#tacpics

Photo Sources: All photos are mine

Snoopy's Soap Box Racers at Kings Island!

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Opened: 2024 Manufacturer: Vekoma Height: 75.5 ft (23 m) Speed: 37.3 mph (60 kph) Length: 672.6 ft (205 m) Place in my rankings: #121 (landing between Pandemonium at Six Flags Fiesta Texas and Cedar Creek Mine Ride at Cedar Point)

It's that time again! I rode two new coasters at Kings Island about a week and a half ago, so that means you guys get two new coaster posts! I think going forward, TTC posts will be listed in the order I get new credits, rather than ranking them in batches. That way, the number at the top matches the number in my progression of credits haha. I'll still have where they fall in my rankings listed above of course (though the rankings listed on the posts I have linked - Pandemonium and CCMR in this case - won't be up to date with my current rankings since I move things around a lot lol)

Anyways, with that out of the way, let's talk about Snoopy's Soap Box Racers! This was my first time riding one of Vekoma's Family Boomerang coasters. I'd heard good things about them for awhile now, so I was definitely looking forward to getting to try one, and it didn't disappoint! It wasn't the most mind blowing thing ever of course, it is still meant to appeal to all ages, but I thought it was super fun! It makes a great stepping stone coaster in the park for kids who are ready to move on from the park's smaller rides like the Great Pumpkin Coaster or Woodstock Express, but aren't quite ready to tackle the more intermediate rides like Queen City Stunt Coaster or Adventure Express.

In terms of thrill, I'd put it about on par with the neighboring Woodstock's Air Rail, since they both offer something new for kids while not being too much. Woodstock's Air Rail hangs below the track and has a bit more forces, where as this goes both forwards and backwards with more banked turns and a bit more speed. The fact that Soap Box Racers is right next to Woodstock's Air Rail also makes for a great showcase in how much Vekoma has evolved over the years. Air Rail, built in 2001, is one of Vekoma's old Suspended Family Coasters, commonly nicknamed Hang and Bangs, due to their roughness. Snoopy's Soap Box Racers, by comparison, is absolutely glass smooth. These Family Boomerangs, along with all the other newer high thrill coasters Vekoma has put out over the last decade or so really goes to show how much they've reinvented themselves.

As for the ride experience itself, there's not too much going on here but it really doesn't need to be overly complicated for what it is. You go up a backwards lift before it releases the train, sending you back through the station and through the course going forward. You then wind through a figure eight shaped course of banked turns right up along the ground before rising up an inclined spike towards the front side of the ride. This then sends the train backwards through the course and returning to the station. Again, not a whole lot to the ride but still a lot of fun for what it is ^^

So yeah, I'd say a very solid family coaster, bordering on family-thrill. I also thought the theming of the ride was very cute and super well done. You guys know me, I'm a big Peanuts fan, so I found the whole thing to be super charming. I liked getting to ride the Esnupi Coaster :3

Previous reblog got me thinking abt pictures I've taken at the SteelStacks in Bethlehem, PA, which is one of my favorite places to go take pictures.

Roller coasters jumpscare !! :3

Photo Sources: All photos are mine

American Eagle at Six Flags Great America!

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Opened: 1981 Manufacturer: Intamin Height: 127 ft (38.7 m) Drop: 147 ft (44.8 m) Speed: 66 mph (106.2 kph) Length: 4,560 ft (1,417.3 m) Place in my rankings: #80 (landing between Scorpion at Busch Gardens Tampa and Roar at Six Flags America)

If we're talking classic, iconic rides at Six Flags Great America, you gotta talk about American Eagle. This ride has been an icon of the park for 45 years and it's still going strong! It didn't open with the park like Whizzer did, but coming 5 years into the park's life and it far and away gave them the headliner attraction they deserved. Built towards the tail end of the wooden racing coaster craze of the 70s and early 80s, American Eagle topped all of the others that came before it in terms of scale. It opened as the tallest and fastest roller coaster, of any kind, wood or steel, in the world in 1981 and held those records until 1988. Today, it still holds the records for tallest, fastest, longest, and largest drop on a wooden racing coaster.

