount of guests in your park, liking it y amount, by year z, at least a semblance of that template should have been maintained to stop it degenerating into selling v amount of pretzels to k children in 20 weekly ms of your waterparks first u of h, t?
Admittedly the scenery available for locations is better, with some challenges bringing you to constructing funparks in snow-topped ski-resorts or inhospitable jungle islands, or in one particularly noteworthy level, an active volcano complete with sulphur-omitting pools of magma, just a few feet shy of the candyfloss stall. The pre-existing scenery can become a bit excessive though - in one level where you have to convert a castle into a park of amusement, the detail of the castle scenery is impressive, but then of course every single individual square of it must be painstakingly deleted, because it's not a theme park, IT IS A CASTLE. The construction tool has actually been modified and improved since the first game, probably for this very purpose.
Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 is, doubtless, a fairly good all-round game. It has just about perceptibly better graphics than its predecessor, the guest AI is much better - they don't start freaking out just because the paths are quite wide any more - and the level designs are very creative and interesting. The thing is though, it is basically just the original, only with a few fancy scenery gimmicks, a seafood stall and Chris Sawyer's spittle over, so as a standalone creation, as paining as it is for me to say, it is about on par to a SimCity marathon, planning the latest tariffs on maize and maize-based produce with some very taxing deadlines.