Theme Park

The Good
A little funny game to play. I liked this one more than the new one. You must build a theme park from the beginning somewhere in the world. And than you must take care of everything, there must be plenty of supllies for the guests, joyfull rides. And you must take care of the money. It is even possible to buy stocks from other themeparks in the world, so you can become the greatest theme-park-builder in the world.

The Bad
The animations are all the same. It doesn't matter hoe your park looks it still the same movies. But for the rest it is a great game.

The Bottom Line
The graphics aren't everything anymore, but this one stays fun to play. And when you like sims and never played this one, then you certainly play this one.

The Good
The graphics are reasonable, the premise is interesting at the very least, but the game misses its intended purpose by a large margin.

The Bad
The graphics, though quite good, are not very fluent and the engine was very slow on my 486 DX2. The gameplay is very flawed with unbearably non-intuitive interface and stupid, unreasonable reactions from the public - even if your park is extremely well designed and run you're still very likely to lose the game. The idea is interesting but not very well-implemented (not enough buildings etc.) and there's not enough control over what happens in the game.

The Bottom Line
In short, a flop, and very un-Bullfrog-like.

The Good
The setting made for a light-hearted and original take on managerial strategy games, with a lot of dry humour ranging from the nasty strategies (such as oversalting chips to make people buy more fizzy drinks) to the people throwing up and the various types of entertainers stopping people getting bored in the queue. Some of the rides look fantastic, and there's a lasting challenge to be had, as it takes a while to learn how to build the perfect park. The manual was well-written.

The Bad
The Amiga 500 wasn't really powerful enough to recreate this to its full effect. A lot of compromises were made, and while some were minor (less graphical detail, less rides and shops), a few were major losses, such as the ability to sample the rides yourself.

It was also quite buggy, with designing roller coasters being very tricky and often getting completely stuck, forcing you to tear down a near-complete ultra-long design - all of which has cost you time, and therefore money.

The mouse pointer moved extremely slowly, and the keyboard input was excruciating, rarely picking up all the letters you types.

Moving overseas didn't seem to work - which is the equivalent of a racing game only having one circuit.

Being an ongoing challenge with no specific goals, it was all too easy to lose focus and end up plodding along, rarely anticipating problems before they occur. Long-term durability suffered as a result.

The Bottom Line
Horribly over-rated at the time, this is one Bullfrog shouldn't've bothered to convert to the A500. On the PC it was a pretty good game, but not here.