Like Whizzer, American Eagle was closed the first time I came to the park in 2024. Since it was still early in the season when I visited then, it was still closed because it was having track work done. Over the last decade or so, from what I'd heard, the park had also been letting American Eagle slip in terms of quality and ride experience. It had been getting more and more rough and hadn't had its two tracks race in nearly a decade. It could run both sides, but when they did, they would either only operate one side and switch them throughout the day, or stagger dispatches so the trains wouldn't race. This is thought to be in order to limit wear and tear on the structure. I'd also heard that the ride was REALLY rough, especially in its enormous 560° helix turnaround, so I was worried about what the ride would be like going into it.

But on this visit, American Eagle was open, but what was even better was that it was racing!! For the park's 50th anniversary this year, American Eagle was running in top condition and the park announced before the season began that the ride would race as it should for the first time in years! So needless to say, I was very excited to hear that :3 I got two rides on American Eagle during my visit, one on the red side and one on the blue side! If I had to pick, I think I liked the blue side slightly more but I thought both were very good for what they were! My first ride on blue side was only a semi-race, in the fact that they did dispatch the red train alongside us, but it didn't have anyone in it lol. My ride on red side was a full race with the blue side full of people as well hehe.

In terms of ride experience, I thought the ride was a lot of fun! What I think American Eagle does best is it's speed and sense of scale. This ride is HUGE!! And like a lot of big wooden coasters, the ride just feels massive when you look at it. It's dense wooden structure painted bright white with the red running rails and blue floorboards completing the all-American look. Going down that drop and flying over the hills on the outward leg really gives a great feeling of speed. And with the refurbishments the ride got prior to the season, I thought it was running fantastically! I found it to be very smooth for a wooden coaster, still having that characteristic rumble that you expect from a woodie, but not nearly the jackhammer fest I was braced for lol. Even in the ride's massive helix, which I'd heard was the worst part of the ride, I didn't notice any roughness really at all! Same goes for the return run and final helix as you hit the final brake run, really a very enjoyable ride all around!

If I had to give one thing I wish American Eagle did better, it would be airtime. None of the hills, or even the first drop for that matter, gave any kind of noticeable negative Gs. There may have been some slight weightlessness feelings on a couple of them, but I do think the other racing woodies like the ones at Kings Island or Kings Dominion did better in that department. So I was a bit underwhelmed with the airtime, but another area that American Eagle surprised me with was laterals. Mainly in that giant helix turnaround, it starts of slow, but you build up a decent amount of speed as you go around it. So by the time you're coming around the last bit of it, you've got some surprisingly strong forces pushing you to the side, which I hadn't expected lol.

A few other minor closing notes: American Eagle has one of the most bizarrely set up entrance paths/queue lines I've ever seen lmao. The ride itself is set way back from the park, on the other side of the park's train line and a service road, so the path to get there winds and zigzags all up and over those before coming back down into the station lol. I also think it's funny how this ride was built by Intamin, who is much more well-known for their crazy steel coasters. Additionally, when they were brought in to build American Eagle, they had only one coaster to their name: the tiny little steel kiddie coaster Wilderness Run at Cedar Point. Talk about swinging for the fences on your second run at building a coaster lmao.

And the last point that I'll bring up is that, as of now at least, American Eagle is my second favorite racing coaster I've done! I put it above all the other out-and-back wooden racing coasters I've done, which are Racer at Kings Island, Racer 75 at Kings Dominion, and Thunder Road at Carowinds. It's also well above Racer at Kennywood haha. I even have American Eagle ranked a few spots ahead of Gemini at Cedar Point! The only racing coaster that tops this one for me is Lightning Racer at Hersheypark, just because that layout is so much more dynamic. But kudos to Great America for keeping this classic coaster running and running so well at that for the park's 50th season! Hopefully the Eagle stays racing for many years to come!

Time for another big trip report post, and I've got a lot to talk about with this one!

This was my second time ever visiting the park after my first visit in 2024, and overall, I had a good time! My primary goal was to ride all the coasters I'd missed the first time I came to the park, and for the most part, I was able to achieve that! Of the park's 16 coasters, I rode 12 of them! I'll detail my experience with each of them as this post goes on but for the most part, everything I rode was solid! Most of the new credits I got were for coasters that I'd either ridden clones of at other parks, or other coasters that were very similar in style so I knew what to expect for most of them going in. It was still nice to get (near) credit completion for the park though hehe :3

