RCT Playthough

I'm getting a new computer, something to take the load off of my "desktop replacement" laptop. That beast has been running strong for the last 5 and 1/2 years, but it's starting to show its age.

Hydro Hills gives you quite a bit of space, and a lot of roller-coasters to work with towards the end of the scenario. The only downside to the park is the large bodies of water surrounded by hills. There's nothing I hate more than those two things together in a park. However, I did mange to crank out some halfway decent rides, and even found a new technique for building roller-coasters just below the waterline (those tunnels add a lot to the excitement score).

Jolly Jungle has two inherent problems, there are trees everywhere, and rides depreciate in value painfully fast. You’ll put a new ride up, and only a few months later, people will be refusing to ride due to the high price.

This comes as a challenge because, due to the absolute insane amount of trees and hills, you’ll be needing to earn as much money as you can to expand the park. Constant vigilance will be needed on checking the ride popularity section of your statistics to spot any rides the guests have decided isn’t worth paying for.

I found that some rides, mainly the River Ride held its value all the way through the scenario, rarely needing a price drop. The Log Flume also experienced a similar value boost, although that may have been attributed to the scenario’s warm climate settings.

Wood America Old Scenario: Arid Heights - Last Saved: 8/2/2002 9:51PM Download Link

Another old scenario, this one dating all the way back to 2002. This scenario started out as an Arid Heights campaign, but quickly turned into a practice session for building Wooden Roller Coasters much like the ones seen in the scenario "Karts and Coasters."

A few of the roller coasters in the park are medium excitement, but a majority of the fifteen wooden roller coasters are a high excitement and high intensity setup. It certainly helps that there are a spattering of trees around each ride (and the proximity of the coasters to each other helps as well) to boost the excitement some more.

With 12 running years, the park isn't without its share of problems. The sheer number of rides and the complex path system (coupled with my lack of knowing what I was doing when I was younger) has lead to a short supply of mechanics and handymen, as well as guests getting lost all over the park. Despite the large size of the entire setup, there is only one main path that runs the length of the park, starting at Rollercoaster 1, and ending at the city-themed Go Karts.

In all, this scenario taught me a lot about what makes a good wooden rollercoaster, and most of the rides I've built of this type since then have had vast improvements in quality and overall excitement thanks to what I learned here!

Gentle Glen puts you in a very unique situation, in a game about building huge, intense, and exciting roller-coasters, attendees at this park won't ride anything with an intensity over 4. Naturally this limits your roller coaster building to a few slow drops and long corners, but if you can pull it off, even the most simple roller coasters can be huge money-makers.

Normal rides that I usually don't give a second thought to, such as the Mini-Golf course and the River Rapids, became immensely popular, and I had to re-adjust the ride times and line lengths to accommodate the huge influx of people wanting to ride them.

I caught this right before it happened, so I was able to make a video of just what went down. This is how a lot of random crashes can happen if you don’t have a lift hill immediately after a station platform. On any rides with single cars (such as Water Slides), cars can pile up right before the lift hill during a breakdown. When the ride starts up again, the cars become bunched up at the top of the hill. Unfortunately, the collision engine doesn’t like it when cars bump into each other at speed, so it brings them to a dead stop. While this isn’t a problem on the lift hill, you can see that on the final hill before the end of the ride, they bump again, and stop completely.

Just a reminder that even though the mechanic fixed the ride, it may still be broken!

Fun Fortress can live up to its name if you just make sure that you take care of some of the excess footpaths right from the start. I never let the guests up into the higher level of the fort, just because it's that much more pathwork to maintain (as well as have guests get lost in). It's only one walkway in this one, so it's not that hard to remove the stairs up to it.

In comparison to the 2001 seven-year played scenario posted previously, this Haunted Harbor is a lot more understated. With the park being so small, I quickly extended outwards onto the beach and water. That space fills up quickly, however, and soon I took advantage of the dirt cheap land prices and started buying up a large chunk of the land nearby. I managed to slap a good Wooden-Reverser roller coaster down, as well as a Virginia Reel. The park's pre-built roller coaster is pretty reliable, so you won't have to worry too much about any problems there.

Old Scenario: Haunted Harbor - Last Saved: 1/30/2001 7:23PM Download Link

This is the first post from the recovered early 2000s saves from my original computer, and I was blown away looking back at this one. I may have gone all the way into year seven with this park, but it looks like I put it to good use. 

What I can't believe is that I have not one, but six roller coasters that not only have high excitement, but the excitement is actually higher than the intensity. The only other roller coaster still maintains a high rating in excitement as well.

One of the more interesting things in this massive park is the zoo filled with entertainers. It doesn't really do much for the park, but it looks really nice. Also, there's a Jurassic themed area with a boat hire in it that the guests seem to avoid for no particular reason. Path-finding is an issue with the mechanics as well, and I had a similar problem playing through the scenario before.

The wooden reverser roller coaster is one of my favorite rides in the RCT games, and it's a shame the only one ever built no longer exists, because I have always really wanted to ride one.

Update: I pulled out the harddrives and, using some surplus computer parts and furniture, rigged up a RollerCoaster Tycoon File Transfer Machine.

I had the IDE dock and everything ready to go, only to find that I didn’t have the power cable the dock needed to power the drive. Not letting that stop me, I used some good old fashined ingenuity and used a spare PC tower power supply (forced into the “on” mode with a paperclip” and ribbon cable to hook it up to the dock. Then, fed it all into the computer and out to a standalone external HDD! I also checked some floppy disks to see if I had anything on them using a USB drive, but found nothing but a single KidPix file.

"What is this beautiful piece of legacy hardware?" You ask yourself? Well, this is the original RollerCoaster Tycoon machine that I've mentioned in posts long ago, and I'm finally able to go digging through the two harddrives to pull up all the old RCT scenarios and custom rides from when I was first starting out my roller coaster career.

This computer has gone through many re-started RCT games, but luckily, it uses the now very outdated Master/Slave hard drive setup, so many of my old games are still intact on the slave drive!

After installing a set of USB ports onto the back, (and promptly finding out the controller was fried or some other diaper-baby nonsense), I've decided that I'll just have to pull out the hard drives (Totaling up to a robust 32Gb) and transfer the files manually through a USB enclosure (that's too small for the hard drives, so they'll be sitting open cabled up to the inside face of it)!

I've been running this blog on a que lately, as I've been to Sacramento for the annual Maker's Fair scoping out potential future employers and networking. I was out there a whole seven days!

Do you hear that noise, that's a Mechanic repairing a Station Brake Failure, the bane of any RollerCoaster Tycoon player. This sound effect plays only for this specific repair, and if you hear it, you need to immediately stop what you are doing, pause the game, and look for the broken roller coaster. Chances are, if you have any coaster operating more than one train, this mechanic won't be fast enough to stop the second one plowing into the station.

In many cases, the station brake failure means that all the ride's brakes will stop working, so it's always wise to station a mechanic for each individual roller coaster so that it can be repaired it as soon as possible. Placing the exit as far to the back of the station platform also helps reduce his work time.

Pictured above is from my Roman Village scenario. The mechanic is in the middle of fixing the broken station brakes as a reverser train shoots right past and into the back of a parked train (luckily this coaster doesn't enter the station fast enough to cause a crash).

Aside from the original 85 scenarios total from the first RollerCoaster Tycoon + Expansions (86 if you include the open-ended Mega Park), there are three additional scenarios released as promotions for the magazines PC Player, PC Gaming World, and Gameplay.com. After locating the three from a very in-depth RollerCoaster Tycoon fansite, I've decided to include them in my playthrough goal.