It has been brought to my attention that I missed two moneyless scenarios in RCT1: Icicle Worlds and Crazy Craters. The point of the video still stands as they have the same 700 park rating requirement, but the first mistake of 2024 has already been made!
maybe make a video series where you build your own class action park? or a parody of europa park with that mod that allows every ride vehicle to run on every track so you can have a class action park europe?
As a child, I never new that there was win conditions in the game so I always chose Prison Island due to it having unlimited money. It was pretty shocking to me when I did "beat" the scenario by complete ignorance on my part.
How? You would've had to read the paragraph at the scenario select or see the pop up window when you started the scenario with a very clearly marked "Objective" section to know you had unlimited money. If you didn't read them How'd you land on Prison Island before clicking any other scenarios to figure out it was the scenario with unlimited money?
@@TwoGunToastKids just often don’t read text in games, especially if it’s long. Many kids start playing games before they’re fully literate, and even as their reading comprehension improves, if they’ve never needed to read to beat games before that point, that habit is hard to break.
@@eclipseeffigy doesn't explain how if they didn't read, they knew prison island was the scenario with unlimited money without first playing other scenarios and failing them (which would inevitably tell them there's a way to beat the scenarios cuz if you can fail a something that usually means you can beat it). yea I played as a child too, still was able to use my eyes and read the very obvious text next to the scenarios or the pop up box you have to physically click out of yourself when the scenario starts. Yea maybe if they're saying they played when they were like 5 and couldn't read yet. I wasn't trying to be mean, it was an honest question.
@@TwoGunToastcould have figured out experimentally "I don't have to deal with money in this one" and then remember which one had that without ever bothering to read the descriptions. My training in UX design has taught me to never underestimate people's abilities to simply skip over provided information and form conclusions based on limited experience, even if those conclusions are completely incorrect! It's why RCT1's scenario design is so good, it subtly pushes you to experience the mechanics rather than hoping you paid attention to a tutorial or read the manual.
Tbh as a kid I lived in the prison map because you didnt have to worry about money, honestly I thought it was a fun sandbox map, I never knew it had an objective lol
I always viewed these as a little holiday in the progression of the scenarios like a "slow done buddy, have some fun with the skills you've built up lately!" like forcing you to play in sandbox for a bit, knowing that you can beat this in like 5 minutes if that's what you want to do.
Prison Island was my favorite scenario as a kid! I was capable of managing a park and its finances, but I found it more fun to be in a stress-free sandbox where I could build a park without needing to worry about anything. I spent dozens of hours playing on Prison Island, decorating and adding more rides, even after beating the scenario.
was gonna say that both of those sound like they'd at least make for fun sandboxes to make a "dream" park in without having to worry about restrictions if you wanted, but then I remembered that given the win conditions the ride selection would probably be absurdly limited anyway so I guess they wouldn't even have that
Marcel, did you know that there is a guest spawn location in Sugarloaf Shores that cannot reach the entrance? These guests will appear, walk to a border fence, turn around, and leave. Not sure if OpenRCT2 fixes this, but it's another case of expansion carelessness.
Another example being massive trees in the Africa hydroelectricity map that appear to be growing inside your park, but which you cannot remove because one or two of their leaves goes over the park fence.
I suppose having a park with multiple entrances but one of them inaccessible would be a challenging handicap to play with, though. It puts a new spin on “harder guest generation” as it essentially cuts your amount of new guests in half. Still infuriating though.
It's funny you say this about Prison Island Marcel - that is the scenario that got me into the game. I was new to the game, didn't understand a lot of game strategies, mechanics, or how ride ratings worked, so having a time or money-constrained scenario was stressful. Prison Island allowed me to explore and learn about the game, and it's probably my favorite park I've built, even though looking back it wasn't that great in many parts. Not all scenarios are equal, but that's one that I really appreciated and look back fondly at. 🙂
When you mentioned that the expansions were a mess - it got me thinking about the art styles of the new scenery items that the expansions added. Those items didn't match the art style of the base game and it clashes if you look at them side by side. Yet another reason that leads me to believe the expansions were a mess!
Yeah, you can tell they weren’t up to par. One of the scenarios has some random tiles in the park you can’t use or buy even though they look like they are part of the park. Plus the taxi giga coaster car doesn’t bank on upward curved turn pieces. There were so many more issues as well but its been a minute since I’ve played them
I forget the exact specifics, but the RCT2 expansion packs were pretty much fully farmed out to Frontier Developments and had really nothing to do with Chris Sawyer. (With RCT1's expansions, Chris Sawyer was actively improving the game engine each time-which incidentally is why Loopy Landscapes REQUIRES CF/AA instead of being an independent thing. RCT2's expansions are effectively just "hey we took the base RCT2 game engine as-is and simply added more 'ride types' (lol) and tossed in some extra scenarios with new theming assets".) I seem to remember watching a video or something a while back detailing how the way that the sprite graphics were rendered for the stuff added in RCT2's expansions is very sloppy and inconsistent with the base game's graphics. If I'm able to find that again, I'll post a link...
@@waltercardcollector Yeah so actually, over the past half hour or so, after many many google searches, I did manage to actually remember and find what I was thinking of! However, the UA-cam Monster ate my comment, probably because it contained links. Fortunately I saved a copy of what I wrote up, so I'll see if I can find a way to post it again without angering the monster...
The default rct2 scenarios, particularly their ordering, is really messed up. I'm on the open scenarios project for OpenRCT2, and I've particular been working on some good replacement starting scenarios for the game. Hopefully we can get some fun stuff made! I'm making an advanced scenario for example where you're in space building a park on some asteroids.
Yes please!! I recently bought rct2 but I really just want to start rct1 style with progressive difficulty maps 😅 looking forward to this! Where do I keep up with updates on this project?