But talking about my day in a bit more detail before getting into the coasters themselves, one of the things I was most excited about for my day was the fact that I was able to go with one of my best friends! As part of my larger long weekend in Chicago, I got to go to the park with @pacsbs! Due to some unforeseen circumstances, we had to split up pretty early in our day and Scrap had to sit out almost all the coasters so I went about the park alone </3 That was definitely a bummer not being able to ride most of the rides together, but getting to be at the park together at all really genuinely makes up for it. Being able to share something that is so special to me with one of my best friends, even in a limited fashion, really meant the world to me <33 Plus, Scrap and I agreed that we'd do a revenge tour of either here or Cedar Point in the future to make up for it, so I've got that to look forward to >:3

But with just being on my own for most of the day, I decided to make sure I would be able to ride everything I wanted to get on. The park was pretty busy since we were there on a Saturday (we'd initially planned on going on the prior Thursday but the air quality was so bad that we bumped it to Saturday), plus we had to leave by like 5 or so to get back down to Chicago for the Flickerstick concert we were going to, so time was kinda limited. So I did something I'd (for the most part) never done before, and that was get a Fast Lane skip-the-line pass. I'd used single shot Fast Lanes to skip one or two lines at Kings Island earlier this year, but never gotten the highest tier to use all day. It was expensive but it definitely was the right move, since I was able to get on everything I wanted to with minimal wait. I don't think it's something I'll do often, but in this circumstance, it really worked out.

Like with my Kings Island post from a few months back, each of my new credits will get dedicated Tac Talks Coasters posts going more in-depth with my thoughts on them, probably over the course of this coming week! I'll give my general thoughts on them here though along with more in-depth thoughts on the re-rides I got on things that already got TTC posts :3

On to the coasters! These will be covered in the order I rode them during the day, then I'll have my ranking for all the park's coasters at the end ^^

Whizzer - 1 ride - Coaster Credit 192!

One of the three coasters I was most excited to ride! Whizzer was down all day during my first visit, so I missed out then on riding this classic coaster that opened with the park back in 1976. But it was the first ride we went for during our visit! I'd never done a ride in this specific style before, so I was interested in seeing how it would feel! The closest comparisons I would give for Whizzer would be like, riding a Schwarzkopf coaster like SooperDooperLooper at Hersheypark, but in the bobsled style seats of a ride like Reptilian at Kings Dominion lol. I'd never done a ride with an electrically powered spiral lift hill either, so that was rlly neat too! I sat in the back car of the train by myself, so I had a lot of room there and I got thrown around more than I had expected to, but in a fun way lol. Whizzer isn't overly intense by any means. It straddles the line between family and thrill coaster very well. But even with that, I thought it had a very nice sense of speed, some surprising lateral forces and I really liked its setting among the trees in the middle of the park. Whizzer wasn't the most mind blowing thing in the world, but it didn't have to be! Like I said, it's a classic, and now that it's the last of its kind, I'm sure Great America will do everything in their power to keep it around as long as they can.

X-Flight - 1 ride

I'd ridden X-Flight during my first visit to the park in 2024, but I had only gotten one ride, so I was interested in taking another lap on it! I sat on the left side of the train towards the back of the train, so I was able to get some good whip and pull through the elements on this one. The vest restraints weren't the most comfortable of course but that's a problem that X-Flight is well known for so I knew about it from my last ride lol. I do think X-Flight has a very solid layout for it's size. For something that's only 130 feet tall and 3,000 feet long, they really do pack in a lot of solid elements here. The thing I think X-Flight does best though are the near-miss elements, with three of them here. One is a fast swoop through a hangar door, and the last two are back to back as you slowly twist through an airport control tower and then through an A-frame support. Great stuff. I'd still put it as my second favorite wing coaster, behind GateKeeper but ahead of Wild Eagle.

American Eagle - 2 rides (one on each side) - Coaster Credit 193!

One of the other coasters I was most excited to get a ride on! Since my 2024 visit was early in the season, American Eagle was still having trackwork done on it and wasn't open when I went. But this time it was, and what was even better: for the park's 50th anniversary this year, it was racing for the first time in almost 10 years! American Eagle, much like Whizzer, is widely regarded as a classic amongst Great America regulars, so like I said, I was super hyped to try it out. The biggest point of hesitancy I had going on was how rough the ride would be. I've heard that this one can be like, really bad, especially in that huge helix turnaround at the far end of the ride. But I was very glad to see that I didn't think it was really that rough at all! It wasn't glass smooth of course, but it wasn't anywhere near as bad as I was worried it would be. My first ride earlier in the day was on the blue side, and the red side hadn't opened yet so I didn't get a full race (although they did dispatch the empty red train alongside us so it wasn't nothing haha). A sign at the ride's entrance said that it would just be blue side operating all day, but when I checked back later, red side was open too! So I snagged a ride on that side too and got a full race! I'll go more in depth with my thoughts on the ride experience in my upcoming dedicated post talking about the ride, but in general, I found it to be the best of the big wooden racing coasters I've done! Better than the ones at Kings Dominion, Carowinds and Kings Island!

