Published by: MicroProse
Reviewed by: KaCee
6/2/00

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First Impressions:

Graphics:

The graphics in Roller Coaster Tycoon are decent enough, with little cartoon people running around the park you design. The drawbacks on the graphics are the same I'll keep mentioning throughout the review: they can be confusing and difficult to work around. While the ability to make certain elements invisible is useful (i.e. make trees invisible so you can see the rides behind them), making some things invisible fails to help in the manner intended. Specifically, trying to work underground for roller coasters or paths that go through tunnels is far too difficult. It is often impossible to tell what piece of land you're grabbing or where the coaster is relative to the surface. Sure, there's a highlighted square, but without a three-dimensional underground grid, it's hard to tell what square that represents. The player ends up grabbing the wrong piece of land to move, and every time you move land, it costs you a significant amount of money, as explained further in the Gameplay section.

Also, it was frustrating to only have three levels of zoom. There were times I really wanted to get in close to see why something wasn't working right, and I couldn't. And when it rains in the park, the screen gets so dark it's hard to see anything without adjusting the monitor settings.

Sound/Music:

It sounds like a theme park: mostly people noises, occasional flushing toilets if that happens to be on screen, ride noises, and music from the Merry-Go-Round. It was kind of neat that the stereo was true to the screen orientation: when I rotated the view, the sounds came out of the speakers on either side of my monitor in accordance with the new screen layout.

Gameplay:

This is where Roller Coaster Tycoon fails: it has annoying, non-intuitive controls that make roller coaster construction a major hassle. My husband played it as well to see if his Ph.D. in mathematics would be of any benefit to trying to figure out what the heck makes a good roller coaster, since it often seemed that no matter what I built, the test ratings showed low excitement, beyond white-knuckled-terror intensity, and extremely high nausea. I would spend hours designing something I thought was cool, only to find out it sucked. My husband didn't fare any better, and completely agrees that the game is difficult in ways that don't make sense.

For example, there's no "undo" button except during actual roller coaster construction. That means if you place a ride in the wrong place, mislay a path, or accidentally move the wrong bit of land, you're out the cost. You can delete some things for a partial refund, but you will lose money if you make a mistake. In land movement in particular, this is stupidly difficult.

If you decide to edit a roller coaster or other track-based ride you've already constructed, you must do so piece by piece instead of by section. This makes it really difficult to, say, lower or raise part of the ride because you have to adjust each and every section of track. Add in the difficulty of making track bits line up and actually join, and this becomes more of a grumble than a game. There were many times I thought the tracks would line up, based on the grid on the ground, only to find that I was off by one square when I actually got there. I had to delete back along the entire track line to a point where I could make the adjustment, and rebuild from there.

When testing custom rides, the test doesn't seem to account for the weight of the people that will be on it. The result is sometimes a safe test will end up killing people, which, needless to say, is not great for your park's reputation. I've included some screen shots of a water slide that worked fine on the test, but when the weight of the people on the slide increased the acceleration, they crashed.

If you give up and just want to plunk down a pre-made roller coaster, that's well and good on the earlier levels where your land is flat, but when you've got bumpy land or islands, good luck trying to plunk down anything that's bigger than a few grid squares. There could be trees in the way, but even if you get rid of all of them (which costs money), the land heights might be wrong. The game will just tell you something's wrong, but not specifically where, so you end up spending hours just adjusting land height (which costs megabucks) trying to figure out what that roller coaster wants and where. You can save your own designs, but you'll have the same problem placing them in another scenario as with the pre-made ones.

Oh, and while you're designing these rides and grumbling away to yourself, the park goes on without you. There is a pause button, but you can't construct anything while the game is paused, and there is no way to slow down time. So you're trying to match up track bits while getting alerts that other rides have broken down, people are lost, etc. That would be exciting gameplay if the roller coaster building wasn't so frustrating to begin with.

My husband was also frustrated by the inability to have multiple construction windows open. If you're building a path, you can't have the land window open, etc. This means a constant switching of windows to make things work, all again while the park goes on unmanaged.

For all of these problems, the manual provides no help. It is badly organized, making it difficult to find the section you're looking for. When you do find it, it rarely gives you the necessary information. We both got the feeling that this game was designed by people who assume everyone understands the physics of roller coasters, and thus little information is provided about concepts such as lateral G's, which are sometimes good and sometimes bad. Trying to learn what makes a good roller coaster has proven to be a task difficult beyond enjoyment, especially since your park can go awry while you're building away. We agreed strongly that this game would be beyond frustrating to younger kids, so don't buy this if you're looking for family entertainment.

Enjoyment:

I should have delighted in this game, but the many hassles and problems eventually soured me. I like challenges, and if it was simply a matter of experimenting to learn what makes a good roller coaster, I'd have loved this. But when the learning is hampered by awkward controls, missing information and the frustrating inability to correct mistakes, it's not long before anyone just gives up.

Multiplayer:

N/A

Overall Impression:

If only the designers had taken the time to make this a user-friendly game, it would have been great. Instead, the obnoxious elements override the fun. It would be so much better if you could put time on hold or at least slower while you work on the custom rides, and if the manual was more helpful in explaining the factors that affect the excitement, intensity, and nausea ratings. My husband and I agreed that it seems like this game was not tested on average users, or they would have learned that it was unnecessarily complicated. There is a tutorial which is too quick to follow and teaches little beyond the controls of the game.

Marketing Efforts Towards Women:

This game is pretty much genderless. Even the people the in the park are androgynous and ageless. The packaging seems to call out for a family audience, but as mentioned above, this game would frustrate kids.