I actually enjoyed Prison island growing up. I was given a copy of the game as a young child and wasn't yet old enough to understand any of the strategy needed to beat the more challenging scenarios. Prison island had the perfect difficulty level for me at that age and is the only part of the game I remember beating. Looking back i can see why most people would find it hilariously easy though
I'd say I agree with you. But as someone who builds pretty ordinary custom coasters, both of these scenarios helped me to improve my coaster building skills. Having no time/money/reputation penalty means you can tweak and modify your layout until they meet the requirements and not worry about losing your hard work. Almost like an open map editor, but it still counts towards your scenarios list.
I don't know, I feel like it's a nice change of pace to have some essentially sandbox scenarios; maybe they don't really challenge you directly, but the challenge is moreso what you can come up with yourself (and while the money may not be limited, the space is, so it's sort of a challenge in and of itself to _not_ go overboard and run out of space SuperVinlin )
I actually like Bumbly Bazaar. I simply put and exit path behind the food court that is the only way to lead to the rides. That way, guests are forced to pass by the stalls entering and exiting. And I have an assortment of pre-built rides that can be built cheaply and have half decent stats that will allow me to charge $10 or so when they are new, and perpetually $5 after guests decidw they wont pay the higher price anymore.
The minimal length requirement for Rollercoaster Heaven and the smaller map makes it a little more interesting than the Prison Island scenario. I think you can actually build the rollercoasters fully on the water on Prison Island which makes it a really sad scenario.
I remember I was playing through the RCT2 scenarios a few years ago, I hit Prison Island and I was like "...am I having fun with this game?" Because I was already relying a bit too much on prebuilds, and this scenario just seemed tailor-made to be cheesed. At that point I wasn't really being creative at all. If I ever get back to RCT2 I'm gonna have to restrict myself to no prebuilds
I always hated having fail conditions because i liked just sitting back and watching the park run. I would be working on my next coaster only to have the fail interrupt me. Having to redo work isnt fun so i didn't complete many levels. Sandbox is great.
Quick question for you, Marcel. If it ever comes to a point where you've covered every aspect of RCT would you cover other games like Planet Coaster or Zoo Tycoon? I'm curious what your plans are and where you plan to take us next. Cheers to another year bro.
I know Marcel has already made a video on this, but the RCT2 scenarios all being unlocked was lame compared to RCT1. I only ever remember playing Extreme Heights, or creating my own.
That’s the EXACT reason why RCT1 and RCT Classic is better than the original rct2 imo Unless you enable the “progressive scenario unlocking” opinion on openRCT2 it’s actually not too bad
Long ago I remember hearing about people strongly preferring RCT2 to RCT1 (before I or they knew about openRCT). It baffled me on why they would prefer a game with everything unlocked, which is what made RCT1 so much more exciting and nostalgic in my opinion. I had a similar experience when originally getting RCT2 with only playing extreme heights and making custom scenarios.
@@MightyFineMan RCT2 is more of an open park builder than a scenario game, even in the non-"Build your own Six Flags" scenarios, and some people really like that. I always personally preferred it because of the UI/Mechanics improvements over RCT1 and since I played RCT2 as a kid before 1 I have way more nostalgia for it lol. It wasn't until coming back much later and getting baffled by why Crazy Castle was weirdly difficult for me (the existing paths through the castle and the guest pathfinding at the staircase) that I realized the scenario design was kinda funky. OpenRCT2/Classic are definitely the way to go now but I think if it was just 1/2/3 I'd still prefer 2. The RCT2 expansions though are definitely not great. I remember getting them as a kid through the scholastic book fair and being super disappointed in them even at the time.
I don't think I ever finished more than 1 or 2 of the RCT2 scenarios. I spent most of my time making and playing my own scenarios in RCT2. It just didn't feel that rewarding beating the scenarios in 2 and a lot of them were kind of lame compared to the great, interesting scenarios from the original.
Thanks for another great video. Really enjoy your content. I still remember as a college student enjoying a snow day with 8 straight hours of RCT2, beat the map with the big wooden rollercoaster next to beach and I had no idea you could buy that land on beach till I saw a video of yours.
I always found it pretty hard to beat any scenario if youre trying to maintain a real world aesthetic with the park and not just jumbling everything together as efficiently as possible. I always end up saying F It anyway but i try
Oh, cool that you did a video on these two parks! I always wondered why they were made this way, they're virtually sandbox parks. Great looking maps, but with no rules it took too much away. Prison island you can just flatten it out and do anything with it - if you were unable to close the park it'd be different, but you can do that too. That and Rollercoaster Heaven, with all this confusing path laid out like a regular city, way off from how you'd make paths, and there's peeps already lost all over it. Seems like the folks who made TT and WW barely played the game to see what scenarios ought to be like!
Not a fun scenario indeed, but i did like to play atleast the prison one at times as it was a decently pre-terraformed sandbox, where as you can make a sandbox with the scenario editor, i never liked a empty square map. So these were an easy option 😅
When I played Rollercoaster Heaven the first times it took me a lot of work to create the needed coasters. It did help me learn to create better coasters. The trees were a pain though. And the path layout, both fun and a frustration for my perfectionism to remove all the dead end and double roads, so the peeps didn't get lost.
That was exacly my problem when I wanted to play 'Prison Island' a few weeks ago. I didn't see much challenge about it. So what I did: just via cheats enable money. That was a lot more fun to do, and I did it!!
