OpenRCT2 – Phase 3

Name = 행복한 순간 (Happy Moment)
Location = China(?) – My original plan was for this park to be more Chinese based, including a bit of C-Pop, but there wasn’t enough for me to work with in the end. The band with the biggest section of rides also has (had) a lot of Chinese influence with several members and a secondary agency, though that all went wrong for them in the year I was building this.
Still, it would be good for me to break into that market. Got a better chance than Mr Lotte now.
Theme = K-Pop
All attractions are based on a music video or song with theming ranging from slight to intense.

Check out the videos below to see some of the rides in action, or download the map to explore.

I honestly struggle to replicate modern wooden coasters in the game without resorting to landscaping. Something about the pacing of a woodie on a piece of flat ground is very hard to emulate when you’re restricted to just reducing the height of the same shaped hills every few seconds. Terrain GCIs are the perfect way to maintain that relentless speed from start to finish, there’s always more momentum to find as you work your way down that hill.

With stalls and wonky hills, RMCs are very fun to build in game (and ride). I believe by this stage I had still only ridden Wildfire of any in the real world and this is more of an artist’s impression of what I’d like my next one to be like, without taking on many spoilers. This one can’t be converted to the new Hybrid track available in game yet as the corkscrew pieces would be missing, so it’s a good demonstration how I was achieving the track look before, with painted rails and wooden supports.

Several new features and techniques for me all came into play for this triple launch Mack coaster. The booster pieces were finally punchy enough to use instead of an overexcited chain lift and they also allow trains to pass backwards across the fins without instantly getting halted again.
The merging and splitting track technique then lets the train join halfway through a launch section in order to not have enough momentum on the first pass, but gain enough on the third to make it in to the rest of the layout.
Finally I was mixing and matching track styles within a single build, something I had always held back on before due to lack of skill and/or I thought they didn’t blend well and were a bit visually jarring. The alternative compromise was always use track that didn’t look anything like Mack at all (LIM launch for me in the past) and so here the combination of Giga, Impulse and Multi-dimension seemed acceptable enough for me to move forward with these sorts of ideas.

As much as I adore the unique feature of Kärnan’s lift hill, there’s a lot of faff involved and I always imagined a better version in which the reverse vertical freefall just continued onwards into a backwards portion of the layout (see also Disney mine trains). It would also be great for thematic reasons in this case.
Track splitting and merging techniques didn’t allow for this in the vertical plane and so the alternative solution was to use a ride operation I never usually touch – reverse incline circuit mode. The catch here was obviously that the cars would be facing the wrong way.
Enter the backwards facing wooden coaster train, but now the ride has to be a woodie. That’s fine by me I said, it’ll just make it even more ridiculous and intense as a concept. The Gravity Group have already dabbled in the shuttle world, I bet I could get them to build something like this if I had the cash.

I have to start by saying that my B&M hypers in the game aren’t built to emulate the ones that exist in real life, as I largely find the layouts a little underwhelming. It’s also just very hard to do a convincing out and back with ever decreasing hill sizes (and some dodgy turnaround no doubt)based on these game mechanics. Instead I build these how I wish they would be, much more twisty and full of stronger airtime. I dream of the day when grace and intensity can go hand in hand. One built around a massive canyon would be nice too.

As with the RMC in this park, this is an artist’s impression of how I wanted something like Lech Coaster to be, before I had even ridden it. The flow and blend of elements, along with the visual interaction feel right up my street. After finally experiencing it this year there’s a certain spark missing from these real Vekomas and I don’t know if I’ll be exploring the ride type in game again for a while yet. There’s one too many things based on B&M track already.

Real life Hafemas are ridiculous in their own right, often pulling crazy stunts you wouldn’t believe possible on a rapids ride. So with some handy hacking I attempted to do the same on my most elaborate water attraction to date. The journey begins by crossing the sea (a world’s first if ever there was one) before weaving in and out of storyline setpieces that lead to the terrifying elevator lift hill and downwards tubey spiral à la River Quest. Just to crank things up another notch (always have to take that intensity one step further) I chucked in a climactic drop on the scale of Singapore’s Jurassic Park shortly after. No time to catch your breath in this end sequence.

The game makes quite light work of building one of these and as un unashamed fan of the Japanese ‘Jet Coaster’ I just had to get one in a park somehow. Narratively speaking it works rather well near the entrance as if it was a somewhat historic relic of the park’s growth. It was also refreshing to create something away from the edge of extreme for once, I imagine one of the main criticisms of guests in these resorts is that the ratio of family rides is too low. I call it tough love.