Thrillville

The original Thrillville is one of my all time favorite games. I love theme parks and the idea of making your own is fun. I remember playing Roller Coaster Tycoon on the computer and loving it and when I found this on the original Xbox, I instantly fell in love. I like the idea of playing through an avatar so you can actually explore the park. Walking around and going from different sections of the park gives you the authentic feel of being in a real theme park. You can actually ride the rides, play the games, interact with people, it's a blast. This game has a fantastic selection of minigames. There's a ton of them, my favorite is a 4 way tie between these first person shooter type games. They're all themed, one being western, one being sci-fi, one being pirate, and one being a haunted house theme. You can find different guns, shoot through robots that match each theme, and explore cool locations. My other favorite minigame was called Luftwafe 109, an overhead WWII airplane shooter with different levels, each having creative boss airships to battle and armies of enemy planes. There's cool racing games a bumper car game, and some shooting galleries. I love them all. I love the different parks you can unlock too. They were very creative and detailed, especially for the time the game was released. Thrillville was ahead of it's time and it's still one of my favorites to this day.

This is a theme park management simulation game in which you control up to five different theme parks, each with their own unique themes, games, rides, and guest demographics. You'll be managing finances, building and customizing rides, placing food and souvenir kiosks, fraternizing with guests, and hiring and training your park staff. In addition, when you're not busy managing the park, you can ride any ride you've placed in your park, including roller coasters of your own design, and play any game. Riding rides and playing games will earn you money and other bonuses to help you better manage your parks.

Visually, Thrillville isn't all that stunning, even by last-gen standards, but the cartoony graphics hold up well overall. Gameplay itself is varied, so there will rarely be a time when you're stuck doing something tedious or difficult just trying to move ahead. The game challenges range from too easy to downright angering with difficulty, but they aren't essential to gaining new parks, usually just to earn a few extra bucks or unlock some small bonus, such as a new coaster blueprint, or decreases in loan rates.

All in all, unlocking new parks isn't that difficult. In fact, you typically won't even have to complete a significant amount of missions in your current park before the next one will become available. This makes it easy to manage and fine-tune up to five different parks at once, but this won't keep you as busy as you might think. Once a park is completed you'll find there isn't a whole lot to offer aside from building relationships with guests, a task that quickly becomes monotonous and repetitive due to limited choices for interaction. While the customization process will seem fun and engaging at first, eventually you will notice there are only a handful of themes for every section of every park, and you'll end up using the same themes over and over, simply because there really are no other choices.

Overall, Thrillville is a fun, interactive game for any age with a very short learning curve and plenty to keep you entertained the first time through. But it's limitations keep the replay value low, and completing every mini-game for every park seems pointless once you've run out of space to place anything new. I highly recommend checking it out, just don't expect a game that's going to entertain you through the long-haul.

Thrillville is a pretty good theme park game. But I'll be honest, I do like the sequel more than this one. Because it does have its issues like some of the gameplay and the graphics can look dated on the humans. But it can be pretty fun to play. It does have a great concept of a theme park simulation and how much responsibility it takes to work there. The cutscenes with Mortimer are wacky that tells what's going on in parks you first enter. The backgrounds on each park look neat. And the mini games are the best parts of the game. Of course, this is the kind of game for coaster enthusiasts. But I mostly recommend playing the mini games that would play any other gaming genre. I'll say the sequel was better a year later, but I enjoyed this one too.

I love this game. Primarily because of the vast number of mini-games. My friends come by and we waste robots, play mini-golf, ride bumper cars, play a variety of old-school video games, rewire electrical devices or drive a variety of vehicles. I personally love the ability to create coasters (and to a lesser extent racetracks).

Not really into the 'Entertainer' mini-game/cheerleader employee training. Sort of DDR without the step-pad. Cleaning up vomit is an acquired 'taste.' This thing has a wide variety of coaster types/mechanics (from standard wood and steel to wonky monorails and this really cool mouse design that has the car whipping around like a tilt-o-whirl). Plus it has these cool interfaces (on the PS2 version) where it will either put in special track presets or will actually figure out how to complete your Masterpiece for you. Lots of control, and some wild physics. Love making those park guests wobble around.

Lot of fun. About 30 hours to finish most of it. But the mini-games will keep you coming back again and again.