Prison Island was by far my most played scenario as a kid, and thats because I loved the "sandbox" vibe it had. I could just have fun designing coasters on a cool island and not worry about anything else
I disagree with almost everything here, I really enjoyed both of these scenarios. You seem to approach them purely from a level-solving perspective, and they don't give much of a challenge there, but if you approach it more from a "let's build a beautiful theme park in the style of the scenario"- perspective, they're loads of fun, and the fact that they're unfailable is completely irrelevant. Why would I spam pre-built coasters when the entire point of this game is designing your own? I play to enjoy myself, not to get some yellow popup at some point. I built coasters in Prison Island winding in and out of the buildings and built the smaller rides in between those buildings, while in Rollercoaster Heaven I loved having the coasters fly through the spaces between the skyscrapers and imagining how much fun this would be for the people presumably working office jobs inside. I probably wouldn't have enjoyed them at all if I just bulldozed all scenery like the person did who made the park at 4:18, but I don't think any level would be any fun if I played the game like that. Parks should be parks, not random spammed prebuilt rides on a big square that together create some arbitrary statistics that make the game tell me "you beat a level!" Main annoyance for both of these scenarios that I remember was fixing the path layout that was absolutely terrible and would cause guests to go hopelessly lost no matter where they went.
Happy new year Marcel! 🎉🎉 i was wondering and HOPING if you could please advise us on how to close our park (on April 1st!) I was so eager to learn how last April 1, but to no avail! I hope this message reaches you with enough time to produce an instructional video on how to close our park! Thank you so much! I love your videos!
I actually _love_ those scenarios because building my own coasters is my favorite part of RollerCoaster Tycoon, and not having the pressure of money or park rating allows me to take my time and build the coasters i want. I do see how Marcel and others that like a challenge would hate it though.
If my memory is right there's another scenario in RCT1 that is like prison island and Rollercoaster heaven but more difficult. And that's Razor Rocks. Like prison island you gotta build 10 roller coasters with minimum 6 excitement rating but you have money to deal with. And some of us have made the mistake on focusing solely on coasters for 6 excitement and don't get stalls and less intense rides in
Yeah I made that mistake too with Razor Rocks. Still was fun and beatable though. And I remember building a really good Reverser Coaster; until a few heavy guests got onboard and caused it to crash. But that was a simple fix and I still met the Excitement Rating requirement.
Tbh, I don’t mind RollerCoaster heaven and Alcatraz because i do like to build my own designs in every park I play to challenge myself a little, Becuase even I said before this: “There’s already pre built designs in the game with 6.00 excitement or designs with over 1,000m and 7 excitement, and plop it down!” But yeah, it’s completely your opinion, no opinion changed
i really like these scenarios tbh. they're relaxing sandboxes where i can just go wild and make massive rollercoasters i wouldn't be able to make otherwise. :)
Guest 1: I'm not paying that much for Rollercoaster Heaven. Marcel: If I see I'm not paying that much one more time I'm moving to Australia. Go to Rollercoaster Heaven Now! REEEEEEEEEE! HULK SMASHY! *Smashes 21 benches and destroys 82 lampposts and trash cans and stone benches
Rollercoaster heaven was mostly great except for the length requirements on the LIM coaster. For a long ride you need a faster boost but that leads to more intensity and excitement penalty so it was unexpectedly challenging for me
I do wonder about prebuilt coasters. RCT, like many tycoon games, suffers from trying to be a business sim but also something else at the same time (a coaster design tool). Planet Zoo had this issue: you can turn a profit and make functional enclosures very easily, making it practically a sandbox game about designing exhibits purely for eye candy.
Furthermore, their layouts are messy and guarantee that the guests are going to get lost. Prison Island has a lot of wide, open path areas while Roller Coaster Heaven is a veritable maze. You need to do a lot of work to get it under control. Roller Coaster Heaven has the additional problem of all those redwood trees that can only be removed by right-clicking them one at a time. The scenery clearing tool doesn't work and neither does trying to build through them. It's very tedious and can lead to hand cramps. Prison Island isn't tedious, but it is boring. A prison theme doesn't give a lot of options for creativity.
Those trees were a pain in the base game indeed. It took me a lot of time to beat that scenario because of the trees. (And to stop people getting lost) I later played it in openrct which has given the remove tool the option to all delete the trees and the level was suddenly a lot quicker and easier
I don’t mind these coaster challenges because I just treat them as sandbox mode. I’m not bad at the game, but at the same time I’m not really that great at building custom rides and sometimes having a guest requirement after year ‘x’ just stresses me out because I don’t feel very confident in parks with uneven terrain… which is most of them 😅
This is the first mention of "Arid Heights" I hear in your videos. Its teh scenario I remember the most, build one huge megapark with tons of themed coasters in it, all of which had "Force" in their name... I was like 12 years old, thought it was cool ;)
I actually have a park on both of these scenarios. I use them as test beds for designs mostly. it's not really playing, but randomly it is. They're not enjoyable in the sense that i have to know what i'm doing, but i get to bust out some creativity if i can when building things, and not have money be a barrier to it. Otherwise, yeah, these aren't really scenarios. I would treat these more like sandbox levels.
Out of curiosity, I wonder how those scenarios would shape up if money was enabled. Though, it would be a significant change to the balancing, and neither of them have research lists. In addition, Rollercoaster Heaven starts with 325 guests already, so simply enabling cash won't give all the current guests funds. What's truly baffling is all of these no-money scenarios in 2's expansions also have cash machines, Great Wall of China included.
Prison Island was my favorite as a kid but I was also like 6 so that might've had something to do with it. Sandbox mode in RCT3 was a game changer for young me :P
Thank you Marcel, I want to tell everyone on here my dream : My dream is to come home from work and play roller coaster tycoon. Every day for 1-2 years. Like what i did for many many many many years. It will happen in these upcoming months hopefully. Talk to a dutch person because I have a name Gretchen that my parents gave me.
