YMMV / RollerCoaster Tycoon

• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • To Americans, the ability to make guests pay for toilets. Pay toilets were outlawed across most of the US during the '70s thanks to the runaway success of a campaign that started as a joke, but are still common in much of the world, including the UK where the series originated.
  • Many of the more absurd coaster types in RCT3 that might seem to be inventions of the developers were actually real prototypes, concepts, or one-off designs. This is especially true of the Wild! expansion pack, which is almost entirely made up of bizarre-but-real designs, such as the Towering Coaster (based on the actual Tower Coaster created by SBF Vista Group), the Splitting Coaster (based on a unrealized concept announced by Setpoint at the 2000 IAAPA expo), and the Rotating Tower Coaster (based on an unrealized 2004 patent by coaster designer Werner Stengel).
  • The Figure-8 Loop from the RCT3 version of the Hypercoaster is an absurd-looking roller coaster element, but it does exist...in concept only. To summarize, a German showman pitched this coaster element to several ride manufacturers, but all of them rejected it due to concerns of excessive lateral g-forces when going through the element. It didn't help that the showman wanted to be paid a licensing fee for anyone wanting to include this element. As a result, no roller coasters has ever included this element.
• Annoying Video Game Helper: Eventually, one will have this reaction to the game after the umpteenth time it gives a message that a guest is lost and can't find the park exit. The second game removes this message entirely unless you specifically set to follow a guest's actions through messages. Unfortunately, the third game reintroduced this game mechanic with the Park Inspector.
• Awesome Music: Music from the expansions in the first game and overall in the second game as well as the third game.
  • Just listening to the Merry-Go-Round is fun enough. Especially since there are ten songs (eleven in the second game), which are remixes of folk and classical music. It gives a nice soundtrack to the park, which is why so many players build it as the very first ride of the park.
  • Rock Style 1. The other two Rock Styles aren't any slouches either.
  • Savannah and Witch Doctor from Wild!.
  • Bermuda Shorts and Surf Shack in Soaked!.
• Best Level Ever:
  • Loopy Landscapes introduced parks that gave you infinite money, such as Arid Heights, letting you exercise the custom roller coaster designer to its fullest and generally build an enormous park with no financial worries. Although, they do have a caveat where if your park rating falls low enough and you can't raise back up, your park gets closed down. Still, once they're done, they're basically entire sandboxes.
  • Vertigo Views from Loopy Landscapes introduces the "Make X amount of ride income" scenario, by giving you a bunch of land and a huge Hypercoaster.
  • Mega Park, from the original game. Two words: "Have fun!"
    • Its sequel, Megaworld Park, is overall a fun endgame level where you have to make a bunch of adjustments to the park in the beginning (i.e. there are a lack of stalls, restrooms, and such), but once everything is fixed, you can modify it to include more rides. Even better in RCT2 and Classic, where your main worry is just modifying the rides so they don't crash. Otherwise, the park is relatively well-established. In fact, some people prefer Megaworld Park over Mega Park because of the fact that the former is an "infinite money" scenario and the fact that Megaworld Park and Mega Park are the same exact park, but it looks like Megaworld was made before Mega Park, as there are empty pathways and gates as if rides were already there.
  • Extreme Heights in the second game is another infinite money level, but here you get a gigantic piece of land to work with (nearly 150 x 150) and a mountainous region, allowing for plenty of creativity in how your rides are laid out, making it among the best of the infinite money scenarios. However, the guests will prefer intense roller coasters, and the objective is to prevent the park rating from falling below 700, so you'll be spending time multitasking between building very intense rides and keeping the guests happy.
  • Funtopia in Corkscrew Follies is a readily accessible example. The park comes with two decent pre-built roller coasters, and has access to every single ride and attraction in the game, when research is all maxed out. (Being one of only five parks in the entire list of eighty-plus scenarios that gives you the Steel Twister roller coaster, one of the best coaster types in the game, right from the start doesn't hurt either.)
  • Leafy Lake in the original is memorable too and none too difficult. The maximum loan is $50,000, the land is wide (and can be expanded), and there's a lot one can do in that giant lake...
  • Blocking off some of the pathways in Evergreen Gardens and Magic Quarters at the start of the scenario to prevent guests from getting lost allows for a smoother transition of construction for the generously large parks. There's a lot that can be done in the vast space of beauty.
  • For some, Micro Park became this, not for the scenario, but for sandbox play in general, since the minuscule size allows for "dream parks" to be completed rather quickly.
  • RCT Classic gives you the option of making a true sandbox level by combining Mega Park's "have fun" goal with Megaworld Park's unlimited cash. An actual park exists in Classic as well: Tycoon Park. You get it by completing every single scenario on the list, and it's essentially a far more stabilized version of Megaworld Park, although some people still consider it inferior. It's the park on the title screen.
• Breather Level: Each of the three level packs in the first game has at least one:
  • The original has Thunder Rock, the final scenario, where you must have 900 guests in your park in 4 years. Many of the earlier parks gave you less time for the same guest count or required more guests in the same time (including one of the starting scenarios), and the scenario immediately before it was That One Level. The location takes a little getting used to, but there were far more limiting ones previously (Mothball Mountain, for instance), and being able to build underneath the rock essentially almost doubles your available space.
