 "Roller Coaster Tycoon 3" | 2009-10-09 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1XNAH1JW3HLX4 |
| Definately worth buying. Lots of fun. I still think zoo tycoon is better. But the graphics have greatly improved. I think it would have been slightly better if they left the old carnival music playing in the background, like in the older versions of the games, but it has no effect on the game play. Hours & Hours of fun. If you have the time to play. Very addicting game. |
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 "A Terrible User Interface" | 2009-08-11 |
| - Reviewed By User: AX82FCGES8102 |
The user interface for RCT3 is the worst user interface ever. It absolutely sucks! It is wrong in every way possible. It wastes lots of man hours due to a terrible design.
Items to place on your map are sorted by name. Names are Large this, medium this, small this, very large this. What a concept! To find a boulder, the user has to wade through statues, lolipop trees, diving suits, and everything between L and V to get to them. Instead of naming them Boulder large, Boulder medium, Boulder small, and Boulder very large which would group all the boulders together, the designers chose to make the user wade through everything according to size. That is just plain stupid! There is no corellation by size. Size is not the way you search for things. Searching for things to place in RCT3 wastes your time!
Wanna find a fountain to place? Names are not Fountain Woman, Fountain Frog, Fountain Pegasus, Fountain etc. They are Frog fountain, Pegasus fountain, etc. and this naming convention wastes time trying to find these items.
Every scenery item in every theme and every ride in every theme is sorted by name. Everything! You can use your own music, but that list isn't sorted at all! No sorting. None! Nada, Zero, Zip. Absolutely no sorting is applied to the list of music to attach to a ride or a loudspeaker. Finding music is very difficult, and wastes a lot of time.
In every software title that I have except for RCT3, I can overwrite text in a text box simply by double clicking that text box. You can't do this in RCT3, though this is an industry standard. Instead, you gotta get into that text box then press the delete or backspace key for every character in that text box. This is a waste of time! If you want to rename a ride or a worker or type in a cheat, you gotta use more time than necessary.
When you place a new worker in your park, there's a panel that pops up RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF YOUR SCREEN. It stays RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF YOUR SCREEN until you close it or move it. There is no hotkey to close it. And it's right in the most valuable place of your screen, dead center, where you are working. You can't edit a worker's territory with this most annoying screen in the way, nor can you tell the game where to put this screen the next time you use it. You gotta close it or move it, again and again and again This is most annoying and it wastes people's time!
Damn! You got all these extra clicks! You got all these extra key strokes! All these waste your time! But the designers figured out a way to help you. You DON'T have to click out in the scenery menu which remains open after you've selected an item to place. All you gotta do is wave your mouse over this window to inadvertantly pick up a different item. This is terribly inconvenient! TERRIBLY! If the designers demanded that you click to pick up an item, this would be far better, but as it is, you end up picking up a different item if you simply wave your mouse over this menu. No extra click required for this inconvenience! It seems that the designers WANT you to be inconvenienced. Yet if you close this window, there's an easy way to reopen it. Just click on the button of the placement window and that will reopen this window. The trouble is, it doesn't open it to the unit you were placing, and you have to wade though all those size sorted items again! This is stupid. It wastes my time more than anything in this game!
THERE IS NO HOTKEY FOR CLOSING THE PLACEMENT WINDOW. None! You gotta close it with a mouse click. And where is the close button? In the most unusual, most inconvenient place possible. It is in the lower left corner of your sceen. I mean the absolutley most lower, most left, corner of the screen where most people never work with any other software title. AND you gotta close it with an item attached to your mouse curser which make this even more awkward. Now, if you close the placement window before you close the menu window, then wave your mouse over the menu window again (which is quite easy to do), you pick up another item to place. You then have to close the placement window again! This is stupid. It wastes my time. It wastes everybody's time!
For every hour you spend making a park, at least 20 minutes of that time is wasted. Approximately 30% of the time is wasted searching for this or that, shaking something off your curser, or renaming a ride, or getting something off of your cursor, or a window out of your way. If 1 million users spend three hours making a park, that amounts to 1 million wasted man-hours! One would think that the designers would correct this ONCE, no matter how much time it took them to correct it so that people would not be inconvenienced by these non-standard, inconvenient and super time wasting design flaws. The designers did not consider this. They won't change it, and never considered the number of hours that their users have to waste, and were not and are not concerned about making their game more enjoyable. Their unwillingness to change this since version 1 of this game shows a complete lack of concern for their users. This is either arrogant or just plain stupid. It is most likely BOTH!
I'm done with this game already. I can't bear to waste another hour at this fighting the user interface, and it really gets my goat to think that the designers don't care how many hours that their customers waste. For about 80 nman hours of the development team's time to change these problems, millions of man hours could be saved and this game would be far better than it is now. FAR better! But since they were unwilling to remedy this problem and are not willing to change this now or ever in the future, I have only one thing that I can do to help my friends who like to play computer games -- Tell every new potential buyer how stupid and how lame that all important user interface is and how it has been overlooked by this design team, and tell them to NOT SPEND THEIR MONEY on this piece of poor software engineering.
Yes, what this game can do is most awesome, but getting it done is terribly difficult and frustrating and this flaw has killed this game. This isn't software at it's best by a long shot. It is quite easily software at it's worst! No matter what software can do, it's not good unless you can get it done efficiently and easily, and the user interface is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING in any software title. RCT3 has the worst user interface ever. Period.
Those wasted hours are a health risk! Sitting at your computer for hours is not good for you. Sitting at your computer wasting your time is even worse! You could, conceivabley, make a park in 6 hours. Instead, it takes 9!
Game? Not if you can barely play it! And it is not fun to waste time. No fun at all. Games are suppose to be entertaining. Ease of use makes them entertaining. You do not play RCT3, you work at it, and most of the work is unnecessary.