Good morning Marcel. Have you ever thought about creating a real labyrinth using only the scenery elements and paths? I tried yesterday and it was curious to see how they got lost in the maze. Only a few managed to get out and enter my park, the others have left it.
Harmonic Hills forces a player to use every facet of the gameplay model to complete imo it's one of the best scenarios from a problem solving standpoint, which is the bread and butter of the gameplay loop of most management sims; whereas the two mentioned here throw all that straight into the wind. You're absolutely not wrong here.
I like rct1 over the second game. The scenarios are well designed mostly, not just a bunch of flat-open spaces. Rotting Heights is a good example for why I enjoyed that game, it wasn’t over-the-top, and it was more about making a successful park rather than a beautiful one.
Icicle Worlds from RCT1 Loopy Landscape also doesn't have money. I guess it also has harder guest generation enabled? I'm not sure about that second part.
10 different coasters with over 7.00 excitement, but your coasters are: The heartline twister, the junior coaster, the mini coaster, the spiral coaster (why is this one a separate type in classic?!) the inverted hairpin, the mini suspended, the steeplechase, the mine ride, the side friction, and the reverser coaster! Go.
Bazaar speedrun: make the Bazar the only path possible, build lots of cheap flat rides and set advertisements for 6 week an then close all rides. Every guest will buy something and the mission is complete in 5 or 6 weeks.
1:53 weren't there like... 4 of them? I remember Arid Heights, Megaworld Park and then there were other 2 similar to Arid Heights. One in an Alien world and another one in the snow.
1:51 Loopy Landscapes has 4 of them. Arid Heights, Crazy Craters, Icicle Woods and Megaworld Park. Then again, Crazy Craters and Icicle Woods are pretty forgettable.
Starting this year of the dragon by dragging into bad scenarios, eh? I hope you had a good new year. Can't wait to learn more about the game with the things you show us.
Back then I refused to get Wacky Worlds and Time Twister on principle. The art style was atrocious, the rides and coasters were basically just reskins, and they were a clear cash grab. I was 14 in 2003 and even then I knew just how bad they were.
In my Archipelago plugin I’m working on, I turn all moneyless scenarios into cash ones and have a custom, modular scenario objective. Maybe prison island could actually be fun!
The "Build the rides with X excitement" are pretty terrible, yeah. Especially the "Complete these rides we partly built" scenarios, which require you to aim for a specific target in often a tight space.
3:47 anyone else thought the mouse pointer on the right side of the screen was some kind of entity shooting up from the ground in the park and paused to take a closer look?
Honestly, I think those two scenarios (and probably Great Wall of China too) were made purely to showcase the godawful expansion scenery items in a park context.
The reason I never beat Prison Island back in the day is because I would get bored too quickly. At least give a "you can't remove scenery" challenge, given the real life Alcatraz - the prison the scenario is based on - is a national landmark.
these scenarios would probably be perfectly reasonable as coaster design tutorials if they were presented to you early on... and not in a fucking expansion pack
To win Prison Island I had to destroy paths at the begining so my stupid guests and cleaner didn't get lost... and then had to spend SO MUCH TIME (because no mods) to remove the paths all over the island to build anything. Really frustrating. I didn't want to cheese it, I wanted to build an actual PARK you know?
See you're talking like an adult who knows how to play video games. But as a kid who had no idea how any of the mechanics of the game worked and just liked building rollercoasters, Alcatraz was my favorite scenario.
It has been brought to my attention that I missed two moneyless scenarios in RCT1: Icicle Worlds and Crazy Craters. The point of the video still stands as they have the same 700 park rating requirement, but the first mistake of 2024 has already been made!
Good, now you don't have to agonise about making your first mistake.
You can agonise about the second now!
Was just gonna point this out, as I remember completing Crazy Craters a while ago and it didn't have money.
You missed Icicle Worlds when it comes to no money.
maybe make a video series where you build your own class action park? or a parody of europa park with that mod that allows every ride vehicle to run on every track so you can have a class action park europe?
There should be versions out where the No money scenarios actually have money and play them too
As a child, I never new that there was win conditions in the game so I always chose Prison Island due to it having unlimited money. It was pretty shocking to me when I did "beat" the scenario by complete ignorance on my part.
How? You would've had to read the paragraph at the scenario select or see the pop up window when you started the scenario with a very clearly marked "Objective" section to know you had unlimited money. If you didn't read them How'd you land on Prison Island before clicking any other scenarios to figure out it was the scenario with unlimited money?
@@TwoGunToastit's simple to understand if you read the first 3 words of their comment. "As a child"...
@@TwoGunToastKids just often don’t read text in games, especially if it’s long. Many kids start playing games before they’re fully literate, and even as their reading comprehension improves, if they’ve never needed to read to beat games before that point, that habit is hard to break.
@@eclipseeffigy doesn't explain how if they didn't read, they knew prison island was the scenario with unlimited money without first playing other scenarios and failing them (which would inevitably tell them there's a way to beat the scenarios cuz if you can fail a something that usually means you can beat it). yea I played as a child too, still was able to use my eyes and read the very obvious text next to the scenarios or the pop up box you have to physically click out of yourself when the scenario starts. Yea maybe if they're saying they played when they were like 5 and couldn't read yet. I wasn't trying to be mean, it was an honest question.
@@TwoGunToastcould have figured out experimentally "I don't have to deal with money in this one" and then remember which one had that without ever bothering to read the descriptions. My training in UX design has taught me to never underestimate people's abilities to simply skip over provided information and form conclusions based on limited experience, even if those conclusions are completely incorrect! It's why RCT1's scenario design is so good, it subtly pushes you to experience the mechanics rather than hoping you paid attention to a tutorial or read the manual.