Wrath of Rakshasa - 2 rides - Coaster Credit 194!

The last of the three coasters I was most excited to try out was Great America's newest coaster! This dive coaster just opened last year and looked like a really interesting ride! First and foremost, this ride is absolutely gorgeous. I love the colors of the blue track and tan supports, and this ride just has a presence to it. It's huge, placed smack in the middle of the park, and has pathways going basically all over underneath it, so you can get all kinds of wild viewpoints of this ride from really anywhere you stand near it. It reminds me a lot of Valravn at Cedar Point in that way. I thought it had a really great layout too. The fact that the park and B&M were able to cram this many back to back elements into such a small footprint really is impressive. The pacing is fantastic, it feels like the ride never lets up or slows down between any of its elements, and each one flows basically seamlessly into the next. This is absolutely an inversion focused ride, with five of them packed in, and all of them are great. Like American Eagle, my main concern going in was how it was gonna ride in terms of smoothness. A lot of new B&M coasters that have opened in the last couple of years have had issues with roughness, and although I'd been avoiding reviews of Rakshasa before riding it, talk of it not being the smoothest ride did slip through the cracks here and there. But again, I'm pleased to state that I didn't find it to be that bad in that regard. It's not perfect, some of the profiling of the turns and stuff definitely sort of throw you around in a way that older B&Ms don't usually do, but I wasn't nearly bad enough to ruin the ride for me. The one asterisk to that being on the two rides I got, they were both in the front row, and I've heard that the back row is far and away the roughest on the train, so had I gotten put back there, I might've come away with a different opinion. But since I got some solid rides on this, I really liked it! Putting it behind the bigger dives I've done with Valravn and SheiKra, but ahead of Iron Menace.

Superman - Ultimate Flight - 1 ride - Coaster Credit 195!

The first of several coasters I'll be talking about here that are clones of rides I've done at other parks lol, the recaps for these are gonna be much shorter than the ones above lmao. I've done Superman at Great Adventure a few times so I knew what to expect going in for this one haha. It's always cool to be able to get on a flying coaster, since there aren't that many of them in the US. I always enjoy the layouts of the Superman flyers, even though there's not a ton to them. The highlight easily is that pretzel loop. You pull some great forces through that element, but it did get a little shaky at that point too. I'm not sure at the moment whether I put this one above Great Adventure's Superman or not, since this one did run a little shakier I think, but I thought it's setting was better with more trees around it compared to the one at Great Adventure that's just out in a grass covered section of the parking lot lol.

Joker - 1 ride - Coaster Credit 196!

In comparison to basically everything else I rode during this visit, I was not particularly eager to ride Joker lmao. After the rather uncomfortable ride I had on SF New England's Joker last year, that reminded me that these S&S 4D Free Spins are just really not my type of ride. The flipping on its own isn't really the problem, it's the quick changes in direction from flipping forwards to flipping backwards and getting your weight thrown into your restraints. It's just not a comfortable sensation. Thankfully, this one wasn't as bad as the one at New England, and regardless of where you ride one, at least they're not very long, so if you're not getting a good ride, you don't have to put up with it for too long. Since I got a marginally better ride on this one, I put it as my second favorite of the four Free Spins I've done, above the ones at New England and Fiesta Texas, but below Great Adventure's. These rides are generally a one and done for me.

Batman The Ride - 1 ride - Coaster Credit 197!

Another ride that I've done a clone of at Great Adventure, but this was the original Batman clone! Actually, the first Invert ever! It was definitely ambitious for its time, and props to Great America for running with B&M from the beginning. They'd gotten B&M's first ever coaster, a standup with Iron Wolf in 1990, then they got the first Invert here with Batman two years later, one of B&M's first Hypers with Raging Bull in 1999, and one of their first Wing coasters with X-Flight in 2012. Plus Rakshasa as another B&M last year haha. But back to Batman, it's clear why there are so many clones of this layout all over, it really is a little powerhouse of a ride. Small but compact and VERY forceful. Those corkscrews especially really feel like they'll rip your feet off from the positive and lateral forces. I thought this one, similar to Superman, was slightly more shaky than the one at Great Adventure, but that would make sense since it's a year or so older, and that still didn't detract from the ride too much.

