Theme Park

played for a few hrs then the game keeps crashing

Well hello there! Please don't be afraid. I'm the reviewer and I am here to take you to a magical land. You first lad! Friends can come to. Aha and even grown ups. Oh! I almost forgot... you to. Roll up, roll up for the greatest show on Earth! GO! This game is a goldmine. Sources suggest that people would be willing to pay much more if EA gave a damn for squashing the old frog and their pioneering Designer Series before it even got a foot. Theme Park should be given justice by remastering the DOS version in HD and fixing the long infamous bugs and putting in the missing features the development team had no further time to implement or anyway of patching the first release, yet did bring them to the inferior ports.

I had Theme Park World which was made for Windows, I thought this would be similar but the interface which is designed for DOS is very clumsy and hard to figure out compared to that title. As a first time player I found this pretty frustrating, couldn't even figure out how to save the game or return to the main menu, couldn't pause the game or adjust the speed and didn't feel like I was in control of what was happening at all really. Not recommended for those who didn't have the game back when it was new, doubt I'll play this more than once. Only upside is I only paid $2.80 for it but wouldn't have even paid that for the few minutes I spent on it.

I got Theme Park as a kid and I loved it back then, which seems to be a common theme with Bullfrog games and how they're rated here. Theme Park's graphical style is still great and the game is full of nice little details. However, that's pretty much the extent of the game's appeal today. First off, Theme Park has a very unintuitive UI. After getting a hang of it, designing your park should be fascinating for a while, and the research aspect keeps things fresh for a bit longer. On the other hand, hiring and micromanaging staff is, at least for me, a pain in the backside, but sadly it's one of the game's only activities besides building more stuff and finetuning prices. You can also manually keep your shops in stock and manage staff wages and the stock market, but you can only do those adequately or wrong. As your park gets bigger, the place gets filled with trash and vomit and you'll get to hear every single time someone throws up or is disgusted by it. The background sound is a very short loop of a noisy crowd that I'll guarantee will get on your nerves sooner or later. Almost the only other sound effects are constant cash register chimes and ride-specific songs. The resulting cacophony is soul-crushing. When your park is finished, you're left with a collection of repetitive animations and the option to build another park just like the last one. I can't recommend Theme Park in this day and age when you have your Rollercoaster Tycoons or even the newer Theme Parks.

Lost a lot of time to this game back on the Amiga 600.. Detailed and challenging, this game is worth a try for any theme park simulation fan out there.