Tbh as a kid I lived in the prison map because you didnt have to worry about money, honestly I thought it was a fun sandbox map, I never knew it had an objective lol
same i spent so many hours on that map
I always viewed these as a little holiday in the progression of the scenarios like a "slow done buddy, have some fun with the skills you've built up lately!" like forcing you to play in sandbox for a bit, knowing that you can beat this in like 5 minutes if that's what you want to do.
Now I want to see a full video where Marcel talks about the RCT2 expansions in detail since he said in the video that those expansions where a mess
I wouldn't mind seeing his 2024 releases be focused on the expansions.
I'll say one thing, most of the scenery and art was out of style for the base game.
Dude I keep seeing you everywhere. I know you from the Calgary telegram chat lmfao
Prison Island was my favorite scenario as a kid! I was capable of managing a park and its finances, but I found it more fun to be in a stress-free sandbox where I could build a park without needing to worry about anything. I spent dozens of hours playing on Prison Island, decorating and adding more rides, even after beating the scenario.
was gonna say that both of those sound like they'd at least make for fun sandboxes to make a "dream" park in without having to worry about restrictions if you wanted, but then I remembered that given the win conditions the ride selection would probably be absurdly limited anyway so I guess they wouldn't even have that
At the very least, Rollercoaster Heaven has a _lot_ of coasters to play with.
Marcel, did you know that there is a guest spawn location in Sugarloaf Shores that cannot reach the entrance? These guests will appear, walk to a border fence, turn around, and leave. Not sure if OpenRCT2 fixes this, but it's another case of expansion carelessness.
Another example being massive trees in the Africa hydroelectricity map that appear to be growing inside your park, but which you cannot remove because one or two of their leaves goes over the park fence.
@@Mrcake0103
Do those trees block your ride construction or does it just look bad when building near them?
I suppose having a park with multiple entrances but one of them inaccessible would be a challenging handicap to play with, though. It puts a new spin on “harder guest generation” as it essentially cuts your amount of new guests in half. Still infuriating though.
It's funny you say this about Prison Island Marcel - that is the scenario that got me into the game. I was new to the game, didn't understand a lot of game strategies, mechanics, or how ride ratings worked, so having a time or money-constrained scenario was stressful. Prison Island allowed me to explore and learn about the game, and it's probably my favorite park I've built, even though looking back it wasn't that great in many parts. Not all scenarios are equal, but that's one that I really appreciated and look back fondly at. 🙂
When you mentioned that the expansions were a mess - it got me thinking about the art styles of the new scenery items that the expansions added. Those items didn't match the art style of the base game and it clashes if you look at them side by side. Yet another reason that leads me to believe the expansions were a mess!
Yeah, you can tell they weren’t up to par. One of the scenarios has some random tiles in the park you can’t use or buy even though they look like they are part of the park. Plus the taxi giga coaster car doesn’t bank on upward curved turn pieces. There were so many more issues as well but its been a minute since I’ve played them
I forget the exact specifics, but the RCT2 expansion packs were pretty much fully farmed out to Frontier Developments and had really nothing to do with Chris Sawyer.
(With RCT1's expansions, Chris Sawyer was actively improving the game engine each time-which incidentally is why Loopy Landscapes REQUIRES CF/AA instead of being an independent thing. RCT2's expansions are effectively just "hey we took the base RCT2 game engine as-is and simply added more 'ride types' (lol) and tossed in some extra scenarios with new theming assets".)
I seem to remember watching a video or something a while back detailing how the way that the sprite graphics were rendered for the stuff added in RCT2's expansions is very sloppy and inconsistent with the base game's graphics. If I'm able to find that again, I'll post a link...
@@jgottula Oh wow, I'm interested! Yes please post the link if you find it.
@@waltercardcollector Yeah so actually, over the past half hour or so, after many many google searches, I did manage to actually remember and find what I was thinking of! However, the UA-cam Monster ate my comment, probably because it contained links. Fortunately I saved a copy of what I wrote up, so I'll see if I can find a way to post it again without angering the monster...
@@waltercardcollectorIt just keeps eating my comment over and over. Even when I omit the links and just describe how to find the pages.
The default rct2 scenarios, particularly their ordering, is really messed up.
I'm on the open scenarios project for OpenRCT2, and I've particular been working on some good replacement starting scenarios for the game.
Hopefully we can get some fun stuff made! I'm making an advanced scenario for example where you're in space building a park on some asteroids.
That's freaking awesome, definitely looking forward to that!
That scenario list needs all the help it can get. Good luck on your endeavor.
Yes please!! I recently bought rct2 but I really just want to start rct1 style with progressive difficulty maps 😅 looking forward to this! Where do I keep up with updates on this project?
thanks for your work on the project!
that looks amazing! How can you get those scenario's?
I actually enjoyed Prison island growing up. I was given a copy of the game as a young child and wasn't yet old enough to understand any of the strategy needed to beat the more challenging scenarios. Prison island had the perfect difficulty level for me at that age and is the only part of the game I remember beating. Looking back i can see why most people would find it hilariously easy though
I'd say I agree with you. But as someone who builds pretty ordinary custom coasters, both of these scenarios helped me to improve my coaster building skills. Having no time/money/reputation penalty means you can tweak and modify your layout until they meet the requirements and not worry about losing your hard work.
Almost like an open map editor, but it still counts towards your scenarios list.
I don't know, I feel like it's a nice change of pace to have some essentially sandbox scenarios; maybe they don't really challenge you directly, but the challenge is moreso what you can come up with yourself (and while the money may not be limited, the space is, so it's sort of a challenge in and of itself to _not_ go overboard and run out of space SuperVinlin )
I actually like Bumbly Bazaar. I simply put and exit path behind the food court that is the only way to lead to the rides. That way, guests are forced to pass by the stalls entering and exiting. And I have an assortment of pre-built rides that can be built cheaply and have half decent stats that will allow me to charge $10 or so when they are new, and perpetually $5 after guests decidw they wont pay the higher price anymore.
