Sim Coaster

Publisher: EA Games
Developer: Bullfrog Prod.
Genre: Business Strategy
Release Date: Jan 29, 2001
ESRB: EVERYONE
ESRB Descriptors: Comic Mischief

SimCoaster is the third game in Bullfrog's series of amusement-park-themed business simulators. It's the sequel to last year's SimTheme Park, which itself was a sequel to 1994's Theme Park. SimTheme Park differentiated itself from Theme Park by hiding much of Theme Park's notorious micromanagement elements, so it let you concentrate on building and expanding your park while managing the minutiae only as you saw fit. The goals were invisible, but certain benchmarks regarding income, crowd capacity, and so forth gave you rewards. SimCoaster dismisses the elegant design of its predecessor and instead favors the often overwhelming amount of management found in the original Theme Park. It also gives you very specific goals that must be completed to progress further into the game.

If it weren't for the significant changes to the gameplay, SimCoaster would look like an expansion pack to SimTheme Park. This is primarily because it uses the same engine as that of its predecessor. And mechanically, it plays the same as SimTheme Park. You place rides, paths, shops, decorative features, and sideshow attractions. Placement is key, and you want to make sure your guests are always on rides or spending money and that your guests always have easy access to the next diversion once they've finished the last. You can also choose to wander around your park in the first-person camcorder view, a nice feature that lets you witness everything from a visitor's perspective as opposed to your normal, all-seeing overview.

The most obvious change in SimCoaster is that there is more of an overarching goal. You begin as an employee of a theme-park management company. By successfully completing challenges and objectives assigned to you by the owners, you'll earn more stock, get promotions, open new areas to build in, and gain access to special rides. Objectives are different from challenges. The first are your overall goals for that time, and these are usually related to expansion. A typical objective will be to find some way to remove a lake so that you can build there. Challenges are ways of testing your management mettle, and they include assignments like keeping a certain number of guests in your park or keeping your employees happy for a predetermined amount of time. Often, your objectives will be to succeed at a certain number of challenges.

In theory, it's a nice change from SimTheme Park's very open-ended gameplay. In reality, the challenges serve only to add a layer between you and the game. The challenges reward you for almost exactly the same types of things as in SimTheme Park. The difference is that instead of simply being rewarded for having been a good manager for a period of time, you must choose the block of time during which your skills will be judged. It doesn't add complexity, just complication.

What's more problematic is that these additions take your attention away from the enjoyable part of the game: building and planning your park. In SimTheme Park and Chris Sawyer's extremely popular RollerCoaster Tycoon, the objectives seem directly tied to your ability to design a high-quality park. In SimCoaster, the goals are much more focused on management. The original Theme Park was a business management simulator disguised as an amusement park game, and SimCoaster returns to these roots. The problems you deal with will be numerous and varied.

You wear many hats in SimCoaster. You're the park planner, the labor manager, the accountant, and the head of security. You must constantly deal with problems, from employees wanting raises to unruly kids setting fire to your bushes and trash cans. Once your park gets big, the problems come fast and furious, and it can get more than a little frustrating when you're trying to build an expansion area at the same time. Your advisor will pop up to inform you of problems, and eventually she's almost always onscreen alerting you of one imminent disaster or another. You can always turn off her commentary, but you would miss many important problems. An e-mail-like message system, which is the other means of learning about significant events, is easy to overlook when you're putting out fires all over your park.

Minimum System Requirements
System: PII 233 or equivalent
Video Memory: 4 MB
Hard Drive Space: 415 MB

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