  • Corkscrew Follies has Mineral Park, the fourth-to-last park, where you must gain a park value of $10,000 in two years. The objective is not hard to achieve in the given time, there are no gimmicks or handicaps, the terrain is not that much of an impediment, and the ride selection is pretty reasonable for the job. The following park, Coaster Crazy, isn't that hard either, especially if you've been doing the Loopy Landscapes scenarios at the same time: Coaster Crazy is actually the first park to have the "build 10 roller coasters" objective (it did not, in fact, debut in Loopy Landscapes). This also makes it the only Corkscrew Follies scenario not to have a time limit, so despite the downplayed Unexpected Gameplay Change, the fact that this one is impossible to actually lose makes it not much of a threat, especially for the third-to-last park. An earlier example would be Gentle Glen, where easy-to-make gentle rides reign supreme on account of the guests' low intensity preference.
  • Loopy Landscapes has Terror Town, also the fourth-to-last scenario, where you must have at least 10 different types of roller coaster that each have an excitement rating of at least 6.00. Well, there are no minimum length requirements and the location is not terribly difficult (two things that were pointedly not the case in some of the earlier parks with the same or a similar objective), so this should be no problem if you completed the earlier similar parks.
  • 2 has Dusty Greens, a monthly profit park with such a low goal ($5,000 from ride tickets) that it's entirely possible to hit said goal before running out of land, and a lack of land is this park's only problem. It's reasonably possible to beat this scenario within one or two in-game months, which is rare for monthly profit parks.
  • Let's just say any and all of the parks with park value-related objectives qualify, other than Micro Park in Loopy Landscapes and maybe Dinky Park in the original (which still isn't exactly difficult, but it is tricky for the original level pack). The four such parks in Corkscrew Follies are ridiculously easy to complete in the allotted time and can generally be finished in half that without too much effort. The ones in the original level pack (Dinky Park aside)? You'd practically have to try to lose those. The biggest issue players have to deal with concerning park value objectives is remembering to replace rides that have aged since the first year, but even then, the park value goal is usually such a low amount that bringing the park value up with brand new rides isn't really a necessity to complete it.
  • In terms of RCT Classic, there are several scenarios in the "Bronze" group (the third-to-last group) that are quite tough to accomplish (see That One Level and Scrappy Mechanic), including Frightmare Hills and Woodworm Park, plus several tough "build 10 roller coasters with this particular excitement rating and length" scenarios like Pleasure Island (land space is difficult), Octagon Park, and Ghost Town (RCT 2). What's the very last scenario that follows all of these? Infernal Views (RCT 2), and it's just a basic "Build 10 Roller Coasters with an Excitement Rating of at least 6.00" and there's no land issues at all.
  • Most of the Silver Group, the second-to-last group in RCT Classic, has a bunch of pesky scenarios at the beginning, such as Fiasco Forest and Pickle Park. However, as you go down, you'll see scenarios such as Pacifica (an easier version of Botany Breakers), Coaster Crazy (a "Build 10 Roller Coasters with a 6.00 Excitement Rating" scenario), and even two free-money scenarios back-to-back in the form of Extreme Heights (just build intense rides and keep your guests happy) and Lucky Lake (if you can work outside of the awkward pathway at the start, this scenario won't be a problem). However, the fun ends at Rainbow Summit, which is a park that forbids advertising and won't let you build above tree height.
• Cheese Strategy: Micro Park can easily be won by building several Roto-Drops at maximum height. Once built, run in them in test mode so that they don't age and then just ride out the clock until October Year 3.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • If the player can design a relatively cheap, compact, high excitement roller coaster it is very tempting to build it in every scenario where the coaster type is available. The Steel Corkscrew, Stand-up and Wild Mouse coasters are especially good for this. The shuttle loop design is far and away the most common choice, but the mini-corkscrew is even more efficient.
  • Some of the pre-built rides that were developed specifically for certain levels are usually saved as reusable tracks, and then rebuilt in other levels; a prime example being "Runaway Plumber" from Katie's World (usually after some adjustments to prevent it from crashing during a (Station) Brakes Failure).
  • For the majority of scenarios, which require a guest quota by a certain date, marketing is easily the tool to acquire those guests in a very short period of time, especially if one charges for the park entrance. With plenty of advertising and a large park entrance fee, one can accumulate enough cash to pay off the marketing fees and then some, and have far more guests than before! Then it's all a matter of playing the waiting game...
  • In scenarios where money is the main concern, it's always most efficient to make admission free and charge per ride, and most players swear by it if the option is available.
  • The more safety-minded players will often build coasters with a set of brakes leading right to the station as a fail-safe for the dreaded Station Brakes Failure breakdown. If a train collides with another at a slow enough speed, it will not crash. It's also common for these players to take the pre-built or scenario specific coasters and modify them to add extra brakes.
• Contested Sequel:
  • RollerCoaster Tycoon 3. The 3D leap caused a few issues with some people, mainly how the coaster designing was still very stiff and restricted despite having no limits with the nature of sprite graphics. What really made this game contested is its performance issues; while most computers can run it fine now, when it was originally released it was known for bringing even high-end computers to their knees, which was a problem when the first two games were known for running thousands of guests with no slowdown on low-end machines. Also, there were those who disliked how much the scenarios were dumbed down, as they usually had very basic goals with very uninspired parks, and were usually completable in only a few minutes. The thing that stops most people from swearing the game off altogether is the addition of the full sandbox mode. As computers improved enough to reasonably run the game, its reputation gradually leaned more positive, leading to a well-received Creator-Driven Successor with Planet Coaster. Even still, it struggles with stacking up to the second game, which has a large playerbase to this day.