The minimal length requirement for Rollercoaster Heaven and the smaller map makes it a little more interesting than the Prison Island scenario. I think you can actually build the rollercoasters fully on the water on Prison Island which makes it a really sad scenario.
I would love to hear more of your opinions about the Time Twister and Wacky Worlds scenarios. Seems like an interesting topic
I remember I was playing through the RCT2 scenarios a few years ago, I hit Prison Island and I was like "...am I having fun with this game?" Because I was already relying a bit too much on prebuilds, and this scenario just seemed tailor-made to be cheesed. At that point I wasn't really being creative at all. If I ever get back to RCT2 I'm gonna have to restrict myself to no prebuilds
I always hated having fail conditions because i liked just sitting back and watching the park run. I would be working on my next coaster only to have the fail interrupt me. Having to redo work isnt fun so i didn't complete many levels. Sandbox is great.
Quick question for you, Marcel. If it ever comes to a point where you've covered every aspect of RCT would you cover other games like Planet Coaster or Zoo Tycoon? I'm curious what your plans are and where you plan to take us next. Cheers to another year bro.
I know Marcel has already made a video on this, but the RCT2 scenarios all being unlocked was lame compared to RCT1. I only ever remember playing Extreme Heights, or creating my own.
That’s the EXACT reason why RCT1 and RCT Classic is better than the original rct2 imo
Unless you enable the “progressive scenario unlocking” opinion on openRCT2 it’s actually not too bad
Long ago I remember hearing about people strongly preferring RCT2 to RCT1 (before I or they knew about openRCT). It baffled me on why they would prefer a game with everything unlocked, which is what made RCT1 so much more exciting and nostalgic in my opinion.
I had a similar experience when originally getting RCT2 with only playing extreme heights and making custom scenarios.
@@MightyFineMan RCT2 is more of an open park builder than a scenario game, even in the non-"Build your own Six Flags" scenarios, and some people really like that. I always personally preferred it because of the UI/Mechanics improvements over RCT1 and since I played RCT2 as a kid before 1 I have way more nostalgia for it lol. It wasn't until coming back much later and getting baffled by why Crazy Castle was weirdly difficult for me (the existing paths through the castle and the guest pathfinding at the staircase) that I realized the scenario design was kinda funky. OpenRCT2/Classic are definitely the way to go now but I think if it was just 1/2/3 I'd still prefer 2.
The RCT2 expansions though are definitely not great. I remember getting them as a kid through the scholastic book fair and being super disappointed in them even at the time.
I don't think I ever finished more than 1 or 2 of the RCT2 scenarios. I spent most of my time making and playing my own scenarios in RCT2. It just didn't feel that rewarding beating the scenarios in 2 and a lot of them were kind of lame compared to the great, interesting scenarios from the original.
Thanks for another great video. Really enjoy your content. I still remember as a college student enjoying a snow day with 8 straight hours of RCT2, beat the map with the big wooden rollercoaster next to beach and I had no idea you could buy that land on beach till I saw a video of yours.
I always found it pretty hard to beat any scenario if youre trying to maintain a real world aesthetic with the park and not just jumbling everything together as efficiently as possible. I always end up saying F It anyway but i try
Oh, cool that you did a video on these two parks! I always wondered why they were made this way, they're virtually sandbox parks. Great looking maps, but with no rules it took too much away. Prison island you can just flatten it out and do anything with it - if you were unable to close the park it'd be different, but you can do that too.
That and Rollercoaster Heaven, with all this confusing path laid out like a regular city, way off from how you'd make paths, and there's peeps already lost all over it.
Seems like the folks who made TT and WW barely played the game to see what scenarios ought to be like!
Perhaps it's low-hanging fruit, but I'd love a video with a "tier list" of Scenarios. What are the most fun scenarios? etc
I remember always spamming pre made coasters just to beat the scenario. Happy new year Marcel!
I recently got a folding phone and reinstalled RCT classic on it. Been watching your videos and having a great time playing RCT on the go.
Not a fun scenario indeed, but i did like to play atleast the prison one at times as it was a decently pre-terraformed sandbox, where as you can make a sandbox with the scenario editor, i never liked a empty square map. So these were an easy option 😅
When I played Rollercoaster Heaven the first times it took me a lot of work to create the needed coasters. It did help me learn to create better coasters.
The trees were a pain though. And the path layout, both fun and a frustration for my perfectionism to remove all the dead end and double roads, so the peeps didn't get lost.
That was exacly my problem when I wanted to play 'Prison Island' a few weeks ago. I didn't see much challenge about it. So what I did: just via cheats enable money. That was a lot more fun to do, and I did it!!
Prison Island was by far my most played scenario as a kid, and thats because I loved the "sandbox" vibe it had. I could just have fun designing coasters on a cool island and not worry about anything else
Oh how I love talking about the delightful dumpster fires that are RCT2's expansions. I look forward to hearing more about them!
I disagree with almost everything here, I really enjoyed both of these scenarios. You seem to approach them purely from a level-solving perspective, and they don't give much of a challenge there, but if you approach it more from a "let's build a beautiful theme park in the style of the scenario"- perspective, they're loads of fun, and the fact that they're unfailable is completely irrelevant. Why would I spam pre-built coasters when the entire point of this game is designing your own? I play to enjoy myself, not to get some yellow popup at some point.
