Rollercoaster Tycoon

                    Final views from Sue

Let me make one thing clear right from the start - Rollercoaster
Tycoon (RCT) is an excellent game. I had great fun playing it and
would recommend it highly.  All my initial favourable comments
stand, but there are a few drawbacks which only become apparent
after you've been playing for a while.

The game is very predictable. There is a certain amount of
variation in which rides, scenery and upgrades etc are available
in any scenario, but by the tenth, or less, you've seen them all.
The 'oh-ah' of being offered a previously-unseen ride is gone as
you realise there are no more surprises in the bran tub which
you've been dipping into. The challenges are also very similar
from one scenario to the next. You need a specified number of
people in your park by a particular month and year with a park
rating of over 600 to win each scenario. Only the numbers and
dates change.

Sadly the game is way too easy. You have to seriously annoy or
upset your little people by letting the park get filthy dirty,
ignoring broken rides or killing the visitors in large numbers
before your park rating drops so low that it's a problem. In most
changes you'll achieve your goals a year or more before the
specified date. One late scenario didn't allow you to chop down
trees and raise or lower land which made it far more difficult to
play and interesting to solve the challenge of laying out the
rides.

It would also have been nice to have more variation in the
settings. Most of the parks are in woodland areas with lakes and
hills. Scenarios which feature something different like a desert,
linked islands, a pier complex, beach etc are few and far between.
But there is a scenario built round a fort, Fort Anachronism, to
download from the official Net site, with a bonus Mega Park - a
huge sandbox level with NO limits! - and extra rides with more on
the way.

I hope there's a follow on and that they'll address some of these
problems.  Despite the repetitive nature of the game, I did enjoy
it ... but they could have cut out a few of the forest scenarios
and made the game five settings shorter, and it wouldn't have lost
anything in enjoyment value. RCT is far more detailed than Theme
Park, and if you aren't any good at building coasters, don't
worry.  I was useless at it; they were often too intense for my
little people, but I loved the management side of the game. Yes,
if you see it at a good price, buy it. Even if you only play half
the scenarios, you'll still have got your money's worth in terms
of sheer fun.








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