Did you know that this game simulates the weight of each guest, and it can affect your coasters? Each person can weigh between forty-five and seventy-six kilograms, and if a cart is filled up with low-weight guests, it will lose speed more quickly than if guests had high weight values, where it will maintain speed for much longer. It won’t make a difference most of the time, but in coasters like the bobsleigh, it can be the reason a cart flies off the track after working flawlessly for years. This is never explained or mentioned in-game, but it’s a useful thing to know when designing coasters.

Did you know that each coaster type has hidden criteria that, if not met, incur severe stat penalties? The most common requirements are hitting certain benchmarks for drop height, number of drops, maximum speed, ride length, and maximum negative or lateral G forces. For each missed criteria, the coaster’s excitement, intensity, and nausea ratings are usually cut in half, so failing just one of them can make for a cost-inefficient coaster, and missing two leaves you with a money sink. However, the game never mentions any of these stat requirements, nor the fact that they even exist. It can be useful to look them up before designing a coaster, so reloading a save or aimlessly making random tweaks isn’t required.

Did you know that guests will regularly pay more than $10 for a ride on each coaster? The price they'll pay isn't just affected by the excitement, intensity, and nausea ratings, but the age of the ride and whether there’s another of the same type in the park. Also, each stat weighs differently into the price calculation depending on the coaster type, so there isn’t an easy formula to figure out how much each ticket should cost. However, the bonus given to a new and exciting ride is significant enough that visitors will often pay the full $20, way more than anyone would actually pay in real life, especially when framed with the knowledge that this game came out in 2002. The way the optimal price is determined isn’t explained anywhere in-game and is mostly figured out through trial-and-error, but once you get the hang of it, even the toughest scenarios become trivial.

You may have discovered a little pattern in these facts, in how Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 is a simulation game that’s uninterested in explaining how its simulation works. Players are just told to build a park with so many guests or earn a certain amount of money per month, and that's it. It’s fine to let players discover some things on their own, with ride prices probably being the best example, but when designing a compelling coaster can take so much fine-tuning, it would be helpful to give players an understanding of how they’re being evaluated. It’s good to know why coasters might randomly crash, it would be nice to know how scenery actually affects your park, and so on. Since so much is left totally ambiguous, it makes sense that the majority of players simply ditched scenario challenges and made the most lethal or silly coasters they possibly could. I suppose that might be true to the game’s title, being “Roller Coaster Tycoon” instead of “Theme Park Tycoon”, with the most fleshed-out elements being those that surround the coasters themselves, and the rest of the game is just a shallow framework to let you keep building. If you wanted to revisit this game after remembering it fondly from your childhood, the coaster madness absolutely holds up, but if you were looking at it as a tycoon game, there are much better choices out there.

Addendum: I found the best information about how RCT2’s mechanics work from an excellent Youtuber named Marcel Vos. He has videos breaking down all the interesting little details about the game which go otherwise unexplained, and they're definitely worth checking out. Also, for running it on modern systems, check out OpenRCT2, an open-source re-implementation of the game with some light-touch new features, bug fixes, and compatibility improvements. It’s probably the best way to play the game nowadays.

For all of Deadly Premonitions reputation about it's jank and hilarious moments there is actually a really deep game here. Not gonna lie and say it's perfect cause it's not. Gameplay around combat is horrendous. The gameplay in general is not great. So why do I like it and rate it so high? Cause DP is an amazing experience. Taking it all in for what it is and what it actually accomplishes despite it's budget is a remarkable achievement. There is a lot to do and see in here and a lot of different mechanics at play. Exploring the town and getting to know the characters and all their quirks and history is really enjoyable. The game has a solid mystery that can keep you guessing. You never know where it's going to go next or what crazy thing York will say or do next. I legitimately think the story is great and has a great mystery to it. As strange and goofy this game can be it was also moving to me. Loved the character of York and Zach and equally amazed at how much I loved it despite thinking this was gonna be the room of video games. In ways yes it was but at it's core there is some legit craft here. Love playing it every couple of years.

Platinum # 14

It was steering the car far too wide and checking the time to fit someone's schedule and going for the map but then realising I would soon be out of gas, and that there are only a finite number of cars that I can run until they run out of gas, and that there's not enough time in the day to walk everywhere, and then crashing into a tree, that this game broke my brain and changed my life. There is nothing in games more willingly maddening and eccentric as this. We like to laugh at it, and we should, but there's something scary and just unknowable in its total derangement.