Roller Coaster Factory 

When I was a kid, I had this deep obsession with wanting to get a roller coaster video game. The object of my affection was Ultimate Ride, which looked incredible and extensive for its time. The demo took a full day to download on my dial-up connection, but in spite of my fervency, my old desktop computer didn’t meet the system requirements.

Flash-forward a few months to a trip to Office Max with my family. While rifling through the bargain bins, I found a copy of ValuSoft’s Roller Coaster Factory, which looked pretty awesome from the jewel case. It would have to do.

This time, it’s personal.

Roller Coaster Factory is awful. It’s one of the crappiest, undercooked bargain games you could come across.

Unlike most roller coaster games, or most games of any genre, Roller Coaster Factory strips its features to the bare minimum. The game functions only to create roller coasters. There are no other modes, scenes, or tycoon aspects. Rather than plotting points for your coaster track and creating an interesting route with curves and banks, you can only select from one of four types of pieces – hills, curves, curving hills, loops, and straight lines. The finished coaster will almost always snake along the cardinal directions. Pretty exciting.

Roller coaster games draw in players with the prospect of testing a crazy monster ride that no engineer or safety regulator would approve. No such speed or excitement to be found here. Your ride will rarely if ever exceed a leisurely lurch, no matter how many times the game tells you it runs at 30 MPH (which, depressingly, is about as fast as they can get).

God forbid you want to go on your roller coaster for the scenic views. The game’s engine barely pulls off sub-Nintendo 64 fidelity, which somehow looks even worse when you switch from a steel coaster to wood. Keep in mind, for all the flickering textures and two-dimensional trees, this game was made in the year 2000, the same year as No One Lives Forever and MechWarrior 4.

Once you finish testing your coaster, you’re given arbitrary numbers for the ride’s “thrill” and overall score with no indication of how you earned them. I guess you’d be able to compete against other people to make higher-scoring coasters, but without any interesting restrictions or track pieces, that just means making the densest, longest ride. At least there’s a few options to tweak, such as activating night mode, which adds a rickety plane of stars and makes everything darker.

That’s all there is to say. There isn’t much of a game here. It feels like the work of one guy on his week off. Honestly, it’s a little sad, but what else can you expect from ValuSoft?

Most frustratingly, the creators of Roller Coaster Factory put out a series of working, decent, playable, coaster games a few years later. But that didn’t stop it from becoming their best-selling game, shipping 150,000 copies. For comparison, The Last Express sold only 100,000.

Never let another wishful child be duped by this evil sorcery again. Gaaaah.

Tags: 00s, 2000, bad, Pantera Entertainment, roller coaster, slow, ValuSoft

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