Amusement parks forever changed for me after playing that game. One of the focal points of the game was getting to build your own gigantic, monster, puke inducing roller coasters, then advertise the heck out of it and charge an extra ten bucks to ride the damn thing....but I digress. What are you inevitably going to do if you have full control over building these roller coasters?
Design them to crash.
Don't give me this "just to see if it works" bullshit. Of course it works! If you send a roller coaster car zooming up a hill that isn't finished, it doesn't disappear into a black hole, or just start back at the beginning! That thing crashes and burns! So maybe you started out just doing this with empty cars. "Just to see if it works". But after a few hours, your park is pretty much running itself, and you are a gazillionaire, so things are a bit boring. What better way to bust your in-game rut than to put some people on a death trap and see what happens!
No surprise here, folks. They die, in a red explosion of animated fire and people parts. So this is the part where, in real life, the ambulances show up to, I don't know...I guess see if any of the people parts are salvageable? And then your park gets shut down for a little while and then you are probably going to court. Your ass is getting sued for designing this death trap and letting people get on it (and charging ten bucks! The nerve.). So, how does RCT handle death in an amusement park?
--80 guests have died on 'The Death Trap'!
--500 guests are looking for cotton candy.
--There is puke everywhere. You need more janitors.
Yep. "Oh, some people died! Business as usual, business as usual, money money money." Now, to be fair, your park rating goes down, and a large majority of the park visitors will not go near The Death Trap. Um, duh. But do you have to pay a fine? No. Do you have to tear it down or close the park? No. Do you have to do anything to show remorse for the fact that your Death Trap just killed 800 people? Unless you consider having to hire another entertainer to cheer the guests up 'remorse', then the answer is no. No remorse.
| You can't see it from here, but those sidewalks are practically made out of vomit. xbox.ign.com |
The game was actually more concerned about flower gardens dying than people. Which in turn causes you to spend all your time watering the gardens. And making sure the janitors scrub the puke off the sidewalks. Puke scrubbing and garden maintenance? Seriously? Screw this, I'm gonna see if I can crash a roller coaster into a crowded bridge.
--8,000 people just died on 'This will teach you to puke in my park'! And on the sidewalk.
--Did you build that cotton candy stand yet? People are getting pretty hungry, so now would be a good time to raise prices.
--People are puking because of the people parts all over the sidewalk. You should hire another janitor to scrub up the people parts and probably an entertainer, too, to take everyone's mind off the carnage.
--You've been voted 'Least Safe Park of the Year.' You've also been voted 'Prettiest Park in the World'! Keep up the good work. Here is a gazillion dollars.
The brief thought crossed my mocking mind that they should have had some punishment for killing people. They should make you shut down the park for an hour, which is like two or three days in game-time. They should have made you tear down The Death Trap, or at least make some show of correcting the death element. They should have fined you, you greedy little teenager! Let's take your fake amusement park simulation earnings and see how you like killing people now!
"But, that's not fair! I was just seeing if it worked!"
The real topper on the simulation cake would have been to make you, the player, hire a lawyer and sit through some ten-minute court proceeding in which you are berated by an animated prosecuting attorney, then not only have to pay up to the deceased's families, but shell out the cash for your lawyer, as well. But in all honesty, do you know what I would have done? Hit the bathroom, melted some cheese on some tortilla chips, grabbed a Mountain Dew, then used a cheat code to get the necessary funds to pay off the lawyer and the crying families.
Are you kidding me? I have been playing computer games since I was about six-years-old, and console games since even before that. My desensitization occurred long before RCT. And has continued since. For the sake of nostalging, I will probably spend a chunk of my day trying to download RCT, then crashing The Death Trap into a sidewalk full of people--preferably the line waiting for The Death Trap, for irony. Who the hell gets on a ride called 'The Death Trap'? Furreal, now.
I will however get very upset if some punks decide to vandalize my lamp posts. Unacceptable. And it goes without saying that my gardens will be perfect....
Fakewords: #gazillionaire, #RCT, #nostalging, #Furreal
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