OpenRCT2 – Phase 1

Name = 포 미닛 월드 (4Minute World)
Location = Korea – I know it’s a bit weird to go backwards at this point but to be honest this first park had some amazing ideas that were not always executed quite so well, as I look back on them now. After rolling out videos of a good chunk of the newer parks I decided to go back and have a bit of a play to bring some of these originals up to scratch again.
This one was actually created in vanilla Rollercoaster Tycoon 2, with many of the ride hacks taking place in a separate piece of user created software. It wasn’t ideal, everything broke down constantly and had the potential to crash the game, but having the opportunity to do far more with the game than ever before was rather enthralling in itself.
At some point I took the plunge and brought this map over to OpenRCT2, learning that most of the ‘hacks’ were now fundamental parts of the newly modified game which made life a lot easier. The biggest gamechanger at that time was the simple option to ‘disable breakdowns’, which meant I could finally see the park fully operational and then take things even further.

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

This Intamin multi-launch coaster was all new to me after the transition to OpenRCT2. The custom scenery was a lot easier to play around with and I wanted something to pad out this hillside area that contained the Lisebergbanan-esque ride with some Liseberg-esque interaction. Because of course.
The recent modification I made to this one was swapping the chain lift for the now faster accelerating LSM booster pieces. This also presented me with the opportunity to tweak the pacing a little bit – when using chain lift as a means of propulsion you were always limited to a single shared speed on both launches.

A GCI woodie with a Wodan inspired start, signature station fly through and a namesake ‘crazy’ section at the end (there was very little to work with on the music video for some of these early picks, I didn’t have a broad enough catalogue of artists). It was interesting to look back on this one and see what my impressions of the manufacturer were like before having ridden, what, 20 of them now. I was fairly happy with this one as it was originally and only ended up smoothing out some of the wilder sections to not be too over-emphasised along with tidying up the scenery a bit – more trees and bushes!

The neighbouring B&M Invert also needed a scenery upgrade, it was looking a bit bare and, for want of a better word, odd. Again I really liked the layout and left it completely as is. There’s an obvious Nemesis beginning here, heading out into a very unconventional both out and back and terrain design that includes some unique interlocking inversions and even that bonus airtime hill before I knew they did such things on these rides – an impressive bit of creative foresight on my part.

This one began with an early fascination of the whole ‘RMC’ deal in the industry. The idea that they converted existing wooden coasters, using the original layout as a base and making many more wild and interesting elements out of it was a very interesting concept to play with in game.

I built myself a CCI woodie with the specific intention of upgrading it almost immediately afterwards and having a template to follow and enhance ended up being both restrictive and rewarding. Once Wildfire and Lightning Rod came along as an inspiration it went a bit more extreme, with a whole extra mountainside section added while almost doubling the original lift hill height (with hybrid support structure), but these in game RMC trains do lose speed pretty quickly so you always had to go bigger and better anyway.

Of course the most recent changes I made here included updating the track type to the actual RMC rails (spot the sneakily disguised corkscrew in there which isn’t actually available to build in this style). Other than that, a couple of pacing improvements here and there and, for reasons that already elude me, an extra inversion.

Kärnan much? The design idea was obvious here with the vertical lift hill inside an overly ridiculous castle tower. Sadly I’m yet to find a way to replicate the actual insanity of the real life lift sequence, but I like to think I made up for it by taking inspiration from elsewhere at Hansa Park and having some great moments of interaction between family and thrill coaster using the intertwined linear layout of a Vekoma Junior Boomerang (let it be known that this was my idea long before Volldampf ever came into being).
In terms of updates, this ride never had an inversion because I always preferred to use the B&M hyper trains to emulate Gerstlauer Infinity trains, but there was no way to make them go upside down. The option was always to comprimise with a shoulder restraint and I was never happy about that (both in game and in real life). These days I find the user created Zierer Tower coaster trains do the job of 4 wide lap bar trains with inversions rather nicely so I decided to chuck in a path interacting zero-G at the end for good measure.

The aforementioned Lisebergbanan ride. It’s quite clear how much my designs were ‘inspired’ by the real coasters I was riding around the time. I had some old mine train cars on this one originally, just to have the choo-choo train look on the front, like the real thing, but these never sat right with me – the animation of the sprites doesn’t show banked curved drops properly and it always looked a little off.
Upon revisiting, I decided to give it some new, standard lap bar Schwarzkopf (likely built by Gerstlauer these days) trains and a new name – to emulate that modifications to this park happen in a real, seasonal time, with accompanying marketing campaign of course.

On the subject of changing trains, this ride had a bit of an in game history as well. Turns out it’s great fun to go back and look on old designs with extra techniques under your belt and more experienced eyes. Maybe with a couple years more practice I’ll be doing the same to the later parks, an endless renewable cycle of attractions and modifications, just like the real thing.

It began life uninspired and unthemed, I knew I wanted a B&M Floorless coaster (for some reason I’ve never spoken those words since) but didn’t have a song to go with it.

Then one day I did, so the terrain got flattened and shipping containers were added everywhere to suit (Merlin would be proud). I also decided to take this upgrade as an opportunity to break the mould – at a time when B&M were converting stand-up trains into floorless trains, this place converted floorless trains into a wing coaster.
It worked surprisingly well, but as I came back to record this one recently I decided that the overall flow of the ride was better suited to the original trains, so they were dug out from the maintenance shed, repainted and reintroduced. Maybe the park will be able to reuse the winged trains on a new attraction some day.