I built coasters in Prison Island winding in and out of the buildings and built the smaller rides in between those buildings, while in Rollercoaster Heaven I loved having the coasters fly through the spaces between the skyscrapers and imagining how much fun this would be for the people presumably working office jobs inside. I probably wouldn't have enjoyed them at all if I just bulldozed all scenery like the person did who made the park at 4:18, but I don't think any level would be any fun if I played the game like that. Parks should be parks, not random spammed prebuilt rides on a big square that together create some arbitrary statistics that make the game tell me "you beat a level!"
Main annoyance for both of these scenarios that I remember was fixing the path layout that was absolutely terrible and would cause guests to go hopelessly lost no matter where they went.
Happy new year Marcel! 🎉🎉 i was wondering and HOPING if you could please advise us on how to close our park (on April 1st!) I was so eager to learn how last April 1, but to no avail! I hope this message reaches you with enough time to produce an instructional video on how to close our park! Thank you so much! I love your videos!
lol dork
I actually _love_ those scenarios because building my own coasters is my favorite part of RollerCoaster Tycoon, and not having the pressure of money or park rating allows me to take my time and build the coasters i want. I do see how Marcel and others that like a challenge would hate it though.
If my memory is right there's another scenario in RCT1 that is like prison island and Rollercoaster heaven but more difficult. And that's Razor Rocks. Like prison island you gotta build 10 roller coasters with minimum 6 excitement rating but you have money to deal with. And some of us have made the mistake on focusing solely on coasters for 6 excitement and don't get stalls and less intense rides in
Yeah I made that mistake too with Razor Rocks. Still was fun and beatable though.
And I remember building a really good Reverser Coaster; until a few heavy guests got onboard and caused it to crash.
But that was a simple fix and I still met the Excitement Rating requirement.
I can't wait until you somehow beat these scenarios with just a toilet.
Tbh, I don’t mind RollerCoaster heaven and Alcatraz because i do like to build my own designs in every park I play to challenge myself a little, Becuase even I said before this: “There’s already pre built designs in the game with 6.00 excitement or designs with over 1,000m and 7 excitement, and plop it down!” But yeah, it’s completely your opinion, no opinion changed
I had no idea some of the scenarios in the RCT2 expansions were this rough, what was going on when making these?
They were farmed out to Frontier; there's another comment that details this.
i really like these scenarios tbh. they're relaxing sandboxes where i can just go wild and make massive rollercoasters i wouldn't be able to make otherwise. :)
Guest 1: I'm not paying that much for Rollercoaster Heaven. Marcel: If I see I'm not paying that much one more time I'm moving to Australia. Go to Rollercoaster Heaven Now! REEEEEEEEEE! HULK SMASHY! *Smashes 21 benches and destroys 82 lampposts and trash cans and stone benches
Rollercoaster heaven was mostly great except for the length requirements on the LIM coaster. For a long ride you need a faster boost but that leads to more intensity and excitement penalty so it was unexpectedly challenging for me
To be fair, those levels seem like a fun way to make custom coasters with some decent prebuilt scenery.
I do wonder about prebuilt coasters. RCT, like many tycoon games, suffers from trying to be a business sim but also something else at the same time (a coaster design tool). Planet Zoo had this issue: you can turn a profit and make functional enclosures very easily, making it practically a sandbox game about designing exhibits purely for eye candy.
Furthermore, their layouts are messy and guarantee that the guests are going to get lost. Prison Island has a lot of wide, open path areas while Roller Coaster Heaven is a veritable maze. You need to do a lot of work to get it under control. Roller Coaster Heaven has the additional problem of all those redwood trees that can only be removed by right-clicking them one at a time. The scenery clearing tool doesn't work and neither does trying to build through them. It's very tedious and can lead to hand cramps. Prison Island isn't tedious, but it is boring. A prison theme doesn't give a lot of options for creativity.
Those trees were a pain in the base game indeed. It took me a lot of time to beat that scenario because of the trees. (And to stop people getting lost)
I later played it in openrct which has given the remove tool the option to all delete the trees and the level was suddenly a lot quicker and easier
I loved prison island as a kid. Now I realized how boring it was after building 7 custom coasters over 6.00 and not feeling like continuing.
Hope you had a good break Marcel, absolutely beaming to see new videos again!
I don’t mind these coaster challenges because I just treat them as sandbox mode. I’m not bad at the game, but at the same time I’m not really that great at building custom rides and sometimes having a guest requirement after year ‘x’ just stresses me out because I don’t feel very confident in parks with uneven terrain… which is most of them 😅
So conversely, best scenario and/or your favorite?
This is the first mention of "Arid Heights" I hear in your videos. Its teh scenario I remember the most, build one huge megapark with tons of themed coasters in it, all of which had "Force" in their name... I was like 12 years old, thought it was cool ;)
I actually have a park on both of these scenarios. I use them as test beds for designs mostly. it's not really playing, but randomly it is.
They're not enjoyable in the sense that i have to know what i'm doing, but i get to bust out some creativity if i can when building things, and not have money be a barrier to it.
Otherwise, yeah, these aren't really scenarios. I would treat these more like sandbox levels.
conversely, Marcel videos are easy to watch yet great
Out of curiosity, I wonder how those scenarios would shape up if money was enabled. Though, it would be a significant change to the balancing, and neither of them have research lists. In addition, Rollercoaster Heaven starts with 325 guests already, so simply enabling cash won't give all the current guests funds.
What's truly baffling is all of these no-money scenarios in 2's expansions also have cash machines, Great Wall of China included.
There's 4 no money scenarios in RCT1, Arid Heights, Crazy Craters, Megaworld Park and Icicle Worlds
Finally, a scenario I can actually beat.
Prison Island was my favorite as a kid but I was also like 6 so that might've had something to do with it. Sandbox mode in RCT3 was a game changer for young me :P
Thank you Marcel, I want to tell everyone on here my dream :
My dream is to come home from work and play roller coaster tycoon. Every day for 1-2 years. Like what i did for many many many many years.