  • The expansions of the second game don't get much love, due to the new rides being nothing more than new vehicle designs (in comparison to the first game's expansions introducing entirely new coaster types) and the rendering style of the new scenery clashing heavily with the base game's. The new scenarios, meanwhile, are considered as weak as, if not more than, the base game scenarios. Fans of track designs will also be disappointed that the expansions only add a small number of new track designs utilizing the new vehicle designs.
• Critical Dissonance: RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 was criticized by critics for looking and playing the same as the predecessor. However, fans really liked it due to introduction of numerous quality-of-life effects such as improved AI, fixes to the interface, an in-game scenario editor, better optimization leading to bigger parks, and numerous new objects, rides, and scenarios.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The trees, themselves become these in scenarios such as Rainbow Valley, where scenery can not be removed. Due to their placement, rides and even pathways can be a pain to properly construct. The trees are even worse in the Corkscrew Follies scenario Harmonic Hills, because you can't build rides over the tree height.
  • Loan interest in RCT1 is very low at 1.33%, but Sprightly Park and the real-life parks (Alton Towers, Heide-Park, and Blackpool Pleasure Beach) still manage to charge you high amounts in interest each month. The reason is that their loans are ridiculously high: Sprightly Park starts with a $250,000 loan, Alton Towers with $4,770,000, Heide-Park with $4,000,000 and Blackpool Pleasure Beach with $2,000,000. In all cases you still start with the standard $10,000 in cash, so you're stuck with those high interest payments for a good while.
  • The Stations Brake Failure is by far the deadliest breakdown type in the game; this usually ends with coaster trains crashing in the station, rendering the ride nigh-unusable due to the safety concerns from the guests afterward.
• Disappointing Last Level:
  • The final levels in RCT3 and Soaked!, (the levels that appear after completing all others) are a bit... dull. And not all that difficult either. The penultimate level of Soaked is pretty tough and RCT3's penultimate level "The Money Pit" is an enormous abandoned park that needs a massive overhaul, whereas the last level is just a large mountain island that can be leveled off with the landscape tool to create a relatively easy scenario.
  • Rainbow Valley is the penultimate scenario of the vanilla first game, and is easily the cruelest, disallowing the removal of scenery and banning landscape editing. Thunder Rock is just a giant rock in the middle of a desert with no gimmicks or handicaps. It can be troublesome with space management, but it can't hold a candle to Rainbow Valley.
  • Loopy Landscapes has Micro Park. Most of Loopy Landscapes scenarios are unique, fun and/or challenging in a good way. Micro Park is none of these. It's a 15x15 park that's completely flat, it isn't fun trying to micromanage your rides (worse when it's a roller coaster) and it's unfairly challenging because the goal is to have a park value of £/$10,000 at the end of Year 2. There's a reason why Dinky Park has a land on the other side of the road available to buy.
• Fan Nickname: The skeleton that's part of the "Spooky Theming" scenery set in this first two games is commonly referred to as "Mr. Bones" thanks to the infamous "Mr. Bones Wild Ride".
• Fanon Discontinuity: As far as most fans are concerned, all of the games released past RCT3 and its expansions (with the exception of RCT Classic) don't exist. Some purists don't count RCT3 (for changing the mechanic so drastically) or even RCT2's expansions (as almost every single "new ride" except for the Stagecoach cars included in Wacky Worlds is just a reskin and a lot of the visuals clash with everything else). Many find Parkitect and Planet Coaster to be far more worthy successors. It helps that the latter was made by the exact same development team behind RCT3, while splitting it into its own series that doesn't have to coexist with the originals.
• First Installment Wins: At least in the public eye, the first game is generally the most liked and best remembered. More dedicated fans usually hold up the second game as superior due to its numerous improvements, but casual fans and critics are more likely to see it as "the first game again". The first game does have a few benefits (such as better-designed scenarios, the ability to charge for admission and rides at the same time, and water rides having multiple screams for the riders) that even those fans prefer, which have been reimplemented into OpenRCT2.
• Game-Breaker:
  • You can charge your guests obscene amounts of money proportional to the excitement rating of the ride for rides if the entrance fee was free. For example, a roller coaster with a 6.30 excitement rating can have an entrance fee upwards of $13.00. While it can be very handy in "pay-per-ride" parks, one must be careful with this, because as the rides get older, the guests will want the price to be lower. To add to this, you can design a Shuttle Loop or similar coaster and make about 1-3 extra ones as "racing" ones (you might need to borrow some loan money), increasing the Excitement rating. Add some In-Ride Photo Sections for some extra income, and guests will be paying about quite a bit for the ride, letting you easily repay your loan with no problem. However, you might have some harder luck if you're playing a scenario like "Gentle Glen" or "old-timer" scenarios like Woodworm Park.
  • Umbrellas. No matter how much it costs, guests will ALWAYS buy it when it's raining. Put the price on $20 and then...
  • Some people consider the marketing mechanic to be this once the player gets the gist of how it works, and consider it to be a cheap cop-out if a player is struggling to get that last batch of guests in their park before the time is up. At the cost of a maximum of $4200 every six weeks to set up park marketing/coupons to spawn more guests to come to your park, the player can effectively make any level that requires "X amount of guests to be in the park by the end of October, Year Y" to be an absolute joke, because your guest numbers have suddenly doubled from 500 to 1000 in just six weeks. As for paying, $4200 may sound like a lot at first, but if you have an established park, you will make that all back easily within a week, usually when one charges a hefty fee for park entry, which guarantees profits well before any marketing campaign expires.