Flash: Vertical Velocity - 1 ride - Coaster Credit 198!

Despite sharing a name with a coaster at Great Adventure, the clone of this one that I've done is not there, but is rather Possessed at Dorney Park lol. Yeah, these Intamin Impulse coasters are nothing too crazy. Going forwards and backwards on a U-shaped track up a twisted spike in the front and a vertical spike in the back. Kinda similar to Joker, these kinds of rides are ones that I've always sort of found to be just kinda whatever. They don't really do a whole lot for me, both figuratively and literally lol. I mean they're still fun to ride for sure, but I wouldn't wait more than like 2 or 3 cycles for them. Compared to Possessed, I thought the launch wasn't as punchy here. I feel like Possessed takes off quicker as the launch kicks in, whereas Flash felt slightly more gradual. I did like Flash's location though, positioned right above the water so you could see it looking down from the vertical back spike. I thought that was a nice detail.

Little Dipper - 1 ride - Coaster Credit 199!

The last of my new credits I picked up on this visit! Little Dipper is another classic, and fairly historic, little wooden coaster. It opened back in 1950 at Kiddieland in Melrose Park, Illinois, just outside of Chicago, but Great America saved it after Kiddieland closed in 2009, reopening here in 2010! It's exceedingly rare to see a wooden coaster, even a small one like this, get relocated in this day and age, but it's awesome that Great America committed to saving it! Being such a small ride, of course it was very tame but I thought it was cute :3 I thought it was a bit tamer than like, the Woodstock Express junior wooden coasters at Kings Island, Kings Dominion and Carowinds for example, so I'd rank it below those, but that doesn't mean it's a bad ride by any means! I thought it ran well and seemed like a great ride for younger kids to start out on!

Goliath - 1 ride

Even though Little Dipper was the last new credit I picked up, I still got some re-rides on coasters I'd done before haha. Now going from a very small wooden coaster to one of the largest wooden coasters in the world! Goliath is awesome, it's my second favorite ride in the park. Not the longest in the world for sure, but it's rapid fire all the way through with some awesome elements. That first drop, the tallest and steepest on any wooden coaster, is fantastic. You get some awesome ejector air going down that thing. Both inversions on this ride are also wild. The dive loop because it's just an element you don't expect to see on a wooden coaster, and flipping through and diving down through that wooden structure is really a surreal visual. Then that massive zero-g stall under the lift hill is amazing too. You hang there for such a long time, getting perfect weightlessness all the way through. Not to be forgotten though is the one other really banger moment of airtime in the middle of the ride, between the turnaround after the first drop and the dive loop. RMC knows how to do ejector airtime and they nail it with this one. Really glad I was able to get back on this one, such an awesome ride.

Viper - 1 ride

Even though I had ridden Viper last time, I really wanted to get another lap in this time because I felt like I didn't get a good feel for it last time. I'd heard from a lot of people that Viper is an underrated wooden coaster, that it has some surprisingly good airtime and often gets overlooked. But I'll come out and say it, I was underwhelmed with Viper last time I rode it and that kinda held true this time too </3 It was still solid for what it was, don't get me wrong I did enjoy my ride on it, it just didn't really surprise me with anything. More than airtime, I feel like Viper excelled in terms of lateral forces. A lot of the turns on the ride weren't heavily banked, meaning you got forced to the side pretty strongly and I thought that was fun haha. And like American Eagle and Little Dipper, I thought Viper was running very well too. I didn't have any kind of a noticeable roughness problem at all with it. Clearly Great America takes very good care of all their woodies haha. So in the end, Viper remains a ride that falls into the category of "I'll happily ride it any time I come to the park, but I don't need to take more than one lap on it per visit", which I think is fair.