It will happen in these upcoming months hopefully. Talk to a dutch person because I have a name Gretchen that my parents gave me.
Good morning Marcel.
Have you ever thought about creating a real labyrinth using only the scenery elements and paths?
I tried yesterday and it was curious to see how they got lost in the maze. Only a few managed to get out
and enter my park, the others have left it.
Can confirm the "no money but keep the park rating up" scenarios can be hard - or at least I used to fail them all the time as a kid!
Harmonic Hills forces a player to use every facet of the gameplay model to complete imo it's one of the best scenarios from a problem solving standpoint, which is the bread and butter of the gameplay loop of most management sims; whereas the two mentioned here throw all that straight into the wind.
You're absolutely not wrong here.
I like rct1 over the second game. The scenarios are well designed mostly, not just a bunch of flat-open spaces. Rotting Heights is a good example for why I enjoyed that game, it wasn’t over-the-top, and it was more about making a successful park rather than a beautiful one.
When I was young
I played so much RCT2 and Prison Island and Rollercoaster Heaven were my favorite parks hahaha
Icicle Worlds from RCT1 Loopy Landscape also doesn't have money. I guess it also has harder guest generation enabled? I'm not sure about that second part.
I actually had a blast with prison island... but I removed all scenery, and made a park that actually looks good.
Let's have a good 2024!
My new years resolution is finishing my dream park: Super Electric Fields (working title)
I'm a little over halfway done.
I always saw prison island as an tutorial level. Like: 'look, there are stats, use them!'
And then there's also the scenario in RCT2 where all you need to do is raise the price of one of the rides a few cents and you win.
I wanna know a quick ranking of all of the scenarios
Roller Coaster Heaven is a tremendous pain in the ass becasue of all of those redwoods
4:02 Marcel retracts an entire video.
Here's a 'fun' twist on the challenge: How many roller coasters can you build WITHOUT accidentally succeeding Prison Island.
10 different coasters with over 7.00 excitement, but your coasters are: The heartline twister, the junior coaster, the mini coaster, the spiral coaster (why is this one a separate type in classic?!) the inverted hairpin, the mini suspended, the steeplechase, the mine ride, the side friction, and the reverser coaster! Go.
Spiral Coaster is really quite easy to get above 7, though?
Bazaar speedrun: make the Bazar the only path possible, build lots of cheap flat rides and set advertisements for 6 week an then close all rides. Every guest will buy something and the mission is complete in 5 or 6 weeks.
1:53 weren't there like... 4 of them? I remember Arid Heights, Megaworld Park and then there were other 2 similar to Arid Heights. One in an Alien world and another one in the snow.
1:51 Loopy Landscapes has 4 of them. Arid Heights, Crazy Craters, Icicle Woods and Megaworld Park.
Then again, Crazy Craters and Icicle Woods are pretty forgettable.
As a kid I liked the Alcatraz map because I treated it as a sandbox mode (I didn’t know there was an actual sandbox mode in the game).
Starting this year of the dragon by dragging into bad scenarios, eh?
I hope you had a good new year. Can't wait to learn more about the game with the things you show us.
Back then I refused to get Wacky Worlds and Time Twister on principle. The art style was atrocious, the rides and coasters were basically just reskins, and they were a clear cash grab. I was 14 in 2003 and even then I knew just how bad they were.
I'd alway fail those moneyless scenarios as a kid because I didn't understand how to manage staff.
In my Archipelago plugin I’m working on, I turn all moneyless scenarios into cash ones and have a custom, modular scenario objective. Maybe prison island could actually be fun!
The "Build the rides with X excitement" are pretty terrible, yeah. Especially the "Complete these rides we partly built" scenarios, which require you to aim for a specific target in often a tight space.
Glad to see Marcel hasn't left UA-cam, Happy 2024 to him
You also have rct3 where, when you fail a deadline, you can try again without resetting
You gotta do a video where you rank the difficulty of all scenarios
When I saw the title I thought he was going to criticize Forest Frontiers and I was about to flip a table.
I also think that the prison island has really annoying layout to build on.
3:47 anyone else thought the mouse pointer on the right side of the screen was some kind of entity shooting up from the ground in the park and paused to take a closer look?
Honestly, I think those two scenarios (and probably Great Wall of China too) were made purely to showcase the godawful expansion scenery items in a park context.
The reason I never beat Prison Island back in the day is because I would get bored too quickly. At least give a "you can't remove scenery" challenge, given the real life Alcatraz - the prison the scenario is based on - is a national landmark.
these scenarios would probably be perfectly reasonable as coaster design tutorials if they were presented to you early on... and not in a fucking expansion pack
Okay but consider that the scenarios are there for you to just chill & have fun making rollercoasters
The outro music is too cool, we are mostly nerds
To win Prison Island I had to destroy paths at the begining so my stupid guests and cleaner didn't get lost... and then had to spend SO MUCH TIME (because no mods) to remove the paths all over the island to build anything. Really frustrating. I didn't want to cheese it, I wanted to build an actual PARK you know?
I feel like these are kind of just intended to be sandbox parks to play around in, and their status as "scenarios" is only incidental.
I, too, have ridiculed the Alcatraz scenario.
Alcatraz was my favourite scenario, when I was 6 years old of course, lol
Cheers to the New Year! Looking forward to all the great videos 2024 will bring!
Good to have you back in 2024.
prison island was my favourite scenario as a kid, not really though im just being a contrarian like everyone else is
See you're talking like an adult who knows how to play video games. But as a kid who had no idea how any of the mechanics of the game worked and just liked building rollercoasters, Alcatraz was my favorite scenario.