The joys of Theme Park

Ah, Theme Park. I could spend entire sunny days of my childhood, sat indoors with the aim of running a successful park. Despite being roughly the age of five and having no concept of financial responsibility. Each of my creations would last a few in-game years before I was shown the disturbing bankruptcy screen we all know.

Today when looking to see if Nightmare Creatures 2 was available on PSN (my Dreamcast has decided not to load it at the moment), we noticed Theme Park and Theme Hospital. Download followed. I have the Mega Drive version but it's not with me at the moment, so I've trialled the PlayStation equivalent.


At first I wasn't sure why I had such fond (albeit traumatised) memories of this game. The interface was even worse than that of Ju-On on the Wii. I had this guy in a silly hat telling me what to do in ways that didn't make sense. He kept pestering me about things that really didn't matter while neglecting to instruct me on things of actual importance.

It took many frustrating sessions of shouting at the television to figure out how to increase the price of Mr. Whippey's ice cream. Initial anger aside however, the game was pretty damn awesome once I'd got the hang of it. Mega nostalgia alert.

My castle blew up

And Such And Such And Such

I don't seem to be learning

Favourite ^_^

Early Pedobear?

Oh dear :/

Just like real life debt!

Protesting Shark

That's all I wanted to hear.

My castle flew into the air, and none of my mechanics worked.

What is that meant to be, Bullfrog?

And then..

"Maybe he's just jumping out the window to escape" says my partner. Yes, that's why there is the FUNERAL MARCH playing :'(

Curse you superior demo park!

I tried again, this time naming my park Oddworld, sorting out all the price settings and correct number of staff before opening the gates. It all went smoothly! I set the amount of loan I was borrowing to 0, this gave me less money but also meant I didn't owe anybody anything. I spaced-out purchases of rides and food outlets, gradually unlocking more as my park improved ^_^

You can see the rubble of blown-up rides XD!

I relinquished the PS3 to my partner eventually, having saved a fairly successful park.

Do I recommend Theme Park? Yeah, definitely. It can be amazingly frustrating at first, but enjoyable and rewarding in the long-run. The involuntary scenes wherein you must extend your arm to meet the other one and agree a wage or goods price increase, are annoying (and I'm pretty sure the right-hand-side never compromises), but they didn't come up once during my successful session. I confused it for some of the time with Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis; I thought you could put bins in, but you can't. I'm not usually bothered by the aged graphics of a given game, but beware of playing it on a HD television. The writing was almost completely unreadable.

Definitely a game to go back to if you have a few hours to spare.

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