Maxx Force - 2 rides

To cap off my day, I used my two line skips for back to back rides on what I think is Great America's best coaster! You guys know me, I'm a sucker for anything with a launch, especially a powerful launch. And with Maxx Force having the fastest accelerating launch in the country, going from 0 to 78 mph in just 1.8 seconds, Maxx Force does not mess around in the power department lol. Like Goliath, Maxx Force is a very short ride, which is easily it's biggest drawback. But I can look past a short ride duration if it packs in some awesome stuff, and along with that launch, Maxx Force flings you through five inversions in a very short amount of time. My favorite of them is the high speed heartline roll in the middle of the ride. You just get whipped through that thing so fast, it's awesome. I'm really glad I was able to get on Maxx Force at all, since literally as I was walking up to it, it went down for some kind of problem and everyone got kicked out of line. Since my day was coming to a close, I was really hoping it would reopen quickly. Thankfully it was only down for about 15 minutes and I was able to get my rides in! This thing is such a rush, I love it lol

So that's concludes my thoughts on everything I rode at Great America! There were a couple coasters I rode last time that I passed on riding again, those being Demon and Dark Knight. Neither of those rides were that great and I didn't mind skipping them. You may notice two other coasters that I didn't ride, those being Raging Bull and Sprocket Rockets. Unlike Demon and Dark Knight, I did want to ride Raging Bull again. Similar to Viper, I was kind of underwhelmed by it on my first ride and wanted to give it another shake. But unfortunately, similar to Maxx Force, I'd saved it for towards the end of my day and it went down </3 It didn't reopen in time before I had to leave, so I wasn't able to do it, which was definitely a bummer. Sprocket Rockets on the other hand, despite never having ridden that one before, I specifically passed on grabbing that credit. As stated above, Little Dipper is credit number 199 for me, and I have big plans for that milestone in a couple weeks, so I didn't want to throw those plans off hehe. I'm sure I'll be back to Great America in the future, so I can grab the Sprocket Rockets credit then ^^

The last thing I'll do in this post is rank all the park's coasters that I've ridden! (So everything other than Sprocket Rockets lol). This will be a relatively tentative ranking, since a lot of the rides with clones I talked about could shift around a fair bit. But based on how I'm feeling about them now, here's how they rank up!

Maxx Force

Goliath

Wrath of Rakshasa

X-Flight

Raging Bull

Superman - Ultimate Flight

Batman the Ride

Viper

American Eagle

Whizzer

Flash: Vertical Velocity

Joker

Demon

Dark Knight

Little Dipper

I know I said before that I'd kind of stopped making these big trip recap posts, but I have a lot that I want to talk about from my visit to Kings Island last week that I figured it was good to revive this format lol

So yeah! My sister and I went to Kings Island last week, our first time at the park since 2024 and had a pretty solid day overall! The main hurdle was just how crowded the park was. There were TONS of school groups there and almost every line we waited in was pushing an hour or more. By about mid-day I had considered just caving and getting Fast Lane skip-the-line passes for the two of us, but by then, they were all sold out for the day. We did end up buying individual single use Fast Lanes for Flight of Fear and the Beast, which definitely came in handy to knock those two rides out. It would have definitely been nice to ride other things, like Racer, Adventure Express or Queen City Stunt Coaster, but with our circumstances, I'll take what we could get lol.

Like I said, I hadn't been to the park in about two years, but a lot of what we rode were rides that I hadn't done since my first visit to the park in 2019, so it was a lot of fun to get back on those. We rode 8 of their 15 coasters, which I thought was reasonable given how heavy the crowds were. I'll go a bit more in depth into our specific ride experiences below, but in terms of what we rode, we were able to get on: Orion, Diamondback, Snoopy's Soap Box Racers, Banshee, Mystic Timbers, Flight of Fear, and the Beast. I also rode the Great Pumpkin Coaster but my sister passed on that one lmao. What was was also kinda funny was that for nearly everything we rode, we were assigned either the back or second to back row. I think the only rides we didn't get the back row for were Banshee and Flight of Fear haha.

One of our main goals was for my sister to ride her 100th coaster there. She'd wanted the Beast to be her hundredth, which I think would have been a very respectable coaster for that milestone haha. But with the crowds, we weren't able to quite get her there. Though she is currently at 96 credits, so she's close! Since she didn't hit the milestone here, she said she wants her 100th to be either Millennium Force at Cedar Point or Pantherian at Kings Dominion (depending on how plans for next summer shake out), which I also think are great picks hehe. I also got two new credits here, bringing me to 191 and finally giving me Kings Island completion lol, but I'll cover those more in depth in a second.

