Rollercoaster Game Roundup (Part 1)

4. Ultimate Ride (Disney Imagineering, $35)

Ultimate Ride is the newest coaster sim out on the market, and with it's release a few months ago came a gigantic marketing campaign: huge advertisements in magazines and on television tried to lure coaster fans onto the computer. Created by Gigawatt Studios and published by "Disney Imagineering", I had high hopes for this one, since the commercial was pretty darn cool, and it had the Disney name on it, the same people who created the fabulous original coaster computer game, "Coaster!"

Alas, Ultimate Ride trades pretty graphics for coaster smoothness, the #1 killer of all coaster games, if you ask me. If the ride doesn't *feel* like a real coaster, it won't get high marks in my book.

Here's the problem with Ultimate Ride: The game relies too heavily on features like "props" -- animated 3-D items you can place in your coaster world for people to look at while they speed by. These are things like clocks, balloons that display messages, odd, glowing, shiny things, and trees and rocks. While this sounds like a good idea in theory, the graphics engine in the game simply isn't hefty enough to render all this stuff and keep the coaster going at a smooth frame-rate. Of course, if you have a beefy computer this might not be such an issue, but on my system, going by one of these props slowed the game substantially. Note to Disney: If you're going to have props, fine.. but make the track ahead the most important item on the screen!

Anyway, to give the designers credit, the game is packed with features: Props come in different flavors for 3 different "themes" (futuristic, medieval, and outer space), plus you can create 3 different types of coasters: wooden, metal, and suspended. The interface is likewise easy to use, though its features are more simplistic than the other more advanced coaster creators I'll describe later. It's basically a remake of the old "Coaster!" design program -- it's a "one click" effort to place a piece, then you place more and more until you somehow manage to make it back to the start. This method, while easy, leads to pretty clunky coaster designs, with tight curves that fling the rider around -- a very un-professional thing to do in the coaster world. I was also disappointed with the number of "special" pieces they include: advanced coaster tricks things

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