  • "Micro-coasters", rollercoasters designed with the goal of being as small and cheap as possible, such as a single slope that's too steep for the train to get over, causing it to immediately back up into the station. While they may have lower stats than a "real", full-size coaster, they more than make up for it in efficiency: the space and money needed to add one full coaster can instead be used to add multiple micro-coasters, and combined, they bring much more value, income, and guests to your park. Spamming these tiny designs all over your park can trivialize even the hardest scenarios. The only downside is that using them is extremely Boring, but Practical, making your theme park look more like an industrial park, and many players consider them to go against the spirit of the game. Additionally, they're not ideal for scenarios where it's harder to attract guests, as only so many guests will come to the park (without advertising) unless if larger roller coasters are built.
  • You can beat the Six Flags Magic Mountain scenario in RCT2 in less than a minute by deleting a few roller coasters, then quickly repaying your loan with the earned money before your park value goes down (the effects aren't instant).
  • When given the choice between charging for rides or charging for the park entrance, the latter is obviously more desirable, especially when combined with the half-price marketing scheme.
  • The Cash Machine, introduced in the second game. It's a godsend if you have the "X guests in park" scenario since without it, guests will leave if they run out of money.^note Not as much of a Game-Breaker as it sounds; these are usually only available for "Pay for Entrance" scenarios, so the guests don't usually spend more after entering. The most it can do is provide guests with money to spend on merchandise and food if they literally go empty from the entrance fee alone.
  • The pool in RCT3 Soaked!, including the Complete Edition release, as there is no queue needed, guests tend to spend a lot of time inside of the pool, and most guests are fine with the $2-5 reception fee. It gets even better if you add water slides, which add a boost to the pool's excitement rating. This video demonstrates how the first park objectives can be easily finished by building a pool.
  • In OpenRCT2 0.4, beating Iceberg Islands was as easy as loading the Iceberg Islands save file used by the Attract Mode. Other scenarios cannot be skipped by loading save files used by the title sequence, as they were already beaten by the time the save files were made. Later versions made making/editing title sequences require an external plugin, so players can't easily beat scenarios like this anymore. Furthermore, the title sequence introduced in 0.4.5 doesn't involve scenarios that are about to be beaten, making it impossible anyway.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Demolishing a fountain or other similar scenery object by replacing it with a coaster segment will give you more than the fountain cost (see "Stop Having Fun" Guys below for the details). However, said glitch has been patched out from digital releases, making this null. You can still attempt this if you have a disc version lying around.
  • The park value is majorly determined by a ride's excitement rating. However, it's also determined by its intensity rating and nausea too. If you happen to build multiple poorly built launch coasters that ramp up the nausea and intensity rating, those ratings will also rapidly increase the park value too. You could also build multiple Roto Drops and Reverse Freefalls and those would increase the value too. Additionally, never opening these rides will also mean that the park value will never deteriorate. A Youtuber discovered a way to destroy any challenging aspect of Micro Park in Classic due to this oversight. Since park value never deteriorates as long as a ride is being tested, you could essentially build a handful of extremely tall Roto Drops that rack up the Park Value and keep the park running for three years straight.. Marcel Vos also made a video on this too, demonstrating this oversight in action too, calling it a "Park Value Bomb".
  • You can make a LIM Launched Roller Coaster in the second game with an excitement rating of OVER 600.00. As shown in this link and proven true by other players, one must build a straight LIM Launched Coaster and make sure it goes at its maximum speed. Then fill every part of the coaster with in-line twists and at one part of the ride, make it go through a Quarter Loop and go up to the second half, but make sure it goes at a speed above 10 MPH. After a few more in-line twists, make a steep drop and finish it with a vertical slope. The train will then go reverse, but make sure the train can reach back to the station. The intensity and nausea ratings will be dreadfully high, but that's an ultra high excitement rating.
  • An excitement rating exceeding 600.00◊ can also be done with a Heartline Twister Roller Coaster by filling it with Reverser Sections and Heartline Rolls. Sadly, the bug that allowed such ridiculous excitement scores was apparently fixed at some point in vanilla RCT2 and is definitely fixed in OpenRCT2.
• Goddamned Bats: Guests who have a low nausea rating will always end up getting sickly green when they ride any sort of ride with a medium or higher nausea rating (mostly elaborate roller coasters, but there are some flat rides with a disproportionately high nausea rating, such as the Roto Drop, Gravitron, and Space Rings. You should generally try to avoid building these). Barf bags aren't an option, and there's absolutely nothing you can to to prevent them from inevitably puking on the paths. You can attempt to build benches for them to sit on to reduce their nausea over time, but guests will only do this if they are severely sick; they will not use benches if they are moderately sick, in which case they will still throw up. 2 adds the First Aid Station where guests can enter to completely remove their nausea, but the Artificial Stupidity can prevent the guests from using them reliably.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In RCT3: Wild, there exists an ‘Extended Coaster’ that can be fitted with many different parts. Its possible car types include Floorless, Stand-Up and Twister cars, and its track is based on B&M steel track, which has made it a popular substitute for the normal B&M-type coasters in the game. In recent years, a number of actual B&M stand-up coasters, such as Cedar Point’s Mantis, have been converted into floorless coasters.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!:
  • Megaworld Park, the third-to-last park in both Loopy Landscapes and Classic. In Loopy Landscapes, it was relatively difficult due to the fact that there were barely any staff, shops, and stalls. Additionally, a good portion of the rides are poorly designed or are prone to Station Brakes Failure. The park rating in Loopy Landscapes was abysmally low, so you had to rely on making the park as friendly as possible so the game wouldn't kick you out. However, every time it is remade, it is made into a significantly easier park. In the second game, there was an unofficial recreation of it, and there were decent staff patrols and good amount of shops and stalls, so your main concern were fixing the rides. However, guests came in at a slower rate, so you had to build significantly more rides so you could attract more guests. However, in RCT Classic, the guests always come in at an alarmingly high rate, meaning that your main concern is just making sure the rides are stable, as there's already a good staff and shop/stall setup already. You could essentially finish it in less than a year if you're lucky.
