Thrillville
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PSP Review
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Review
You remember Theme Park? Bullfrog’s amusement park simulator was an absolute cracker, and is the cause of many of the nostalgic memories of a whole generation of gamers. Sure, most of these memories are associated with the absolutely horrible things you could do on the game – induce vomiting, throw people off half-complete rollercoasters, fill their drinks up with ice and spoon the salt on to their chips – but that was all a small part of the fun. The main attraction of the game was the ability to make your own dream theme park, with sprawling coasters, hosts of rides and acres of crazy amusements.
You remember Elite? David Braben and Ian Bell’s incredible space game is held aloft as one of the greatest of all time. An incredible open-ended experience, you were given an entire universe to play in, with no curfew or limitation.
Why the history lesson? Have patience, good reader, for I will be tying these strings into knots very shortly. You see, Braben from Elite fame went on to contribute to the Rollercoaster Tycoon series (Theme Park’s number one competitor and arguable technical superior), and now he’s strapped himself into Thrillville, the next gen answer to both competing series. It’s crawling up and up the steel track, and getting closer to the top. Will this ride tear through air and blow our minds, or fly off the track and into someone’s over-iced Coke? Will this dreadful metaphor kindly just die? I hope so. I really do.
Thrillville puts you in the role of a hip young teen (with a fully customisable appearance, of course) who is put in control of their Uncle Mortimer’s theme parks. Ol’ Mort’s a bit of a fruit loop, you see. He acts like Doc Brown’s ADD-infested little brother. Still, his insanity is our gain, as we now have our hands on a theme park, and like any good kid, we don’t want to sit in an office and manage it. We’re getting out there and enjoying it. This sounds like it should be a movie with Macaulay Culkin in it.
The game is split up into five sections, which are introduced to us via unnecessary laborious tutorials. These sections are: Building rides, playing games, talking to customers, taking care of business and training the staff. Before we explore them all, don’t be put off by the last three – this is no stuffy business sim, everything here is geared towards creating the most fun as possible. This is more Dragon’s Lair than Dragon’s Den. Ha, you see what I did there?
Rides – What would a theme park be without its rides? A park, that’s what. Developing your park and making a success of it is all down to how you put together your rides. There’s loads of rides to dabble with here, and you can customise them all. This is a treat that we get throughout the entire Thrillville experience – practically everything can be customised to your personal preferences, and there’s a massive level of detail to everything.
Clearly anyone with a pulse will be most interested in the rollercoasters. You’re allowed to add them to your park pre-built, or put them together yourself. The construction mode (which is also used to build go-kart tracks) can get on your nerves as it constantly tells you off for doing something wrong with the track (too close to attractions, too high up etc) so a lot of trial and error is needed. The Trackassist tool will help you out if you find it too confusing. I did.
You can have a go on all the rides, but that’s not as thrilling as you may think. The only exception are the Go-Karts, which leads us to the next section…
Games – The dozens of mini-games included on this disc are so good I could have taken them without all the theme park guff attached. You can have a go on all the games available to your punters, which range from (customisable) mini golf courses, trampolining, first-person shooters, Bubble Bobble style platformers, bumper cars, RC demolition derby… the list goes on and on, and I spent hours on all of them. These are, thankfully, the meat of the game, and not just a limp add-on like many mini-games are. This sets up Thrillville as a very strong opponent to Nintendo’s 42 All-Time Classics, and it takes a lot for me to say that.
If you’re lucky enough to have friends, you can play them on the mini-games in the separate Party Mode. This makes an extremely enjoyable experience twenty times better. If you’re sticking to the first person experience though, success at the mini-games wins you money to build up your park with. You can also challenge your punters and set records for them to beat. Awesome.
Customers – When you’re not playing games or riding rides, you can explore the park and chat it up with the customers. You can promote your rides, ask them for their opinions, even win their friendships. This is pretty dull but it’s useful if you want to know what to concentrate on developing in your park. The conversations are spiced up by your character’s bizarrely comprehensive grasp on world events and scientific facts, which are hilariously random. You can also flirt and set people up, but whatever.
Taking Care of Business – I grimaced when I came across this bit. The game had so far presented me with bright colours, bouncy graphics and a focus on fun over everything else, so I wasn’t really looking forward to number-crunching. Luckily, it’s all pretty simple – theme park management hasn’t evolved much from Theme Park with the main thing you have to worry about is the ticket price and where you want to put the exit. This is a very good thing. Like we discussed earlier, everything here is for fun, so the park isn’t going to collapse in on itself if you don’t check your books for a couple of hours. It’s all about using everything to earn yourself more cash money, so you can buy more games for yourself!
Stat fiends will love it though, as practically everything is covered here, and you can spend ages tinkering with your attractions. There are also finance issues to take care of, marketing to manage, and demographics to stroke your chin at. Proof then that this isn’t just a light-hearted romp, there’s a serious sim if you want one. If you don’t? Don’t worry about it, you can still play your heart out.
Staff – Just like you can take the role of a customer, you can also show your staff how things get done. A series of mini-games simulate the roles of groundkeepers, entertainers and mechanics. Yes, that’s right, more games.
Thrillville has taken a leaf out of GTA’s blood-splattered book by presenting the game as a series of Missions which you can opt to take on or ignore in favour of more go-karting. You can free-roam as much as you want, but if you want to develop into new, fancier parks, you’ll have to put some work into the missions. You won’t get lonely though, as they’ve even ripped off GTA’s radio station soundtrack, combining third-rate catchy pop songs with interviews and comic sketches. These get repetitive quite quickly, and if you’re trying to concentrate, you might want to tap the volume down.
I was very pleasantly surprised with Thrillville. It’s clearly aimed at teens, but this is a seriously well-balanced experience that anyone could fall in love with. Simple graphics work in favour of creating a laidback atmosphere. Even if you have no interest in looking after an amusement park, I would recommend this to any PSP owner as the mini-game Holy Grail they’ve desperately needed.
Better than Theme Park, though? It’s hard to topple a classic, but said classic’s scheduled return on the DS in March will help answer that question. As it stands now, the newcomer has a very, very strong chance indeed.
Thrillville - PS2
Thrillville - PSP
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