Roller Coaster Tycoon

Rating:
Summary: ROLLER COASTER TYCOON ROCKS
Review: I have owned this game for about half a year and I and my younger brother have already built a successful theme park. I highly recommend this game to people who like to build. You can build other rides like water slides, go-karts, and woah bellies (just like the detonator). I also own the two expansion packs and they give even better designs to build, including a motion simulator and jet skies. Here's a tip: start with a steel mini coaster as your first custom design. Now the only thing that I can say is get this game for hours of fun.

Rating:
Summary: Addictive!
Review: This awesome game is great!! You get complete freedom of the park! The roller coasters are impressive. You can even make your own roller coasters. This game is beyond words.

Rating:
Summary: Way Cool
Review: This is a very cool game. Not only is it cool it is very addicting. It is also a very good management game. And if you love rollercoasters, get this.

Rating:
Summary: Easy To Learn, Great To Play
Review: A great game. Do Not Waste your money on Sim Theme Park,or Sim Coaster, this is so much easier to play,and has a lot more features. I loved this game so much, I went out and bought Sim Coaster, but I couldn't even learn how to play it. I highly recommend this game!!!!!

Rating:
Summary: I get it now....
Review: I happened to play Sim Theme Park (STP) first, which I liked, but in which the gameplay was constantly interrupted by a need to fix the rides. And while playing it, I was thinking, "Well, if that wasn't part of the game, what would there be left to do?" Now I get it.

You can set up a park in Roller Coaster Tycoon (RCT) that basically runs itself. If you staff it well, you won't even have to worry (much) about the usual things that turn guests off (litter, vandalism, lack of facilities, etc). And what are you doing during all this? Planning expansions. Landscaping. Building roller-coasters. And it's surprisingly entertaining.

A comparison with STP is useful here: In STP I would repeatedly find some little detail and think "Well, that was cool." The artistry of that game is elaborate--but inside of a week or two of fairly casual play, I had seen all there was to see. In RCT, though, the sensation one has is of actually making a park his own, as opposed to just arranging elements that an artist has given him. (You're still arranging someone else's artwork in RCT, but the pieces are small enough tht it doesn't feel that way.)

STP has the ultra-cool first-person perspective option courtesy Bullfrog's ultra-cool Dungeon Keeper/Populous/Theme Park engine--and yet the graphics in that game are so gaudy as to be somewhat tiring. RCT's decidedly more primitive graphics are actually easier to look at after a while, and really encourage you to landscape your park! The two main drawbacks of the engine are that there's no first person view and that you can only rotate the isometric view by 90 degrees.

STP's free rotation and zoom would be welcome here, but RCT provides myriad different views by allowing you to hide different features of the park and terrain. In fact, the depth of various RCT tools are amazing, some of which I was surprised were left out of STP (which was released after). In fact, I find myself hesitant to state that there are tools missing from RCT because I've found so many of them after thinking "I wish the game gave me a way to....".

The game is not perfect, of course. What is the deal with handymen? In STP you could drop your handyman on top of six piles of vomit and he might just walk away. In RCT, he'll clean them up, but you'll wonder why he hadn't done it before. (The manuals even admonish you that your handymen are sort of clueless. I think it must be some sort of AI problem.)

The route-setting mechanism in RCT is more primitive than STP's (where you just have to drag your mouse around the area you want your worker to partol) but surprisingly RCT's works better in the sense that it's much easier to add or remove a section of the park from someone's route. Neither game has a feature for you to say "Who's patrolling this area?" which results in some drudge work when your park gets big. You can't rename your workers in RCT, either, which was a big help in STP for keeping track of them.

Also RCT allows you to do some very cool stuff with tunnels and bridges, but it's hard to patrol those areas. In an early game I ended up putting a roller-coaster very, very high up because of the way the terrain was, and I could =not= get mechanics to inspect the ride, resulting in the deaths of 16 poor little sims when the coaster suddenly flew off the track. (So much for that "Safest Park" award.)

Probably the most disturbing aspect of the AI in this game is how easily the guests get lost. One of the maps has a beautiful flower garden arranged in columns with one aisle going down the center, and guests entering that will never find their way out. You can build a perfectly feasible real-world map and end up with an RCT-world mess. Often a creative solution is available, though.

But again, most of these complaints feel like nitpicks. I can see why this game has persisted on the top ten charts for two years, and I'm glad I got it as a sort of "antidote" to "Black and White". It doesn't ask you any deep philosophical questions, and it doesn't really challenge one's ideas about what computer games can be or do: It's just fun.

Before I end this, let me add that this game is somewhat tougher to learn than Sim Theme Park. I could see 6-8 year olds playing STP whereas this game strikes me as having a 10-year old lower level.

Rating:
Summary: Could've been better.
Review: This game is a very good themepark editor and maker. the only problem i find is the Roller Coasters. Chris Sawyer could've extended the game and made the Roller Coasters that you build, rideable.( so YOU can ride on them ) And to take it even further, this game would've been the best Park simulator there ever was if he would've made all the rides rideable. Well, that is just my opinion.

Rating:
Summary: Best Game Ever!
Review: Do you ever look for a game that you will acually not get tired of playing? Well, here is the game. In this game you manage your park just like you would a real amusement park. You have to watch you money, because before you know it you will run out of it. You start out with 5 parks to build on, but once you accomplish a certain amount of parks, new parks are available to build on. If you think that it will be too easy for you than you are wrong. The first few parks are fun and easy. After you get past those the parks get harder and more challenging, but that just makes it funner. I got this game about 1 year ago and I haven't stopped playing it since. I would encourage you to get this game.

Rating:
Summary: Great way to build your dream theme park!
Review: I thought that Theme Park was a good game to do with theme parks but when I saw this, I just had to have it. I was in the USA and thought that, this is what i want to do, to be able to design my own park and to be able to run it all. But there are always problem when running a Theme Park. You get put as the designer, maker and manager of your own co-orporation, however big it is. The missions that you have to try and achieve are really great and life like. You can actually see Theme Park around the world having to cope with all of the aspects that you have to cope with when playing this game.

The areas that you are put are also very real in a way as you are limited to space and have to try to get round this in a variety of different ways. You can even buy or rent extra land if oyu are in need of some but not all of it is for sale, which brings you to think like what a proper company has to cope with.

This is all just about the amount the space and are to build in but all the other aspects are just as great. You can create the wackiest and fastest roller coaster of your choice, there are no limits but i do advise you to test it before you open it to the public as you may well have a few accidents!

There is such a wide variety of ride and attractions that you can choose from and get throughout the duration of the game. Just put a bit of money aside to the development of new rides and it comes up with the best ride that you can think of.

Even down to the colour or the make of the path shows you how detailed that this is! There is a very wide range of paths, colours and even fences to stop people going where they shouldn't.

When choosing to build a roller coaster there are so many things that you can do with a piece of track. You can make it speed up/slow down, cork screm, loop the loop or even have a photo shoot, plus much much more realistic ideas to choose from.

There are even more great things to choose from i nthe addon pack that you can also buy. There are some great things to choose from on these.

You really get the feeling like you are actually there, managing the whole park and how it runs. It is a great feeling when you start to make a profit and can build the best park with all the best rides that you can think of!

Well, if you like theme parks, then this is for you!

Rating:
Summary: Yeah!
Review: This is probably the best computer game ever, even better with the expansion packs!

Rating:
Summary: One of the best
Review: This game is the 3rd best strategy game I own(The first is GETTYSBURG! and the second is Civil War Generals 2) ,the scenarios are easy to learn but difficult to beat. Five star graffics and reality too.