  • The scenario objectives in 3 are very simple and straightforward with no deadlines or possibility of total failure, which understandably disappointed veterans of the first two games. On the flipside, this allows the player to focus more on building and customizing the parks.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: What most negative reviews for RCT2 usually result as when compared to the original game. It's been Vindicated by History since people point out that many Scrappy Mechanics and errors in the first game have been fixed, yet the sequel keeps the good parts of the original intact. Some examples are having Handymen ignore lawn mowing and the Scenario Editor.
• Just Here for Godzilla: A number of players simply like the game for the coaster building and pay no mind to the management aspects, often using cheats and trainers to give themselves unlimited money to do so with.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Many rides simply have poor stats or have other problems that prevent them from being financially viable, or are otherwise unpleasant enough for players to ignore them completely, and is usually considered a waste when it's one of the researchable rides. In general, the formula is as follows: For roller coasters, if it has a piss-poor guest capacity per car/train, lacks ways to control intensity, and swings around a lot (resulting in extra nausea), it's crap. For gentle rides, if it's outdoors or lacks a roof and has poor stats all around, it's crap. And for any example, if it has a slow guest throughput, it's crap, because it'll be very slow to make that ride profitable. The Merry-Go-Round usually lags in excitement, but thanks to its roof (and for some, the music), it's exempt from this rule. The Slide isn't so lucky.
  • The Mini Suspended Roller Coaster is undoubtedly the worst roller coaster in the game. It has one of the lowest support limits, doesn't have a lot of design elements, and the cars are really light, meaning designing a track will be extremely unreliable compared to designing other rides (as they'll lose speed). The Steeplechase fares a bit better (the cars are heavier, the stats are slightly higher, and the cars - horses and bikes - look cool), but there's a lot of better options to choose from.
  • The Stand-Up Steel Roller Coaster. Many people familiar with the game will refuse to design a roller coaster that is this because the Intensity and Nausea ratings are abnormally high compared to the Excitement rating. Unless you are making a simulated theme park, you know how to design one well, or you are playing Adrenaline Heights, you should stay away from this one, especially seeing that there are better options such as the Steel Roller Coaster. Even the Stand-Up Twister Roller Coaster (although more expensive) is significantly better.
  • The Heartline Twister Roller Coaster. It may look rather interesting, but it is nigh impossible to make a good one...a decent roller coaster of most types might have an excitement rating of 7.00 or so, with the lower bound of practicality around 6.00 and the potential of getting into the 8.xx or 9.xx range. The Heartline Twister might give you an excitement rating of 4.00 if you do a good job on one. And it's one of only two types of roller coaster that do not allow turning. Yes, you cannot build turns, which means the entire track has to be in a straight line, underneath or above existing parts of track if need be. Might also border on Cool, but Inefficient because of its unique design. Some have joked about Chris Sawyer having such an awful experience on one of these that he took revenge by making it impossible to create a decent one in the game — even the prebuilt models have terrible stats!
    Marcel Vos: "What exactly did the Heartline Coaster do to Chris Sawyer to deserve its stats to be this terrible?"
  • Any ride where the cars/trains can fly off the track and crash due to going to fast either up a hill or around sharp turns. The Bobsled, Wooden Side-Friction, and Wooden Reverser roller coasters are notorious for this, as are the Water Slide and Ghost Train/Haunted Mansion ride. A car/train full of guests will also go faster due to its added weight than an empty one, which many have learned the hard way when a ride that cleared a test run with no incidents suddenly became very fatal in actual operation. This makes them tricky to keep going at a decent pace without crashes, especially the Water Slide as putting a chain lift somewhere other than at the very beginning will result in a row of boats stalled at the bottom of the hill after every breakdown; the prebuilt one in White Water Park in particular is infamous for frequently stalling due to its multiple chain lifts.
  • The Ferris Wheel. Near universally disliked because the guests wait too long to even get on the ride and they'll complain that they want to get off at two full rotations or more unless you set it to one. That, and a mere two guests can enter the ride at a time, making it a time-waster for both guests and the player.
  • The "Runaway Plumber" underground roller coaster in Katie's World is perhaps one of the most disliked pre-built rides from the original game. It is EXTREMELY prone to crashing, and because it's completely underground, underneath an area of land you technically don't even own, it's almost impossible to rebuild after the crash. But there is some good news regarding this case. It does make for a decent roller-coaster that can be rebuilt in other levels, and is completely indoors, making it profitable in the rain.
  • The "Force Nine" ("Hurricane" in the original UK version) roller coaster in Ivory Towers isn't so lucky. It's responsible for all the puke staining the park at the start, and no matter what anyone does, its nausea rating will still be through the roof. Players often demolish the whole thing as one of the solutions to getting the park all cleaned up. Suspended roller coasters in general often have unnecessarily high nausea ratings.
