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chrisls's Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 (PC)

[March 2, 2015 06:51:24 PM]

Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 is a simulation game in which the player is tasked with managing an amusement park. Despite being a sequel, Rollercoaster Tycoon 2’s core game mechanics are the same as the original’s. The sequel adds a few minor improvements and additions and has new scenarios, but the discussion of gameplay elements in this log should be applicable to the original game as well.

To begin a new game, you first select a scenario. Each scenario provides its own map, win conditions, failure conditions, attraction and scenario options, and special rules. Although these differences may seem fairly trivial for a simulation game, they can significantly alter the strategies used and overall gameplay experience. For this gamelog, I am documenting a playthrough of the “Prehistoric – After the Asteroid” scenario, which was added to the game in the “Time Twister!” expansion pack. This scenario tasks the player with building an asteroid-themed amusement park in a meteor crater. The win condition of this scenario is to reach a park value of at least $100,000 and the lose condition is not achieving the win condition by the end of October, Year 2. This scenario, like many in Rollercoaster Tycoon 2, has a special rule disallowing you from charging for rides. The player must make money through entry fees and stalls alone. In this scenario, the player starts out with $10,000 and no loans.

Because the goal for this scenario is simply to achieve a certain park value, I needed to make sure I was consistently adding new popular rides and attractions to my park. To be able to do this, I would need a steady and moderate amount of income. To start off with a good foundation, I spent my initial $10k constructing 2 simple thrill rides, 1 simple gentle ride, and a small, inexpensive corkscrew rollercoaster that I designed.

One of the core gameplay mechanics behind the game is designing your own rollercoasters. Although the game has premade track designs that you can use, they may not cover the price range the player is looking for and sometimes have poor excitement-rating-per-cost performance. (Excitement rating is a major factor in determining a ride’s popularity among guests and having rides with high excitement ratings is crucial to attracting a large amount of guests to the park.) Additionally, using premade track designs bypasses one of the game’s core mechanics, which I find to be very enjoyable and rewarding. However, I do often use premade tracks to bypass designing ride types that I find uninteresting. You can use the game’s coaster designer live inside a game session or in a special roller coaster design mode that allows you to build and test designs without any cost, and then save the designs to be constructed in a live game. For the initial corkscrew coaster, I chose to use the separate design mode to try to get a very inexpensive design while still having a decent excitement rating.

After constructing these few rides, I added in very basic stalls (food, information kiosk, drink, and restroom – these keep guests happy and bring in cash), constructed a straightforward but sizeable path system, complete with benches, trash bins, and path lights, and raised the park entry fee from its initial $10 price to $15. Once this initial setup had been done, I opened my park for business.

This initial setup phase depleted most of my monetary resource. However, I quickly made enough back from entrance and stall fees to make small expansions to the park in the form of a few more small thrill rides. I also invested money in advertisement campaigns, which can help boost the number of guests in your park, and, therefore, increase your income when done at opportune times. After this expansion was done and the marketing campaign was launched, I bumped the park entry fee up by $3.

I continued this strategy of making small, incremental expansions ranging in cost from $2k-$6k and launching advertising campaigns after each expansion to quickly boost my cash-on-hand back up to get ready for the next expansion. I continued this strategy until I had enough attractions in my park to reach a park value of $100,000, and thus, meeting the win condition for the scenario. I was only barely into year 2 when this win condition was met, so I won with a good amount of time remaining on the clock.

After the win condition is met, the scenario is technically ‘complete’. However, the game allows you to keep playing, which is nice because I often feel attached to my parks after completing a scenario and like trying to finish off my original vision for them before moving on to the next scenario. In this game, I continued playing until most of the flat part of the map (the bottom of the crater) was filled with rides. By the end of my play session, my park had 18 rides, six of which were designed by me specifically for this play session, though I may end up re-using some of these designs in future play sessions.

I thoroughly enjoyed this play session of Rollercoaster Tycoon 2, though I found the challenge level to be a bit too low for someone of my experience level, as the scenario was in the “beginner” category. I thoroughly enjoy being able to not only layout and design my own amusement park, but design the rides as well. Additionally, the game can be played in small chunks of time and can also be played somewhat passively, which allows for flexible play sessions instead of having to dedicate hours to be able to enjoy it.

This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Mar 2nd, 2015 at 18:52:27.