You can lose your job and still find another. You can lose all your money, and find some more. You can lose your spouse and find another. The one thing in this world that you cannot replace is time, and sadly, the design team of RCT3 doesn't understand that concept. They insist on wasting yours, to save them theirs, and literally millions of man hours are wasted in front of this game.
Don't buy this piece of junk. You'll waste your time with it, and wish you hadn't wasted your money.
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 "Buyer beware: software issues with latest versions (read for details)" | 2009-05-06 |
| - Reviewed By seeraphael |
Having never played any games within the Roller Coaster Tycoon series before, I have to say that this game is a lot of fun - and addicting. You can building your own park from the ground up and control every little aspect from the colors on the rides, background music (you can use your own MP3s or WMAs), how much ketchup to put on the hamburgers, prices, etc. - a real treat for the obsessively-inclined. It is very rewarding to zoom way in and watch the little parkgoers meander, ride, buy your souveneirs, and have fun. Being able to "ride" your own rides is a nice touch.
A caveat emptor for anyone who is considering purchasing this game at this point: if you play this game and enjoy it, then you will almost certainly be interested in purchasing the expansion packs (Soaked! and Wild!) as well, which add large amounts of added content and also fix numerous bugs and interface issues that were present in the original release. HOWEVER -- the original releases of RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 (RCT3) were released with copy protection, requiring a CD key for initial installation and the actual CD to play. Recent printings of this game DO NOT have this same copy protection (so you don't need the CD in the computer to play) and are shipped with no printed manual or CD key; however, the expansion packs ARE NOT compatible with these newer versions and will even render the original title unplayable if installed (the computer will perpetually ask to "insert RCT3 CD" on attempting to play and will not recognize the newer RCT3 CD as a legitimate copy). This is a known software issue for which Atari does not offer a solution. This also applies to software patches for RCT3 which apply the bug-fixes and interface tweaks without adding extra content - recent printings of RCT3 (including direct-download versions) are not compatable with patches.
If you know you will never be interested in the expansion content and/or the bug and interface fixes, then the plain-vanilla RCT3 will work just find for you. If there is any possibility that you will be interested in patched content or expansion content (which is considerable and greatly adds to the original game), then a better purchase would be Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 Platinum, which seamlessly integrates both of the expansion packs and all of the software patches, error-free. |
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| "great game but the fun doesn't last" | 2009-01-06 |
| - Reviewed By User: A2WDSCVH4BXYQZ |
| bought this for my daughter and it worked for one week and then it stopped downloading. Found out that this is a major problem with RCT3. Huge disappointment. She loved it for one week. |
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 "I'll give Disney a run for his money! My park, My way!" | 2008-12-28 |
| - Reviewed By User: A3LD3X6S5J2INT |
| This game is AWSOME! If you've ever wanted to build your own amusement park, this is the game! You can design and build YOUR own Roller Coaster rides! You have full control of park operations, YOU DA MAN! You can play the game with senarios that challenge you or you can play in the Sandbox Mode. The sandbox allows you to go nuts without challenges, Carte Blanche to build the Ultimate Theme Park YOUR WAY! The rides are very accurate and detailed. The graphice are not real in detail up close, however the movements and reactions are very realistic. GREAT GAME and we are addicted! FIVE ***** ALL THE WAY! |
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| "An Update Far Worse than The Original" | 2008-11-29 |
| - Reviewed By User: A31QU8RE32762Z |
If you are a fan of RCT2 or 1, don't bother with number 3.
To somebody new to the series, maybe RCT3 will feel great. But if you've played 1 or 2, you'll notice that with all the new features, that the game lacks a few things. Things like cuteness. In the originals, "Guests" were guests, and they were small and round and cute. They cheered and laughed like little kids- they were even cute when they threw up. This time around, not so much. Your cute soft little "Guests" have turned into angular, jagged, and obnoxious "Peeps". If having 3D graphics means elminiating
every last piece of cute roundness on the characters and turning them into something that looks like it came out of "Yu-Gi-Oh", then keep them 2D. I didn't have any problem with the graphics.
Another thing missing is the creativity. In RCT3, every ride and stall is either themed "Basic", "Sci-Fi", "Scary","Wild West" or "Adventure". Now, in RCT1 & 2, the rides were all rides, and if I wanted it to be a certain way I would use certain scenery. If I wanted my
ride to be scary, I would use scary scenery. If I wanted it kid friendly, I'd surround it with giant candy canes. Here, they're just handing you a ride. If the theme doesn't match with your park, too bad that's the only way to get it.
Not to mention the Park Advisor guy. Basically, his job is to tell you what you already know from the message bar and by using your brain. One of the things I liked about RCT and RCT2 was that when there was a problem, like, I don't have enough guests, you think, "Hmm... what am I missing?". When you find out and Guests start pouring in by the hundreds, you feel proud of your achievement. Now it's the Park Advisor, saying "Nobody is coming to your park because there aren't enough plants." You add plants, and Guests come in, but you don't feel like you've accomplished anything.
But at least the makers of the game managed to do one thing. In the game, you can customize the sandwhiches sold in your shops.
That's right folks. While the team at Atari could have spent time improving the graphics, or fixing bugs, or making the gameplay more fun, they made sure that you could decide how many pickles go on your hamburgers. What the heck? I don't care about the number of stupid ice cubes in the diet cola! I care about how my park looks, and how fun the game is, and whether or not I can even look at the faces of my "Peeps" without cringing.
So if you're looking for the game "SimSandwhich", this is the right game for you. If not, then play RCT2! Find a copy online, or maybe you already own it, I don't care! Just don't waste your money funding Atari to make more simple sequels to a wonderful and hours-and-days-and-weeks-of-fun game. |
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