Sim Theme Park

"It's no wild ride"

When the original Theme Park was ported from PC to Playstation in the system's early days it was almost unplayable. For one the game's controls had hardly been adapted for the Playstation's controller at all, and no attempt had been made to streamline the game's features to fit the limited hardware capabilities. Thankfully neither of these problems are to be found in this port of the popular sequel to that seminal sim game.

Playing the original Theme Park now it seems grossly simplistic while still being strangely compelling. Theme Park World keeps the same basic aims in mind while piling on enough new features to make it seem satisfyingly different. You must build a park from the ground up, laying down paths, toilets and rides among various other things. Before opening your park to the public you must also hire various types of staff to patrol the area such as cleaners, mechanics and researchers. Once your park is open you must build up its portfolio of rides, sideshows and shops by researching new ideas. If you go too long without any new attractions, kids will start to lose interest (And these are keen ones, as they seem to stay for upwards of 70 days. Troubled home lives perhaps?) and will stop coming.

The control system for what was a totally mouse-dependent game has been brilliantly transferred onto the playstation controller. Despite this, remembering what everything does will still take some learning, and you won't be left alone to do so. The park's mascot, a couple of black balls stuck together with a crudely animated pair of eyes and floating hands (a la Rayman), will tell you how to work everything in his soothing Scottish voice. The left analogue stick (Or D-pad, if you're one of those) will shift your view around the park, while the right analogue stick will rotate the camera angle. Most actions are designated to the four face buttons, one press of which will bring up menus such as staff hiring forms, available ride lists and your laptop.

Your laptop is the nerve center of the whole operation. From here you can check up on staff, research new rides, features sideshows and shops and tinker with ticket prices. It also includes numerous charts that show different things such as customer satisfaction, profits and how big the groups that arrive at your park are. You will make many decisions based on these things, if the chart shows that most of the children are hungry, you will build more shops, if not many are coming and your new ride is a long way off then you lower ticket prices.

While this offers a reasonable level of complexity and involvement, it is fairly basic stuff for a sim game, so getting into it is easy. Definite goals are set at the opening of each park (There are about eight different ones to open) and on the completion of each of these you will receive a gold ticket. As well as obvious ones such as making a certain amount of money and keeping your park clean there are various hidden ones such as placing a bin next to every single shop or planting enough trees and features to make your park look nice. Early in the game, you can spend some golden tickets on a camcorder which will let you explore your own park in third person. While this looks extremely ragged in practice, it is still fun to wander around your own creation, and will give you more chances to win golden tickets in the form of sideshows you've built. When you have enough tickets you can buy your way to the next park.

Although the parks branch across four different themes (prehistoric, horror, fantasy and space) the rides all broadly correspond to the same categories even if they have different names. You will always find the Ferris-wheel type ride, the roller-coaster type, the go-kart type and so on. There are loads of rides so researching every last one will take a while, and placing a new one down is immensely satisfying. As the progress bar of your new ride slowly fills up on the research screen you will begin to think about placement and what features you will use to draw the kids in.

The relatively relaxed pace of everything means you have ample time to design your park and arrange things how you wish. There is a colossal list of features at your disposal, including different types of trees, fountains, toilets and rocks (Some of the rocks look surprisingly pretty). Making a good-looking park will not only net you gold tickets, but it also makes building in it a little more enjoyable for you. When the mascot pops up in the corner of the screen every now and then to tell you how lovely your park looks, you feel very proud.

Maybe even more fun than this, though, is designing roller-coasters and flume rides. Although I really disliked the bizarre method it had you go through to place all the columns that the track had to be laied on. There is a starting base where the track must begin and end obviously, and you must stretch the track around in a loop, but you can only place the pillars in small areas of ground that are often hard to reach. Actually managing to loop the track around is always much more complicated than it needs to be, and I don't know why the developers decided to employ this incongruous, difficult technique. Once the hard part is done though, you can adjust the height of the pillars to make huge drops and the tilt level of the track. With all of this you can make some truly wild-looking stuff. When you get to ride the roller-coaster yourself in first-person mode, you feel as if you've achieved something pretty great. Extra features such as loop-the-loops can be researched and added later as well.