  • Good luck trying to build an effective Steel Mini Roller Coaster if you're playing with the original Roller Coaster Tycoon (without the Loopy Landscapes expansion pack). The ride doesn't allow banked curves at all, making the ride unforgiving and forcing you to use very wide turns. Thankfully Loopy Landscapes allows the ride to have banked curves.
  • Boat Hire sometimes gets this reaction for several reasons. For one, it suffers from a Game-Breaking Bug that sometimes causes boats to get stuck as they try to re-enter the station which would, in turn, get every other boat trying to get into the station stuck ^note (most of the time, this occurs if the player adds an incomplete track to try to control an open area for boats to paddle), and causes players to restructure the ride until it works properly. Another reason is because of guests who occasionally go out too far in a vast water area, and can't return to the station which leads to many complaints about not being able to get off the ride. Then there's the fact that so many ride improvements are dedicated to this lousy ride because of the amount of boat types it has, and it gets worse in RCT2, where they're considered separate rides yet still need to be researched, taking up valuable research time in the water rides category. ^note (In OpenRCT2 the separate rides are brought back together as a single ride, but you still have to research them via the water rides category.)
  • The Multi-Dimension roller coaster is a very gimmicky ride that is incredibly hard to construct properly. The cost is absurdly high, the rotations are hard to figure out and don't even affect the ratings at all, and the ride will generally have far higher intensity and nausea than its excitement rating. The wiki outright states that you should only bother constructing one if you're doing a sandbox park or in the ride designer, as even figuring one out can be time-consuming.
  • The Mini-Golf, as fun as it looks, is considered one of the worst attractions in the game that requires careful timing. Its excitement rating is about on par with a similar gentle rides, but guests will constantly complain about wanting to leave the ride, especially if you use Holes D or E, therefore, careful ride design is required. Worst of all, the running cost itself is so absurdly high, a modest mini golf course is more expensive than almost all rides except for really expensive/large roller coasters.
  • There's basically no reason to build the Elevator whatsoever. Most of its blueprints consist of a simple high tower which in theory is meant to give the guests a nice view. The problem is that there's no way back down other than using the Elevator again, the view has no impact on ratings, you can't charge much for the Elevator because of its poor stats, and guests are often too stupid to go back down, or will randomly and arbitrarily decide that they want to go on a ride more thrilling, despite being perfectly willing to go on it before. Using traditional pathways to go between elevated positions also has a negligible impact on tiredness, so building an Elevator with provided pathways is still pointless.
  • The Space Rings is generally considered the worst flat ride in the game. The ride is slow, is outdoors (meaning it can't be immune to the effects of rain), it doesn't really make profit, it has the worst annual customer turnout for flat rides at 232 (in comparison, the Ferris Wheel, the second worst, has 402), can't be modified to potentially raise the turnout (which is something you can do to other rides such as the carousel), has the lowest profitability of all flat rides (the Crooked House even makes more than it), and ironically for a gentle ride, it has the second highest nausea rating of all flat rides, only being beaten by the Enterprise. Watch Marcel Vos cover it here.
  • Several flat rides will have guests refusing to go on them if they charge money after a year or so, even if it's raining. These include (but aren't limited to) the 3D Cinema, Haunted House, Space Rings, and Crooked House. This means you have to constantly demolish them if you want guests to keep going on them, which in the long run doesn't have much of a profit margin compared to an effective roller coaster. Fortunately if you're running a park that strictly runs based on the admission price, guests will still ride those aforementioned rides.
  • The Suspended Swinging Coaster is one of the least liked roller coaster type, due to its nasty tendency to get a high nausea rating. This often results in the exit paths being littered with puke, necessitating dropping in Handymen to keep the paths clean. It also has a limited selection of elements to choose from, limiting the variety of coaster designs possible. Finally, even though the coaster is designed to be big with a long length requirement, it lacks banked turns, and the swinging cars do not substitute the banked turns.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Mr. Bones' Wild Ride (Experience it yourself in first-person.) ^ExplanationSpawned from a 4chan post documenting a ride made in this game that takes four years of in-game time to finish, which is followed by a line that leads back to the entrance of the ride. Frequently referenced in any situation involving long roller coasters.
    • The Ride Never Ends ^ExplanationThe line to reenter the ride contains "Mr. Bones", who is holding a sign that says this. "The ride never ends" sees good use as a reaction image for when things go on for extended periods of time.
    • I want to get off Mr. Bones' Wild Ride!^ExplanationThe eventual guest reaction to being on the coaster, which ended up becoming a meme itself. "I want to get off [ride name]" appears in a speech bubble if people are on any ride for too long.
  • EXPLODING DINGHIES!^ExplanationThe rafts the guests ride on for the Water Slide explode if they go off the track.
    • EXPLODING MINI-GOLF!^ExplanationThanks to OpenRCT2's tools, thousands of gamers discovered something even more absurd: If a guest were to walk off of an incomplete mini-golf course, they will explode. This is because they are technically riding on a vehicle while walking down the mini-golf path; the sprites just try to hide this.
  • Peep Bowling^ExplanationIn RCT3, guests can't die in roller coaster accidents, so people took to building elaborate 'machines' and rides dedicated to flinging guests as far as possible!
  • Several popularized by Joel at Vinesauce:
    • IT'S A FEATURE ^ExplanationBuilding a Restroom suspended in mid air and a lengthy path leading up to it, usually with a ride directly underneath the restroom.