Orion - 1 ride

Orion was the first ride we went for and it was just as much fun as I had remembered it being! It's a super long ride with great speed and forces. I know a lot of people give it flack in terms of its layout or its height or whatever, but I've always thought it was really solid. It's not quite to the level of the other B&M Giga I've ridden, Fury 325 at Carowinds (though to be fair, very few rides are up to that level in general), but I think Orion stands well as it's own ride. Getting the back row also made the airtime better, especially on that massive wave turn right after the first drop. And speaking of, that first drop is still awesome. Like on Fury, it feels like you're falling forever, getting a perfect weightless feeling the whole way down. I also thought the turnaround at the far end of the ride, and the helix towards the middle pulled some surprisingly strong positive Gs as well. Overall, I still really liked Orion and it still lands as my favorite coaster at the park and within my overall top 20.

Diamondback - 1 ride

I had ridden Diamondback on my last visit to the park in 2024, but this was another ride I was eager to ride again. I'd always heard people say it's one of the best B&M Hypers, and I wanted to give it another shake to see how it compared to some of the other Hypers I've done like Thunder Striker or Candymonium. Like a lot of the other coasters we rode, we got put in the back row, which much like Orion, definitely helped the airtime hit harder haha. Diamondback was just a much fun as I'd remembered, with its huge, parabolic airtime hills and great feeling of speed. It's long trains also make it so in the back, you feel like you really get whipped over some of those hills. There were some moments that did feel a little rattly in the valleys but overall the ride seemed to be running very well. One funny thing that happened on our ride that I hadn't expected came from the fact that we got the back row. The trains on Diamondback have two scoops on either side of the train that, when the train skims over the surface of a pond at the end of the ride, the scoops dig into the water and shoot it into the air as two big plumes behind the train. As my sister and I were in the back row with our hands up, my right arm and her left arm hit the plumes of water, causing us both to get a bit wet lmao. We weren't expecting that and we both found it pretty funny lol. In the end, I did end up bumping Diamondback up to become my favorite B&M Hyper, surpassing Thunder Striker. I think Diamondback does have the superior layout and setting over Thunder Striker.

Snoopy's Soap Box Racers - 1 ride - Coaster Credit 190!

Thankfully the shortest line we waited in all day, this was one of the two coasters I hadn't ridden before, so new credit for both me and my sister! :3 Like all the new credits I get, this one will get it's own dedicated Tac Talks Coasters post at some point relatively soon-ish where I'll go into more in depth about it. But in general, I thought it was a lot of fun! This was my first Vekoma Family Boomerang I've done and I thought it was a great fit for the park. A really good stepping stone coaster for kids who might want to move on from smaller rides like the Great Pumpkin Coaster or Woodstock Express, but aren't quite ready to take on things like Adventure Express or Queen City Stunt Coaster. I also thought the theming around the ride, and really the whole Camp Snoopy area, was super cute and very well done :3

Banshee - 1 ride

After waiting in what felt like the most painfully long line of the day, I was able to ride Banshee for the first time since 2019! This was one of the rides I was most eager to take another shot at, since between now and 2019, I'd heard a lot of people say that Banshee had a problem with roughness and that it was much more noticeable here than on other Inverts, so I went in expecting that to be a prominent issue. But I am glad to report that I really didn't find it to be that bad! Yeah the ride had a bit of a vibration to it that became fairly noticeable at points, but I really didn't think it detracted from the ride experience all that much. The main things that I thought Banshee did well were it's length, it's forces and it's layout. Banshee is the longest and fastest of any B&M Invert and you can definitely tell when you ride it. I thought the ride's 7 inversions were all really solid too. I especially liked the pretzel knot and the final in-line twist. I also thought the ride's first drop was surprisingly good. As the only large scale Invert in the US without a pre-drop, the drop felt very sudden and whippy, which I thought was great. While still a middle-of-the-road Invert for me, I still really enjoyed getting the chance to ride Banshee again.

Great Pumpkin Coaster - 1 ride - Coaster Credit 191!

I have no shame lmao. Although it would appear my sister has a bit more dignity than I do in this case because she passed on this one lol. Great Pumpkin was the last coaster at the park that I hadn't done, and since they removed the maximum height restriction since the last time I visited the park, I made sure to grab the credit lol. Again, this will also get its own TTC post down the line, but in general, it's a perfectly serviceable little kiddie coaster. It's the smallest of the models E&F Miler offers and you get sent around twice. All well and good for a young kid's first coaster.

