Web Video / Marcel Vos

"Hello everyone, and welcome to another video."

— Marcel Vos and his usual greeting to his viewers.

Marcel Vos is a Dutch YouTuber who is well known for covering a lot of gaming mechanics for RollerCoaster Tycoon (generally diving into those for the second game/Classic/Open). He generally goes in-depth on various rides and what can and can't be done in the game. He is also known for his introductory greeting (as shown in the quote above) and is also a fan of Minecraft and Age of Empires. View his YouTube channel here and his subreddit here.

---

Marcel Vos provides examples of:

• Analysis Channel: Marcel's channel is probably one of the most in-depth analysis channels for RollerCoaster Tycoon mechanics on Youtube, with highly detailed discussions on various topics (rides, map completion, park mechanics). He also shows off other (more hilarious) bits, which are usually related to (or a sort of critique on) the various mechanical quirks of the game.
• April Fools' Day: Marcel has made several video's specifically for April Fools' day, where he either intentionally gave bad advice on rollercoaster design or explained the (rather mundane) act of opening and closing the park in great detail (as if it were the most difficult thing to achieve in the world).
  • One April Fool's video with a rather unique twist is his video on Toilets: half unique details from the game that he hadn't mentioned in other stall videos, half B.S.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: In his second "Weird Logic Moments" video, he theorizes that Peeps have super dense bones compared to humans; this would explain how they can survive g-forces that would turn a normal human into goo, but are also unable to swim.
• Catchphrase: "Hello everyone, and welcome to another video". You probably read that in his voice too.
• Deadpan Snarker: Most of the humor on his channel can be attributed either to this trope (when he provides witty criticism in his standard, deadpan voice) or from being The Comically Serious.
• Funny Foreigner: Has very strong Deadpan Snarker tendencies, and a very strong Dutch accent.
• In-Universe Game Clock: Discussed in this video, where a time lapse is shown to demonstrate the clock's function.
• Leitmotif: His videos generally play Gentle Style/Drifting to Heaven in the background. A fan remix even plays as the outro of them alongside his "Loading" screens when streaming.
• Made of Explodium: Marcel often jokes about this aspect of the game, stating that the rollercoaster designers intentionally added explosives to the carts (or filled the dingies with flammable gas) to create this effect. The most hilarious example of this was his ride overview of the Mini Golf, where allowing the guests to leave the Mini Golf track through cheats causes them to explode instantaneously. This led most viewers to believe that the Mini Golf ride is filled to the brim with landmines.
• Makes Just as Much Sense in Context: Several RollerCoaster Tycoon mechanics fitting this trope are discussed in these two videos, aptly called the "Weird Logic Moments" videos. Specific examples include the fact that coaster trains and dingies are highly explosive, none of the guests can swim, guests are both super strong and indestructible (while also being highly obedient and terrible at pathfinding), labour, health and safety laws don't exist and that highly energetic guests drown faster than exhausted ones.
• Overflow Error: How fast can you go in RollerCoaster Tycoon 2? uses a series of physics exploits, culminating in a Go-Karts ride which breaks the game's speed cap of 65,535 mph.
• Reality-Breaking Paradox: In the Cash Machine video, he brings up how even though we (the player) has a finite amount of money to run the park, the guests somehow have an infinite amount of money in their balance, as they'll always withdraw $50 upon using one as long as they're happy.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: In-Universe
  • He's played the beginning level, Forest Frontiers, with crazy restrictions, such as beating it with four tiles, beating it without placing any rides, and beating it with only a single Merry Go Round.
  • Similar to the first Forest Frontiers challenge, he beat Bumbly Bazaar with only two tiles. Then he beat Forest Frontiers again with only one tile.
  • He also beat Volcania, a park that requires you to finish five pre-existing roller coasters, without opening the park. He then topped it by doing the same in Razor Rocks, which requires ten roller coasters. He even encouraged viewers to see if they could beat it with less funds than he did.
• Simple, yet Awesome:
  • Any scenery can add to the excitement bonus for rides - even tiny shrubs. Whenever Marcel demonstrates this, he uses said shrubs to do so.
  • His signature Micro Corkscrew Coaster. It somehow fulfills stat requirements for it to be a decent ride to attract guests and make a good amount of money. Here's a video for more information.
• Take That!: In one of his park playthrough videos, he talks about how guests won't normally come in the park if the price is too high, but if one happens to advertise, the price doesn't matter to them. He then adds that it's actually not unrealistic, stating that Disney does that and it works.
• Time Abyss:
  • He has built the largest maze possible in the game engine, cheesing it by building only left-side indents to exploit the pathfinding algorithm to create a maze that's artificially difficult for guests to complete. He estimated it would take a whopping average of 6.6 x 10^19 758 years for a guest to finish it. For comparison, it's estimated that the last supermassive black hole will have evaporated through Hawking Radiation in 1.7×10^106 years. Vos helpfully provides a few references for the sheer time scale involved. For instance, if you picked up every atom in the universe and waited one Googol ^note  That's 10^100, 1 followed by a hundred zeroes years between each atom, by the time you're done you wouldn't even be close enough to the maze being finished.
  • He also created several rollercoasters and tracked rides, which would take hundreds of years of in-game time to complete. While not as spectacular as the previous example, the rides have broken some records for the longest ride back in their day.
  • This video showcases a rollercoaster which take ~3.1 x 10^78 years to complete. Unlike the maze example above, this does have a finite ride time instead of being based on probability.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Examples of this often crop up in Marcel's videos.
  • He would often drown a guest or two in his playthroughs to appease the RollerCoaster Tycoon gods.
  • He also made videos where he drowned a wide variety of guests, to show that energetic guests drown more quickly than tired ones.
  • In scenarios where guests only pay for the entrance fee, Marcel would employ a series of tiny mazes, which would exit underground without an exit path, in order to remove guests from his park without killing them. The fact that they dropped to their doom into the abyss didn't bother him that much.
  • He also made a video, where he would repeatedly drop the same guest into water to make him lose his balloon, only to save the guest and place him near the balloon stall for extra profits.
  • Also shown in this short video, aptly named "5 Creative Ways to Kill Your Guests."
  • His video with the challenge of excavating the Crazy Castle scenario before beating it has him build up to a park of almost 6000 guests, only for him to turn the entire park into a lake and delete everything, drowning them all seconds before the date switched over and STILL beat the scenario. That being said, it is a pretty flashy and definitely non-standard way of beating it.
• Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing: Yes. Through some analysis, he had concluded that out of every single scenario from the first and second game that's accessible in Open, there's one park that's possible to win (through some luck and constant restarting however) by doing absolutely nothing at all, and that's Heide Park from the Loopy Landscapes expansion pack. The park is developed enough that guests will still come in while meeting the minimum requirement, but the luck comes in with the poor organization of handymen, making the park prone to vomit and vandalism, and therefore, a lower park rating.