Roller Coaster Tycoon 2

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I just got this yesterday.
The gameplay, menus, controls, are exactly like the first one. Here are some differences that I've noticed so far:

You change your ride entrances and exits to match a "theme". For instance, in the first scenario, you have to build a park inside a huge castle. So you can change your ride entrances and exits to look like castle towers, for instance.

There are also a lot themed scenery pieces. These range from the medeival to space age and MC Escher like abstract stuff.

There seems to be a lot more rides and concession stands in the new one.

You can create a park and save it as a scenario (set up your own scenarios, goals, etc).

You can (finally) create a coaster in a seperate environment. In the first game, you could only create coasters in your park, while the park was running. In this one, you can create a coaster in a closed environment, and import it to your park. The downside to this is that you can't intertwine it with your rides.

Still no ability to pause the game and work on ride construction. It can be a pain to have to build rides while trying to deal with all the other aspects of the park.

Overall, it doesn't seem to be that much different than the first one, just more of everything.

 

What kind of new rides are there?

I'm always a fun of thrill rides holding off the masses until I get enough dough to break out a sweet coaster.

Space stuff eh? I might have to make Lucas World .

 

I always liked making coasters that ended with a one way trip to death. Crank up the power and send em' off

 

Don't get too excited, B! There isn't (at least not so far) enough space things to really make "LucasWorld".

Overall, I am a bit disapointed that there really isn't much new stuff at all. Mostly coasters, the ability to make scenarios, and a few other rides.

A few problems in the original game are still there. For example, if you take out a section of track on a coaster, you have to use the arrow buttons on the construction window to forward to the next track piece. If you want to go to the other end of the break, you have to press the arrow about 50,000 times to get there. There should have been a "jump to next/last break in track" button. A feature to raise/lower track without removing each individual piece and rebuilding that section would have been nice also.

You still can't pause the game and build anything, although you can move your staff around, examine rides, rename them, and change prices while paused.

Handymen still have problems, and sometimes you have to pick them up and move them to puke stains in the sidewalk or they will not get to it for months.

I downloaded one scenario, Bumbly Beach, from their site. This scenario seems pretty easy, just get 800 people in the park by Oct of year 2. But I replayed it 3 times, and just can't do it. I can get maybe 650-700 at most. Each time I retried it, I attempted to fix the most common complaints about the last game. For example the first time, people were complaining about how crowded it was, so on the replay, I tried to make more paths, and spread my food stands out a bit. Then they started grousing about how filthy the place was, and the vandalism. I had about 6 handymen at the time, and they were fairly well distributed throughout the park. So next time through, I would manually pick them up and move them to puke stains. I have not yet been able to succeed in this scenario (it is labeled easy).

Bottom line: I do like the game, and it's really cool, but if you have the first one and all the expansions, don't get it unless you are a really big fan. There isn't enough new content to justify paying $30 for something you mostly have already. If you've never played it before, get the new one, it has almost all the content from the first game and expansions. Be warned though, this game is fairly difficult, and requires a lot of micromanagement of your park. You have to spend a lot of time fine-tuning little things, and it's very difficult to judge just how much of an effect things like scenery, new paintjobs, and entertainers have on your guests. Still, there's nothing like being able to design your own park, and completely customize everything in it, right down to the paint jobs on the individual coaster cars.