But while this slow pace allows you to take more time on the little details, it also makes for far too many long stretches of boredom. Sometimes you will be sitting there for literally five minutes just watching the days pass before the mascot pops up in the corner to report a complaint or announce that a new ride/shop/whatever has been finished. And even then, he'll often just tell you that customers think the ticket prices are too high, it takes a couple of seconds to adjust the costs, and then you resume sitting and waiting. This seems like feeding a starving person with a grain of rice once every few hours, and it can get quite dull.

The complete absence of a sense of urgency and regular periods of nothingness seem to stem from a lack of variety. While the PC version had tasks that were set without warning and had to be achieved within a certain time periods (Sell X balloons in Y days etc) that had you concentrating your resources on one part of the park was quite exciting. The Playstation version completely lacks this kind of spontaneity. You research the rides, you build the rides, you send mechanics to the rides when they break down. The enjoyable food delivery sequences from the original have also been abolished, making the shops next to redundant in terms of interactivity. All you can tamper with now is the price of the goods, their quality and the amount of salt/sugar/ice in the fries/ice-cream/drinks. But if you tamper any of the pre-set figures, your customers will almost always be disgusted and boycott your shops. The same goes for the sideshows (Where you can change the cost of the prize and the chance of winning), which renders many of the choices you can make in the game pointless.

And ones that do make a difference carry no risk. You can increase the speed at which your rides run and the seating capacity, but why aren't they up to the top in the first place? All raising the speed will do is make some kids sick, which the cleaners will always get to straight away, and the ill kids always make miraculously quick recoveries. Increasing the capacity will mean the ride breaks down more often, but who cares when the mechanics fix them so quickly anyway? Beyond actually putting stuff down, nothing you do has any discernible effect on anything, so why bother trying?

One other thing which I found ridiculous is that your customers refuse to actually walk around the whole park. Once you have built rides about 75% through the park, the kids will go no further. I filled my first park with rides all the way to the back, and literally not ONE child went anywhere near there. No matter how much you lure them towards the back with shops, sideshows and pretty rocks, the children seem to be restrained by an invisible forcefield. Considering the waste of money and space this problem causes, it is inexplicable that such a problem stays in the game.

My last complaint about what is a mostly competent theme park sim is the mascot. While he is helpful at the start and is useful when it comes to pointing out some of the problems, his relentless stupidity is infuriating. He will pop up at least once a minute to say something. If there is nothing practical for him to say then he will repeat what he said a minute ago or, more often than not, he will make something up. You get used to the fact that he is telling you that you have unused ride upgrades when you plainly don't, but it is the frequency of these comments that really grates. He will often say that customers are really pleased with the value of my food when all the food stalls are being boycotted. Sometimes he will claim that kids think my ticket prices are 'a steal', only to scold me for lowering them by a dollar a second later. And some of his
attempts at humour are so bad it's surreal that anyone came up with them in the first place. Imagine hearing ''Your park needs more features. You know like 'I'll just run to the feature and powder my nose' or 'Lets sit down on this feature and take a load off''' three times in a row every ten minutes or so. This is easily the comment that crops up most often, and his obsession with you planting trees and EVERY AVAILABLE SPOT is nauseating and disturbing in equal parts.

The graphics and sound seem inconsequential in a game like this, and developers Climax seem to realise this as the game is bare but functional in both areas. The graphics aren't immensely detailed and the framerate in the first person-mode is wretched, but the rides are nicely animated. Everything moves, including various rivers and fountains dotted around, so your park always looks busy, fun and very colourful. I can lump the sound in at the end here as it doesn't consist of very much. The four looping tunes that go with their respective themed park are all pleasant but unremarkable. The Scottish voice of the mascot is professional and friendly, which makes it a shame that the character himself is such a nuisance.

Opening and reaching the goals of all of the parks is a lengthy task and one that is worth undertaking if you don't mind the limited gameplay. It cannot be denied that Theme Park world on the Playstation has many flaws and is never exciting or even very difficult. But its pleasant array of features (The gamepay type not the 'run to the feature and powder my nose' type) and often satisfying gameplay make it just the ticket (I'm very sorry for that one) when you are in the mood for something undemanding and relaxing.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 01/23/03, Updated 01/23/03