Theme Park Roller Coaster
Score: 88% ESRB: Everyone Publisher: EA Games Developer: Bullfrog Media: DVD/1 Players: 1 Genre: Simulation/ God Games
Graphics & Sound: While not stellar, the graphics in Theme Park Roller Coaster certainly get the job done. It runs at a solid clip, only lagging when there are a whole lot of things happening on the screen at the same time. The graphics are clean and cartoony, in a unique style that is solely Theme Park Roller Coaster. Along with the overhead viewpoint, you can press a button and actually walk around the theme parks that you build. Walking up to one of the many rides in the park often gives you the option to actually ride them, giving you yet another entertaining view of the action. It’s not particularly gorgeous, but it’s consistent and stylish in its own way. And you can never mistake the Hallowe’en land for any others. The music is almost nonexistent, but what’s there fits the park that you’re playing in. The prehistoric park’s music is suitably tribal, the scary park is a little spooky, the fantasy park is light and airy, and so on. It’s nothing you’ll remember, or even really notice unless you’re paying close attention, but it’s certainly there. The sound effects are nice, although I would have liked a few more. You can hear a lot of the things that the kids are doing in your theme park, from riding the coasters to the sounds of the games, but it never gets to the aural level of, say, Roller Coaster Tycoon. TPRC does sport voice acting, in the form of an advisor... ant-thing... that shows you the ropes of the game and then informs you when anything important is happening. He’ll keep you up with incidences of too many employees, break-downs in the rides, and the occasional stink bomb.
Gameplay: Theme Park Roller Coaster is classic God Game material. You are the overlord of a series of theme parks, and you’ve got to bring them to maturity by building rides, attractions, roller coasters, and other necessities to make the park-goers happy. And while not as deep or enthralling as Roller Coaster Tycoon, it’s an enjoyable little game. You start off with access to one park, a prehistoric-themed one. By completing certain goals told to you at the beginning of the game -- getting a certain number of park-goers, making a certain amount of money, and lasting a certain amount of time -- you get Golden Tickets. You use Golden Tickets to open up new parks to test your mettle in. Of course, as you buy tickets, the parks get more difficult to keep going. The core gameplay consists of building rides, attractions, sideshows and whatnot, making sure there are paths to get to the rides and to get out of them, and then micromanaging whenever anything bad happens. This is helped by an excellent game interface, along with a “Laptop” that you can pop open at any time to get any information you need. As you place rides, shops, and everything else, you have to worry about both location and value. Some shops are too far out of the way to ever get used, whereas others are hammered like crazy and overrun. And building the various rides with their lines is an art as well. Fortunately, the line-creation mechanism is somewhat simpler than the same thing in Roller Coaster Tycoon, which is a plus. The amount of tweaking is roughly the same. You can alter everything from the amount of salt on the fries and fat in the burgers to the duration of the rides and cost of entering the park. Careful management of these values can be the difference between making a bundle and losing vast amounts of money, so prepare to be clicking on lots of things and keeping it all under control. With this is the added complexity of research. You’ve got to keep up with the Six Flags, so to speak, so you hire researchers to make new rides, things to scatter about your park, and improve the rides you already have. You can also hire janitors to keep the place clean, guards to patrol the parks, mechanics to fix the rides, and entertainers to keep the people happy. And, of course, you can build your own roller coasters. Making them exciting and desirable will net you a lot more cash than a weak roller coaster, and the art of building ‘coasters is integral to getting all of the Golden Tickets in the game. The roller coaster construction isn’t anywhere near as involved as Roller Coaster Tycoon, but it gets the job done.
Difficulty: The game starts off easy, and ramps up as the parks become more complex to manage, but Theme Park Roller Coaster never ventures off into Impossible-land. Because of the structure of the game, you can play for an hour or two, save the game, come back and regroup. It’s easy to recover from poor management of locations, although you’ll lose money in the short term trying to fix where everything is. It can certainly be tough at times, but it’s always manageable -- which is more than can be said of many God Game-type titles.
Game Mechanics: The control scheme is near-impeccable in TPRC, with an on-screen menu showing at all times what each button does in the game. The only thing that I miss is the pinchers from Roller Coaster Tycoon, letting me drop a worker exactly where I need them. Ah, well. For the most part, the rest of the interface is intuitive as well. The core mechanics of the game make sense, even if a few of the usage rules are arbitrary -- why do people not go to bathrooms at certain locations, but do at others? Who knows? The menus are easy to understand and navigate, which is a major boon in a game that relies on menus as much as TPRC. The load times are obnoxiously long when you enter a theme park, but once you’re in, there aren’t any more load times at all. It’s a trade-off, one that feels more irritating than it really is because the loads all hit you at once. Theme Park Roller Coaster is the only God Game I know of on the PS2, and it’s a fine one. While it’s not quite as involving as its cousin Roller Coaster Tycoon, it’s a very enjoyable title. Any fan of the genre would do well to pick this up, and those who like to sit for 30 minutes at a time and feel a sense of accomplishment in their gaming would do well to get Theme Park Roller Coaster as well. Cute graphics, solid sound, and good entertainment conspire to make a fun experience.
-Sunfall to-Ennien, GameVortex Communications AKA Phil Bordelon
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