The cold wind from the north is starting to breathe down on us again, and warm, sunny summer days have been replaced with cold, rainy, dark fall afternoons. Unless you live in Florida or southern California, this is hardly the time to don your swimsuit and head to the local water slide and wave pool mega-complex. So, while you could just lay back and dream of lazy rivers and chlorine-reddened eyes, it's much better to take matters into your own hands and relive those summer memories by building your own fantasy water park with the first Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 expansion pack Soaked! So break out your SPF 40 (monitor burn can kill) and lets turn the hose on this expansion to see if it floats or sinks.
RCT3: Soaked! adds all the water park staples to the overwhelming array of rides and amusements already present in Roller Coaster Tycoon 3. This lets you build the best of the best "combo" parks just like the big boys at Six Flags or Disney, and gives your peeps a true surf and turf experience (aside from the horrible lobster-red sunburns). All in all, the expansion adds 50 new rides, including new track types for plume style rides and water slides, pools, new shops, new shows, aquariums, two new themes (Atlantis and Pirates), new scenarios and more. Plan on spending a lot of time in Sandbox mode just playing with all the new toys and figuring out how to integrate them into your favorite park.
Pools are a great addition for those hot-under-the-collar peeps, and you have a lot of flexibility in how you set them up. Pools are drawn on the map, in whatever shape you want as long as you can conform to square tiles, though there are several different corner pieces to allow some freedom of expression. Then you can add in all of the normal props: diving boards, bored lifeguards, underwater lights for the night swimmers and so on. Place dressing rooms to allow your peeps to get changed into their bathing suits, which they can conveniently buy from your brand new swimsuit stall along with floaties and sunscreen, and the peeps will hit the pool by the dozens. My son built a pool with over 600 peeps all swimming at once … suffice it to say it was a madhouse, just like any real public pool.
Fluid dynamics play a large part in the pool too, as you can add wave machines that send ripples from the edge of the pool. You can also click and run your mouse in circles to create temporary whirlpools that suck hapless peeps down into a giant swirlie. Funny enough, they seem to like it and yelp with joy. Thankfully, peeps can't drown, or you could have walked across my test pool without touching the water... too much fun.
Water slides are built just like roller coasters, and can be set up to interact with the pools, spitting out the peeps at high speed like a watermelon seed at the State Fair. The designs can be fairly complex, with overlapping spirals and both U-shaped and full tube pipes, but share the same frustrations that you have when building a good coaster, including the usual troubles in getting everything exactly where you want it. Or my worst frustration: building a full slide only to find out you can't have it end where you want, and you can't move the whole ride a few squares to fix it. In any case, once you finally get the slide built up, you can ride it with CoasterCam just like any other coaster. If you've read my original review of RCT3 you know this can often be a nauseating experience if you suffer from any kind of motion sickness - in fact, I think the body slide might actually be worse on my stomach. Luckily, you have all that water to wash away the hurl.
Besides the slides and pools, there are tons of other new things to try out. I particularly enjoyed the dolphin and killer whale shows, as they have multiple cameras in CoasterCam mode, including from the viewpoint of the whale itself as it glides around its pen. The aquarium is interesting as well, allowing you to build an aquarium layout out of various tank buildings and covered paths, building it just as you would a track. There are even manta rays that come up to the peeps to be fed, just like Sea World!
Other new features simply add on to the original RCT features. For example, the fireworks show has been expanded to include laser lights and water effects. Waterfalls have been added to the terrain modeling but didn't match my expectations. For the waterfalls to work, they have to be built in a very specific way to allow enough room to draw the falls. Because of the blocky, tile based map, this leads to some pretty unattractive results, leading me to pretty much give up my Amazonian jungle zone ideas. I do enjoy the Pirate theme though, and set up my own little Pirates of the Caribbean area, complete with 10 foot tall animatronic pirates shooting cannons at innocent bystanders. Mmm. I just love the smell of black powder and Pepto Bismol in the morning.
While I like to build my own tracks, I also like to just be able to drop pre-built coasters into my park, and I was disappointed with the number of pre-built tracks included with the new rides. Considering that the developer designed the game and had to test out the software, you would think that they would have at least hired some interns to build several dozen pre-built coasters to just plop in place. Luckily, the new Ride Exchange is open at the Roller Coaster Tycoon web site, so you can always download and put in fan-created rides instead.
The only other minor issue that just bugs me a little bit, is that there are new branded stalls for Hershey included now, along with Atari T-Shirts at the t-shirt stall. I'm not a real big fan of advertisements in game, and while I suppose they add realism, unless the game is wholly sponsored and free I'd rather they leave that sort of "brand programming" out. But maybe I'm just a narrow minded old codger stuck in the past.
As usual my six-year-old son and I both prefer the Sandbox mode to any scripted scenario. While this is a Tycoon game with all the financial and park popularity objectives, it's still much more fun to just build my dream park. This is still, by far, the best possible feature of Roller Coaster Tycoon, especially for younger kids who still think that a nickel is worth more than a dime. ("Because it's bigger!") I really wish more sim games would include these "god modes" by default, to allow everyone to just play the way they want.
If you already have Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 and enjoy it, or have a kid in your household that likes "build-it" games, do yourself a favor and pick up this must-have expansion. If you don't have RCT3 yet, read my review and seriously consider getting it and the expansion. It's worth the money, and will give you countless hours of amusement park fun and first-person coaster nausea. Especially since you couldn't even get a photo-op with Shamu for the price of the game, and it saves getting drenched in whale spit to boot.
Dave lives with his wife and three kids, doing independant software development consulting and fits games in every nook and cranny of his free time. He particularly enjoys seeing new and fresh ideas from the Indie Game Studios, and believes that they are the true future of gaming. He'll play just about anything if you put it in front of him, and usually like about two thirds of it. He's also an "0ld Sk00l" gamer, having cut his teeth on Adventure, the Vic-20, Apple II and Infocom. Back when playing a new game meant you had to type the program in from a Family Computing magazine, during a snowstorm, up a hill, both ways.