    • MADE IN CHINA ^ExplanationIf a ride looks intentionally functional but crashes without a Station Brakes Failure, it gets named (or renamed) this.
    • The placement of random Mr. Bones and/or Skulls across the map.
  • Killing the park inspector was a popular meme back in the 2010s.
  • [ride] looks too intense for me!^ExplanationSomething that park guests may think if a ride seems too intense for them. A somewhat frequent snowclone in the comments sections for videos of roller coasters, with the name of the ride usually being substituted for the default model name in the games. (e.g. "LIM Launched Coaster 1" for a launched roller coaster)
  • "Oh no. You want to drown."^ExplanationPlayers enjoy drowning guests, especially those who want to go home.
  • I want to go on something more thrilling than Merry-Go-Round 1. ^ExplanationUsually commented on Youtube videos of the original classical music songs that the merry-go-round's fairground organ music is based on.
• Narm: Some of the ride names in the first game sound very goofy and strange, to where they were thankfully changed in the second game.
  • The Scrambler rides were called "Scrambled Eggs" in the first game. In the second game, they're simply called "Twist", a British naming variant.
  • The Launched Freefall tower and Reverse Freefall Coasters are called "Whoa Belly" and "Reverse Whoa Belly Coasters" in the American version, which seems like a really odd name to call a ride. The second game keeps the former names for all versions.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The sound of successfully passing a scenario.
  • The transaction sound too. Especially when a lot of guests enter your best roller coaster or buy $20 umbrellas during a rainstorm.
  • In RCT3, the sounds the peeps make when they get hit by a coaster.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • In-universe, rides and coasters with a lot of spinning (discounting the Spinning Wild Mouse and Virginia Reel) or time spent inverted will get a high nausea rating and guests will vomit if their nausea gets too high but First Aid Stands in the second and third game along with benches can help prevent guests from losing their lunch. Commercials for the games even use this as a selling point.
  • Out of universe, if you have motion sickness or a fear of roller coasters in general, the game can easily become this as you watch the rides from afar. Using the coaster cam in later games can bring this up even further.
• Porting Disaster:
  • The Xbox port. It's the same game, only with bad controls. Not as bad as other disasters, but somewhat notable. It also didn't help that the second game was literally released on computers about 5 months earlier.
  • Because of the fact how wall terrain tiles worked in the first game, Fun Fortress and Good Knight Park (both castle parks) do not transfer well within the RCT2 engine, which Classic happens to use. The end result is off-colored wood tiles with castle walls on top, which end up looking hideous. Compare them to Crazy Castle, which was constructed using the second game's resources. OpenRCT2 remedies this by incorporating the terrain tools from both games, allowing both to be used at the same time (that is if you're importing assets from both games).
  • Oddly enough, newer devices have had issues running Classic to the point where some phones have flat out refused to load it, which is a shame for many people who like to play it on the go. Specifically, many mentioned phones as old as Samsung Galaxy S10s have reported resolution bugs. While it's still being worked on, there's still numerous devices which have aforementioned glitches.
  • The mobile versions of Classic are considered great, but the Steam version of Classic is rather odd, especially on Mac computers. A lot of the menus are a bit buggy and it's actually impossible to exit Classic through conventional means (you have to hit Cmd + Q). The instructions on how to import scenarios is way too vague (it still uses the mobile version's instructions). You actually have to manually import them, and even then, the game will constantly warn you to reinstall the game, even though there's no actual harm done. Additionally, playing it on Surface tablets (which run Windows) and other similar devices doesn't give the same experience as running them on an iPad or Android tablet, making the Steam version even more awkward.
  • OpenRCT2 is, unfortunately, a nightmare to run on mobile devices, to the point where it's generally recommended just to download Classic for a better mobile experience.
• Quicksand Box: A problem with beginners is that they expand too quickly and waste money on stuff they don't need (duplicate rides, scenery, large roller coasters and such). Of course, Evergreen Gardens is supposed to work people out of that mentality by giving them everything but what they need.
• Schizophrenic Difficulty: In all scenario lists (especially those of the first game), the parks are roughly arranged in order of difficulty. However, we want to emphasize "roughly"; every level pack has at least a few scenarios that seem unusually easy or difficult for their position in the list. (Also see the entries for That One Level and Breather Level.) The same goes for Classic, where even the second-to-last group, the Silver Group, has a surprisingly amount of Breather Level category scenarios, especially after dealing with the hell known as Fiasco Forest and Pickle Park.
• The Scrappy: The Park Inspector in RCT3 is disliked due to him constantly pestering you about prices being too cheap or expensive and other aspects of your park, which can get very annoying. Many players stop his thoughts from being displayed in the message centre to prevent his constant nagging.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Enough to warrant its own page.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • There is no major downside or penalty for having more than one of the same ride. Therefore, the optimal strategy in most scenarios is to concentrate almost exclusively on high-excitement, high-popularity, high-profit rides like the Go-Karts, Launched Freefall, and Enterprise (in addition to roller coasters, of course), while ignoring lower-performing options like most gentle and transport rides. This is especially true in scenarios in which space is at a premium. However, many players find playing this way less fun and that it goes against the spirit of the game, not to mention feels less realistic. Many players make a point to build as wide of a variety of rides as possible and avoid duplicates, at least until they've already built one of each ride.
  • There are many people and groups who try to add their own challenges to particular scenarios, specifically easier ones like Forest Frontiers and Bumbly Beach. Marcel Vos has managed to beat Forest Frontiers with a single Merry-Go-Round, with no rides at all, and using just a single tile!
