Four themes and More Gameplay

The 4 Themes

As we mentioned earlier, Sim Theme Park features four unique themes or styles that your park can take. There's the Lost Kingdom, Halloween World, Wonderland, and Space Zone. Halloween World and Space Zone are fairly self explanatory - Lost Kingdom is a combination jungle/dinosaur theme while Wonderland looks similar to the Alice in Wonderland fairy tale with oversized, but everyday items. The shops and rides pretty much remain similar in function even if you change themes. They just differ in appearance. The hamburger stand in Halloween world, for instance, looks like a bat, while in the Lost Kingdom it looks more like a turtle. I hope that's not indicative of the ingredients! Roller coaster tracks in Space Zone can take on the appearance of energy waves, while the ones in Wonderland can look like pretzels or plant vines. The themes permeate right down to the shape of the bathrooms, shops, and other decorations that you can build in the park. Separately, each of the themes looks well thought out and cohesive, but of course I have my favorites. Halloween World tops my list, with Lost Kingdom in a close second. I actually didn't favor the "higher level themes." Space Zone was somewhat interesting although it had the worst music. Wonderland I didn't care for that much because the cuteness factor just goes overboard in that level.

The go kart race has started!

First person view of a go kart jump

The Micromanagement

Micromanaging is what amusement park administration is all about. You're in charge of everything from gate prices to ride speeds, how many people go on the ride at once, etc. With your food stands and gift shops you need to determine whether to go with a lower quality product and a really low price or maybe give a high quality product at a more premium price. Placement of your shops is key! I've found that placing balloon shops and gift shops right at ride exits (when patrons are happiest) results in much better sales. That's a tip I took right out of Disney's playbook =) Those of you who've been to Disneyland know what I'm talking about.

Staff - good help is hard to find

Another important thing you need to manage is staff. For janitors to effectively clean the litter, vomit, and bathrooms in your park, it's not enough to just have many of them mindlessly wandering around. You need to have a couple of them assigned to each area of the park via patrol routes. Ditto for your security guards and mechanics, who often do a much better job that way. To get even better performance you can set up a training budget to train your staff. They'll slowly improve their skills and become noticeably more efficient. Neat!

Eww a worm in the apple

More SpaceZone coasters

Lowlights

Despite these tools, there were some annoying aspects to deal with that Bullfrog could have improved on. First off is ride breakage: like the original Theme Park, rides seem to be breaking down all the time. If you don't want any to break, it seems like you have to check each manually before its "state of repair" bar reaches 0. This gets really tedious when your park is large and you have over a dozen rides. It seems silly that you can't set an automatic repair schedule so that you're not subjected to ride break downs that shorten the usable life of your attractions. Security cameras also seemed ineffective. They're supposed to help security guards keep the peace, but no matter how many I set up, I'm still beset with hooligans setting off stink bombs. Sometimes these would happen 1 or 2 tiles away from the camera!

Mo' money

While Bullfrog didn't fix the AI problem at least they addressed the money flow problem. Effective park building seems to result in positive cashflow in STP, unlike in the original Theme Park where it seemed like you were constantly in debt and paying off loans, no matter what you did. In STP I have yet to find the need to take out a loan. The extra money earned from meeting "challenges" (from time to time the computer will give you a challenge - sell 100 burgers in 100 game days, or build a roller coaster with a loop in 60 days, etc. for a cash reward) turns out to be a good cash supplement as well.

That tentacle pops in and out

You're all wet