Italy 08/19 – Rainbow Magicland + Cinecittà World
Here’s a proper park
-ish.
Day 3 – Rainbow Magicland
First ride of the day was again, the main event. I’ve had my eye on Shock for a while now, since enjoying other launched Maurer X-Cars. They can make good little rides, if a little clunky in places and this one was no exception.
The launch into possible trim and airtime hill gives a powerful surge before you’re flung into the rest of the first half of the layout. It all happens pretty fast with a good contrast of positives and negatives through the non-inverting loop, stupidly tight overbank corner and the entry into the midcourse.
It loses a bit of steam after that, exiting a little slowly, doing some meaningless corners and then a cool little inversion to finish. Strong stuff for a Maurer though, potentially the best example of what I’d say is their strongest ride type as a full package. There’s just too many duds in their spinner world (spoilers).
From there we took the counter-clockwise cred lap. Dune was up first – a Vekoma Junior with the nicer trains. Is what it is.
Opposite that is an interesting dark ride based on a show I’ve never heard of, but my wife was able to fill me on the details mid-ride. In short, anime pixie girls.
Not quite as cut and paste a fantasy tale as I would have imagined though. Apparently they have superpowers such as ‘technology’ or ‘music’.
It takes the Peter Pan/Droomvlucht style of ride to reasonable levels of effort and has some good little sets, just with a bit of mismatch in scaling in places.
Construction – get excited.
The madhouse next door was closed for some reason, then we got lost in a newly rethemed jungle area.
It contained this Wacky Worm though. Good.
The classic shot.
More construction – mmm… look at them fences.
The Maurer Spinner was next which we were fortunate enough to have an excitable Italian man shout the name of the ride in our face, in the proper accent. The outside looks cool with its M.C. Escher theming (big fan – I’ve been to his museum).
The hardware is just another lackluster spinner though, never really doing much in a big empty warehouse.
Huntik is their other dark ride that caught me off guard. Again it’s based on some show I’ve never heard of, but you can catch up on back to back episodes on a TV in the entrance/exit area.
It’s a shooting ride with almost-Spiderman/Legend of Nuwa technology, just far less dynamic. It has a rockin’ soundtrack through on-board speakers though and ends almost perfectly to a particular riff and someone shouting the word Huntik! I like that.
Flying Dutchman: The Mine Train is supposedly custom, but it’s suspiciously similar to the standard double lift layout that I’ve done a few too many times.
It rode with some vigour at least.
And that was it, other than the Flying Island.
With views of the nearby shopping place at which we would soon have a hearty lunch.
The sun sheltered car park completed with solar panels – lifesaving and smart.
You’ve got to laugh at the little meandering pre-launch track layout of Shock that obviously wasn’t used to its original intention. Supposedly it was going to start with a bit of a dark ride section.
Shock re-rides were particularly welcome after we had learnt that the staff don’t even touch your lap bars so you could go rather loose and be fully out of your seat for a good many moments in the layout. It’s a damn good ride.
There was a bit of car park faff on the way out – we had prebooked tickets online and had the piece of paper but got as far as the barrier to realise you needed an actual ticket and they were unstaffed. Turns out you have to go into the service centre, swap your piece of paper and the ticket you picked up on the way in for another one. Seems a bit pointless doing it online.
Interesting little park really. I got a bit of a Chinese vibe from the place in the way that some stuff is very intensely themed in a rather haphazard fashion. Also in the sense that it’s a very quiet park on what should be a very busy day and shares that feeling of ‘build it and they will come’. Then they don’t come.
Talking of which…
Cinecittà World
An even grander entrance to an even quieter park.
First port of call was the slightly off-looking Mack water coaster thing that isn’t a coaster apparently. The lifts were a bit slow in the burning sun, but the drops were surprisingly powerful for something with such bulk.
We also managed to trigger an Etnaland-scale cheer and applause within our boat. I’ve missed that Italy, you haven’t been quite the same since.
Then it was the slightly off-looking Colossus clone. Not sure on the look of those square supports.
How was lap bar Colossus? Nothing special to be honest.
I like Colossus enough, it’s a bit of fun on occasion. The restraints are less than ideal but the core issue is that it doesn’t ride particularly well for what it is.
So it’s like an SLC with vests in that it shifts your focus on what the ride is doing to you. Fix the restraints and you just tend to notice more that it’s rattling and juddering through 100 inversions and not really giving you a huge amount of joy.
Yes, the drop is profiled better (but less amusingly) and yes the in-lines are a bit cooler with a lap bar, but was it worth cloning? Not at all.
Flamingoland are fools.
I was recommended to do the horror walkthrough round the corner from there. It contains a load of scenes from famous horror films and it was quite fun playing name that film. I’m no expert as I very rarely do them, but as a scare attraction it wasn’t very good.
It’s one of those conga line ones where any level of suspense is just broken by the faff of moving 10 people with different attitudes towards the experience through a room in a timely fashion.
Also as with many year round attractions like this, half the rooms were empty and in the other half most of the actors weren’t doing a whole lot – there was an unthemed staff member at some point in the middle of it telling us to turn right instead of left while also standing directly in front of a scare.
I was promised Voldemort in one of the scenes. Didn’t happen.
The day was running on and we had started noticing from the signs that most of the attractions were due to close before the park did, so we hurried on to the other, better cred.
This ride was really good. The first half of the layout is surprisingly forceful for its size (and given that Thirteen’s feeble first half is the easy comparison), whipping you through some tight turns and twists in the dark with some rather fetching theming.
I’m a bit confused on the theme as there are still newspaper articles on the station wall about the film studio burning down. Is that stuff from the old name? The rest of it now appears to be related to Dante’s Inferno.
It’s mostly done in parchment and ink storybook style, animated with projections and it gets quite graphic on the drop track as some big monster thing starts munching on some people.
Boom! Drop tracks never get old. Properly out of the seat, laughing with joy.
The second half is a little weaker, as seems to be the trend on these when you’ve run yourself out of height on the previous element. Great stuff overall though.
Seems familiar.
It’s an immersive tunnel ride, about dinosaurs if you hadn’t guessed it. This one seemed slightly odd in that the focus of the action seems to be on the front screen, with less interesting stuff going on at the sides. Fortunately we were seated at the very front of the front car of the tram vehicle, but I can imagine it would be less than ideal if you were all the way at the back of the warehouse.
Had a bit of a grim ending – we got eaten. Wasn’t that fussed about it to be honest. I’ve done better.
Final ride of the day would have been the flying simulator but we got as far as the end of the preshow (which went on for far too long) and were then evacuated out a fire exit as it had broken down (or as a direct translation “had a spectacular technical problem).”
And that was that.
This place is obviously suffering even more than Rainbow from a similar vibe. Trouble is it has even less decent things to do and the shopping outlet directly over the road is worse than useless, closing all its restaurants at 7pm – how un-Italian of them. We had most of our amazing pizzas at 10pm.
Inferno is worth the visit at least.
Day 4