  • One of the most common challenges people do when they see Rotting Heights is to rebuild everything to how the park was before it was abandoned.
  • Small parks naturally draw challenges to build as compact of a park as possible, doubly so if you can buy land to expand the park. Micro Park, Dinky Park and Haunted Harbour are the most common levels to get this kind of challenge.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: The third game gives the player more leniency to complete each level than its predecessors, by replacing Timed Missions with objective lists, giving parks more space to work with, and allowing the player to build while the game is paused. These conventions would carry on in Frontier's Creator-Driven Successor, Planet Coaster.
• Song Association: The fairground organ music from the merry-go-round can become this if not a classical music enthusiast.
• "Stop Having Fun" Guys:
  • Chris Sawyer, creator of the RollerCoaster Tycoon games, has gone on the record as saying that the "entire point" of RollerCoaster Tycoon is the scenarios, and only the scenarios, stating that the casual sandbox-players (that is, those who just wanted to build a simulated theme park and who didn't really care about playing the scenarios) are "doing it wrong, and need to get serious and do it right", especially when they used a fan-produced "key" program to open the game up for sandbox play. He disliked sandbox play so much that when he wrote the expansions and the sequel, he continually added code that would wreck the game if the player attempted to use any sort of "sandbox key". Fans fought back with the RCTPatch (commonly known as the "Drexler patch"), which defeated the anti-cheat programming in RCT1. About the only reason the third game even included a full-on sandbox mode was because Sawyer's involvement in that game was limited to a consultant role. ^note Interestingly, a publisher demanded scenarios be included in SimCity because they felt no one would ever do a free-form game. Of course, few gamers played the scenarios.
  • To a lesser extent, Chris Sawyer calls you out in a subtle manner whenever you automatically demolish something in the second game. A program code causes scenery objects demolished manually (i.e. right-click) to cost much less than it would if it was automatically demolished (e.g. building a Spiral Slide on it). However, this feature doesn't always work properly and will reduce the cost of rides that are built into scenery objects that give you back some money when right-clicking on them. This leads to the greatest Game-Breaker in the entire game: By building ride tracks into fountains, you will get money for doing so, allowing one to amass a sizable fortune from ride construction. Hoist by His Own Petard much? ^note A bit more info on why this happens: trees cost money to delete. If you plant a ride on top of a tree, the game is programmed so that it first checks how much it would have cost if you just removed the tree alone, then multiplies that by five, making it cost five times as much. But fountains are also counted as scenery...but they are fabricated, so demolishing them gets you some money back, similar with deleting a ride. However, because they're still internally counted as scenery, planting a ride on top of it still performs the same calculation...but you get money instead of losing, leading to this massive game-breaking oversight. Sadly, that money glitch has been patched in the Steam and GOG releases of the game.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Prairie Rider, a song meant to be used in Western-themed areas in 3, is based on the theme of The Magnificent Seven (1960). Surf Shack, meant for aquatic areas, is very much "Wipe Out" by The Surfaris.
• That One Level: Has its own section.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Even before the third game used an entirely different game engine and had a different game design, the transition between the first and second games made quite a few changes despite looking almost identical and running on the same engine, and not all of them being productive. It's impossible to charge for both the park entrance and rides at once (as mentioned above, OpenRCT2 brings that option back but makes it impossible to charge for flat rides if you charge a park entry fee), for some reason water rides use the same, shrill shriek for falls when this wasn't present in the first game, and scenarios aren't unlockable, which ruins a lot of curiosity for players.
• Tough Act to Follow: RCT2 is still considered the peak of the series to this day, as the popularity of OpenRCT2 attests, and any later installments are going to be stacked up against it. RCT3 in particular got hit hard by completely changing the mechanics from its predecessor's 2D grid-based mechanics, and the negative reception to those changes (among other factors) led to the series going dormant.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • Height-building is pretty annoying in RCT1, because there's no option to normally build rides up in the air, or down underneath the soil. The only ways to get this to properly work is to either raise up a ground block so that the ride uses said block to be built high up in the air. Or, if you're building a track, you start making the ride normally, but instead place station somewhere deep underground, and instead start creating the ride from there.
  • With the exception of some smaller maps, like Dinky Park, Haunted Harbour, and Urban Park, the Land-for-Sale mechanic is quite underutilized in RCT1. Almost all the levels can be beaten without the player ever feeling the need to increase the size of the park. It's even possible to beat the aforementioned parks without expanding land.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The second game features five Six Flags Parks as scenarios - three from North America and two from Europe (Six Flags Belgium and Six Flags Holland). However, roughly two years after the game came out, Six Flags sold the European parks (now they are named Walibi Belgium and Walibi Holland), making the game feel slightly dated in comparison.
• Vindicated by History: RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 was criticized at launch due to its shift from isometric sprites to 3D environments, lack of involvement from creator Chris Sawyer, and poor performance on computers of the time. Its poor reception caused the series to go on hiatus for several years. However, in the interim, PC specifications improved enough to run the game as intended, and the game developed a dedicated fanbase due to the creative freedom it allowed, sheer amounts of new content including swimming pool and zoo introduced by the respective expansion packs, and its ease of access for modding; it had an active and extensive modding scene for several years after its official support had ended. This eventually led to the release of an acclaimed Creator-Driven Successor, Planet Coaster, over a decade later, which, while it suffered from the same performance issues relative to contemporary average mid to low spec PC users, fared better with critics and fans since launch.