Mystic Timbers - 1 ride

Back to more noteworthy rides haha, Mystic Timbers is awesome. I'd put it third in the park behind Orion and Diamondback, but they're all pretty close to each other in my rankings. What I think Mystic Timbers does best is that out-of-control feeling that wooden coasters can excel at. Mystic runs through a course full of fast paced banked airtime hills, darting from side to side through the woods. Each hill gives a sharp pop of airtime as you go flying through the course, ending at the ride's infamous shed at the end. This time around, I didn't think the airtime on the ride hit quite as strongly as I had remembered, but I still find it to be a top tier GCI and excellent wooden coaster altogether :3

Flight of Fear - 1 ride

Another ride I'd missed in 2024, I was very interested to get back on Flight of Fear for the first time in so long. I had done one of its outdoor clones, Joker's Jinx at Six Flags America, last year and really enjoyed that, so I wanted to see how this one compared. But before riding it, even getting onto the ride itself was a bit of an endeavor lmao. We were initially going to make it the second ride of the day after doing Orion, since the line was relatively short and the two rides are right next to each other. But not long after getting in line, all the lights and screens in the ride's theme queue turned off, just going to basic white lighting and it was announced that the ride went down for maintenance. We waited maybe 20-30 minuted in the line to see if the ride would reopen but when it didn't, we decided to bail and come back later. When we wanted to come back to ride it, the app listed the ride as having a 90 minute wait. We didn't have the time to wait in that line before we had to leave, so we got those two one time Fast Lane passes to skip the line to make sure we rode it. Thankfully those came very much in handy and we only waited maybe 10 minutes for the ride. As for the ride experience itself, I thought it was a lot of fun. The launch wasn't quite as punchy as I'd remembered but the layout was still really solid. Even in the dark, you could tell how compact and intertwined it all is. The main downside is the ride's mid-course brake run basically slamming you to a stop before continuing through the rest of the ride. It was able to regain a lot of it's speed by the end, but I do kinda wish it didn't have it's mid-course, similar to Joker's Jinx and Poltergeist at Fiesta Texas.

The Beast - 1 ride

And for our grand finale of the day, we had to get a ride on this legendary wooden coaster. My sister had been dying to ride it for like 2 years, since she'd wanted to ride it in 2024 but it was closed all day. And I hadn't ridden it since 2019, and in that time, it had gotten some substantial re-tracking and re-profiling from the Gravity Group, so this was far and away the coaster I was most excited to ride during our visit. And let me tell you, The Beast did NOT disappoint. Holy crap, this might have been one of the wildest wooden coasters I've ever ridden. I'd completely forgotten what this ride feels like. It's not quite to the level on insanity that rides like El Toro, Boardwalk Bullet or Mine Blower have, but it's not that far behind those, just in a different way. While El Toro has mind blowing airtime, and Boardwalk Bullet and Mine Blower have super compact and twisted layouts, The Beast dominates them in terms of scale. At a ridiculous 7,000+ feet long and with a ride time of over four minutes, there are very few coasters that compare to this one. And to think that this was all built by the park themselves back in 1979. Split into two halves by it's 2 lift hills, the first half of the ride is all about running through the wooded hills way behind the park. This part is a lot of fun, hugging the ground, shooting through tunnels and getting some decent airtime. The parts that had the Gravity Group's pre-cut wooden track were running supremely well, though there were some noticeable jolts in areas where the ride hadn't yet been re-tracked. I didn't find those to be too bad though. Then the second half of the ride is really where The Beast shines. After going up a second lift hill, you turn to the left and see a relatively shallow drop into an enormous double helix. Though the drop is not very steep, don't be fooled, you build up some crazy speed going down and by the time you explode into that helix, the ride is absolutely flying. The fact that the bottom part of the helix is in a tunnel just accentuates that out of control feeling and the sense of speed. It also slams you with some fantastic positive and lateral Gs. After the helix, you rise up through a few smaller hills into the brake run but man, what a way to end the ride. Like I said, I'd forgotten how bonkers this ride is. I liked it so much more than I'd remembered and ended up bumping it like 20 spots higher in my rankings. It now lands in my overall top 40, surpassing Banshee and Vortex to become my fourth place coaster at the park, behind Orion, Diamondback and Mystic Timbers.