RollerCoaster Tycoon® Deluxe

Before RCT, there was Theme Park, a game that was one of the first of it's kind, extremely fun and memorable and requiring you to have management and decision making skills to make a amusement park. RCT then came along, thanks to Chris Sawyer who pretty much made the whole game with a hired graphics artist. What he came up with was a touch of genius. Everything that was present in Theme Park is in the game and with so much more added. You start with one of the scenarios whereby a typical scenario could start off with a fairly developed park or one that requires you to almost build from scratch. After meeting the requirements, you successfully complete the scenario and unlock the next ones. To meet requirements, you build your park up. Like in Theme Park, you start off by laying paths, building some "static" rides which are grouped into 2, the gentle rides which are more for the peeps that can't take too intense rides, and the thrill rides that are more for hardcore theme park fans. Gentle Rides range from Merry-Go-Rounds, Haunted House, Ferris Wheels etc. Thrill Rides go from Swinging Ships, Go Karts etc. And of course, every theme park needs stalls, stalls selling food and drink, stalls selling balloons and souvenir. Placement of stalls like the rides is extremely important. Placing a balloon stall near the entrance of the park and every peep that comes in will probably buy one, filling the whole park full of balloons. Also placing food stores near intense or Rollercoaster rides might induce more people vomitting while drink stores decrease nausea. Also place toilets near intense rides. Stall and ride placements are another part that requires your management and strategic skills. And then there are the staff. A park cannot run without them. You need mechanics to inspect and fix rides, before everything starts getting faulty and exploding, you need entertainers to make people in long queues happy, you need guards to catch people and maintain security etc. Decorations and park themes another important part of the game, you don't want your park to look too barren, and hence you fill it full of trees, hedges, decorations, and scenary items to your specific theme you want for the park. The visitors to your park will often marvel at well-built park decoration and themes. And the best part of the game, building rollercoasters. The engine itself is a wonderfully complex and yet easy to learn marvel of a rollercoaster simulation. You start off by building the station and adding the track depending on your budget and designs. There are tonnes of rollercoaster types available, you decide on the height of the drops, the twists, the turns, the cockscrews, the loops, the length, ANYTHING you wish, creating the coaster of your dreams a single track at a time. After you complete coaster, you test it, and the 3 main stats that determine whether your coaster is a success: Excitement, Intensity, and Nausea. Almost no one will take a coaster that has Nausea ratings off the roof, some peeps are good for more intense rollercoasters, some aren't, Excitement is the stat you want to be as high as possible, higher excitement ratings mean you can set higher prices and more people will ride it. Building a good coaster is a good challenge, the game judges the coaster you built quite realistically and it's damned gratifying to make a coaster with Excitement rating 9 or more though it's also quite hard. Once you're done building your park, you can just sit back, enjoy the peeps riding your rides, watching the activity and making changes whenever you feel like it. It's part of the building and watching that makes this game so great. The awesome details, scenary, music, sounds and rides bring the game to life. RCT, like many other great Sim/Tycoon games like Simcity and Theme Park, is a timeless classic that any PC gamer can play on for years to come, design a park of their dreams and jump in to marvel and escape reality.