Let me start off by saying, so it doesn't continue to be a distraction
to me later: Please, enough with the AOE2 already. I wrote that
column a month ago, and yet I received another 2 emails
yesterday, probably from very slow readers (three weeks from now
I'll get an email saying "Hey! I am not!). The final summary: of the
81 emails that I received, 65 agreed with me ("You da man!", "A
whole f**king year!", "I agree."), 14 disagreed ("You're full of s**t",
"Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.", "The greatest XP ever!"), and frankly two
responses were so incoherent that I couldn't tell what they wanted.
One ranted about government and, I'm pretty sure, alien
interference in the software industry. The other was entirely in
French, of which I speak not a word. I believe I wrote back to
every one of you (the guy who wrote to me in French I wrote back
to in German). If you fell through the electronic cracks, I'm truly
sorry. Praise or disapproval, your letters at least mean you're
reading, and for that I'm grateful. One thing I do have to say
regarding the criticism, however. I had at least 5 people wrote me
letters to the effect "Let's see you write a game and I'll criticize it."
Right. Right. Because I can't make a game, I also have no idea
what constitutes a good game. By extension, then, because I can't
make a steel-belted radial tire, I have no right to question tread
separation. Uh-huh. And here I came to write about Rollercoaster
Tycoon: Loopy Landscapes, and specifically not AOE2, and yet I've
spent ½ of a page discussing just that. Clearly I'm driving myself
nuts. Just so long as I'm not doing it on Firestone tires.
An interesting thing (well, an interesting thing to me at any rate)
about gaming occurred to me recently. No matter how wholesome
a gaming experience a game designer is aiming for, some game
players will find a way to pervert it. I achieved this epiphany last
week when I was trying to find out how many ways there were for
Frogger to die. Even before then, if I had thought about it in that
light, there were stories of people drowning their Sims in
swimming pools and slapping their Imps to death in Dungeon
Keeper. And so, while my wife is designing the perfect flower
garden complete with lamp posts and benches to promote peace
and tranquility in her amusement park in Rollercoaster Tycoon, I'm
building rollercoasters with discontinuous tracks to kill as many
passengers as possible. I would then see how far I would have to
drop the price to get people to ride my deathtraps again. Maybe
I'd have to take out an ad campaign: "Ride the Decapitator!"
There's one rollercoaster type which consists of a vertical pole that
a car is launched up and then slides back down. I would turn up
the launch speed until the car flies right off the top of the pole,
raining passenger death down upon the park. Neat! Well, I think
it's neat. Hey, whatever floats your boat. Go drown a Sim, if you
prefer.
Simply put, I loved Rollercoaster Tycoon. While I found Sim City
and Sim Tower playable, after a couple of hours I always want to
do something else. In contrast, I've played RCT for 5 or 6 hours at
a stretch, continuing to tweak my park and watching the money
roll in long after the objective has been reached. It has an
addictive quality that attracts many different types of gamers. As I
sit here banging away at my keyboard, I can't figure out what
makes it so addictive, but it all works: from the simple research
model, to the dozens of rides you can build, to the tiny people
puking on your walkways. In substance, it was really very similar
to a game that came out just a few months later called Sim Theme
Park from Bullfrog, which was almost unplayable and really no fun
at all. I'm sure people at both Hasbro and Bullfrog are scratching
their heads over that one.
When RCT came out, I went ripping through the 21 "missions"
(levels? parks?) in no time, and judging from the forums on RCT, I
wasn't alone. People loved the game, and yet complained that it
was too short and too easy. Hasbro responded quickly with the
addon pack. It added a little bit of everything (rides, landscape
themes, concessions), 30 new parks, and was a little more difficult,
to me at least. It quickly became a bestseller like the game that
spawned it. Now they've slapped another addon pack on top of
that one, and I'm having some trouble reviewing it.
I think the bulk of my problem comes from the fact that, though I
played RCT and the first addon a great deal, I'm really kind of an
amateur compared to some of the hard core players. To start with,
I've never themed any of my parks at all. No flowerbeds, or
statuary, or any of that for me; just rides and concessions at my
parks, and the game seems pretty happy with that - I've had parks
with sustained ratings of 899 (900 being the highest). Heck, I don't
even have my handymen mow the lawn - that's how sloppy my
parks are. Just mop up the vomit, and your guests are in a state of
bliss. So the theming (if that is even a word) is entirely for your
benefit, and is entirely up to your discretion. Additionally, while
my parks all turn a handsome profit, I don't spend a lot of time
playing with the cost of the hamburgers at the concession stands to
wring out every last dime. Get it? Strictly amateur. So I'm
hesitant to attach a rating to this game more than most.
This XP adds, like the last one, rides, landscape themes, and
concessions, along with another 30 new parks to try your hand at.
There seems to have been some minor improvements to the
in-game menu system here than there. I could well be wrong
about that - there could simply be some functions I haven't noticed
up to now. The opening game menu has definitely been
organized for the better in that is it now easier to pick a game from
the original or one of the expansion packs using a tab and folder
system that is much more convenient. The twist in Loopy
Landscapes is that they have also brought in some new
environments - snow, desert, etc - in which to build your parks, but
the implementation of those environments is pretty strange. In
snowy environments, for example, the ground is white instead of
the green of grass, even when the temperature is over 70F. Magic
non-melting snow. Yup. Either that, or someone went berserk
with the flocking gun all over the entire park. And when the
temperature is in the 30's, people will still get on the water rides.
Wheee. Pneumonia. Dig down, say to level out a hill, and you
don't strike dirt, you strike more snow. Where are we, the polar
icecaps? Maybe with parks entitled "Iceberg Islands" and "Icicle
Worlds" we're supposed to be. You can still plant flowers - they
don't seem to freeze and die. And it rains, but it never snows. The
list goes on, but I think I've gotten the point across. The snow is
more a look than an impact, if you get my drift. As a whole, such a
strange half-assed implementation that it kind of surprises me,
because the RCT series has so far been well thought out. Oh, well,
they can't get everything right. I think even more than new
environments, I would have liked to have some kind of day/night
cycle implemented - all the rides would light up along with the
lamp posts on the footpaths. Then again, with a month of game
time taking about 10 minutes, it would have gone from day to night
a little too quickly. Still, wouldn't that be something to see?
With the new stuff in this XP, it truly seems that you can build onto
your park just about forever, as long as you have land to build on
(or under, or over) and cash in the bank. That continues to be part
of the beauty and one of the most compelling reasons for the
addictive nature of the RCT series. Perhaps despite all the little
changes and additions, to the average player it will start to feel
like more of the same old thing after awhile. Here's where the
RCT aficionados tell me that the snowman theming is just the thing
they've been looking for around their bobsled rollercoaster.
Maybe so. I know that it did get a little same-y to me, but as a
reviewer I'm trying to get through a game very quickly to get my
review out - I'm really marathoning more than playing the game.
Look, the RCT maniacs are going to love Loopy Landscapes, but
considering everything, I think the average RCT players like myself
are also going to find enough things to enjoy too. That said, I think
Hasbro needs to be very cautious about returning to this well too
often (Hello, Tomb Raider). While I liked this one, I don't think I'd
receive RCT XP3 as kindly.