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I like theme parks. Growing up, we travelled a lot during the summers and would try to frequent the theme parks we passed. During my last couple years of high school, we lived within 20 minutes of a decent-sized park, and instead of hanging out in the local mall (not that there was one there), my friends and I spent our time hanging out in the park, and most of them ultimately worked there during the season. I've seen some good parks and have been to a few very bad ones, so on first playing Theme Park on the DS, I figured I had a good understanding of how to create a virtual park.

Now, let me tell you that there are a few game genres I don't play often. Not due to a dislike of them, but due to an innate lack of patience. Sim games tend to fall in this category for me. I love the concept and enjoy the experience of most, but I end up getting frustrated with the micromanagement of things. Being that I don't typically do well with this type of game, it made it a bit harder to pick it up at first, but what I found was a respectable update of a classic sim title.

You enter your information, and the game gives you a choice of one of the four advisers to assist with your money-making endeavors. These advisers have different looks and personalities that affect how they advise you through the course of the game. After choosing, there is an optional tutorial that gives you the gist of how to build the park. It is amazingly simple on the DS as it makes good use of the touchscreen for drawing paths and placing rides and shops as well as the requisite employees. After learning your way around, you are unleashed to wreak havoc on the theme-park world.

The selection of attractions and stores isn't varied at first, but as your park is open longer and does better, it increases. Each ride has durability to watch as you can't have your haunted house breaking down and ultimately destroying itself; the means for maintaining this is with the repairman employee. As you design and tweak, your adviser will be spouting recommendations on what to set prices at or if you should add more of one thing or another, and for the most part, this helped me a good deal; although, my adviser swore up and down that I didn't have enough signs in the park to show people where the exit is, even though I ended up with one every other square on the paths.

At the end of each season, you get a breakdown of your park's performance and all the other nuances that make a micromanager happy. During each season, there are a ton of background menus to analyze values and performance that will take the gameplay to another level for those who enjoy that aspect of these games. There are even options on the different shops to tweak the amount of salt used on fries to drive more drink sales, which struck me as an interesting design idea.

I was more about the design aspect of the park. I loved drawing new paths around the park and finding nifty ways to place rides so that my patrons could find maximum enjoyment from Harmakhet-land. Trying to make everyone happy is my downfall in these games, though. I would adjust the prices for the shops and tweak ticket prices to an outrageous level based on my adviser's requests, but it got to a point in which I would bounce back and forth trying to make them all happy.

At some point, you will have made your park worth a good deal more than the empty lot you started with and will want to sell it. Once you do that, you will go to a new place and start all over. This is the life of a theme-park designer, and it is the goal of this game ... to keep building successful parks in new and different locations.

Visually, the game looks good. There is a great use of brighter colors that one would associate with a theme park, and the animations, while somewhat simple, are clear enough to show what is going on at a quick glance. The sounds are decent for what they are in a sim — background music and some effect to give you an indication of what is happening.

Theme Park is good. Even a person who doesn't typically play this genre of game can find some enjoyment in it, although it will be vastly better received by a fan of the sim genre.