RCT2 was made for people who wanted more RCT and were already veterans of the first game. I prefer the first game with its expansions for many reasons.
Great content as always. It's worth noting Claustrophobia has underground and "confined" sections, while Agoraphobia is in a big open space over the water. Probably obvious, but it wouldn't surprise me if that got past some people.
Only upon repurchasing the game on steam years ago did I understand the reference (I was much younger when I first played and bought the game). Whenever I built new rollercoasters in Diamond Heights I tried to fit in with the name theming, as the Mini Steel rollercoaster was named Arachnophobia. I think I tried Coulrophobia but I got lazy with painting it with rainbow colors.
@@RainingMetal Is it really a theme of Phobias if it's only half the park? :P The Miniature Railway, Log Flume and Wooden Mine Ride are not named after any... Unless Doppelganger is supposed to relate to the phobias?
Something else I think helps rct1's difficulty curve (especially for impulsive kids - speaking from experience) is the locking of more difficult courses until enough earlier ones are completed. While a bit annoying for new installs where they'd need to be beaten again, they keep new players from just jumping straight in the deep end of something like rainbow valley and losing interest.
I obviously knew about that but I completely forgot to mention it. Along with the simplicity of Forest Frontiers it is another thing that stops the player from being overwhelmed.
Completely agree. I remember being disappointed that RCT2's scenarios were all available from the start. The reward and incentive to play through like RCT1 just wasn't there, especially when there was essentially a sandbox mode in the Build Your Own Six Flags park. I just ended up playing that one most of the time.
I think my favorite part of the unlocking mechanism in RCT1 as a kid was that it always provided 5 unbeaten scenarios at a time. Always gave me hype about eventually getting to the new scenario I'd just unlocked (or jumping straight from Forest Frontiers into Bumbly Beach just to check out the new park), and presented a good variety of different situations so you never really felt bored while playing, even on the long stretch of 3/4 year scenarios -- you could always just save and quit for now and try another one out!
Me as a 5 year old child has lost that rct2 tutorial probably over a hundred times. But man did(and do) i love building fun parks with ridiculous murder coasters! There might be some things wrong with me...
That was the reason why I played and beat every single RCT1 scenario, and can‘t remember attempting most of the RCT2 scenarios. I mostly made and played my own scenarios in RCT2.
I think Chris and the team treated it like a really big expansion pack and then made it a standalone game when they realized how much content they were adding and how many sales they would miss out on if RCT1 was required
@@shukterhousejive That's exactly how it was lambasted almost universally by critics at the time. They called it "an expansion pack sold to you as a whole new game." I wonder if this had any affect on sales at all.
Uhhh, yeah, obviously. That was pretty normal when these games came out, there was a lot less hand holding and if you were playing Whatever 2 it was assumed that it was because you liked Whatever 1 and didn't need it all explained again.
I only had RCT2 as a kid and you're totally right. The high difficulty of the early scenarios made me ignore scenario play entirely as a kid. I basically only played sandbox mode
Yep. I was maybe 4 years old the first time I saw a rollercoaster tycoon game. I wasn’t really all that good at ANY video game, and it was just fun to make crazy coasters in the track designer.
@@HeelBJC you could create your own scenarios and give yourself infinite money, that was essentially "sandbox mode", probably what they mean, that's what I did as a kid anyway
This is where a cloud support system would be nice. Each game would report back to the cloud if the user completed the level, and how long the user took (i.e. just send the scenario name and failure/time, no user data). The cloud system would determine how many people have finished which scenarios (if the time is zero, then it is assumed the user failed that scenario), and pass that list back whenever the game is booted up. On boot-up, the game would list the different scenarios in decreasing order of which ones have been completed the most. So players could play any scenario in any order, but steadily the easier ones would go to the front of the list, and the harder ones would go to the back of the list. I.e. if one scenario has been completed 90% of the time, it would tend to be towards the front of the list, while another scenario that has been completed 10% of the time is towards the back of the list. This would allow the game programmer to see which scenarios are easy vs hard, and try to adjust them if needed (i.e. if the highest success rate is 60%, you might want to make your scenarios easier). A future expansion would allow for custom games, but the player has to complete the scenario first (hopefully without falsifying the data). So the new scenario would initially be near the front of the list (since its success rate is 100%), but as people try it out the success rate% will change.
Also don't forget Ivory Towers, which shows the bad effect disgusting paths can have on your park.. And Crumbly Woods, which lets you deal with very old rides! I think the good thing about the RCT1 scenarios is that most of them are centered around one aspect/gimmick of the game, which is often a good way of designing levels in any game.
I remember when I was a kid, I didn't like playing on any level but Forest Frontiers. I would also start the game through the tutorial button, and then fight the tutorial as it tried to place a merry go round.
For those of you who didn't know (Marcel Vos included), the scenario order in RCT2 was alphabetical in every language., Which made (in my own language for example) Factory Capers the first RCT2 scenario, followed by Crazy Castle then Electric Fields. Sadly, Amity Airfield still was next...
That's interesting, and provides insight into why it's alphabetical. I wonder if this also means Marcel played it in English as a kid, instead of Dutch
@@jonnnnniej hmm, so maybe the scenario names were not localized like the rest of the game, just reordered based on that language's alphabet. I guess it's that names don't really have translations as such. The Arc de Triomphe and the Nurburgring Nordschliefe are called those names in English too, and probably Dutch.
Interestingly, as a Hongkonger, Amity Airfield also comes first in the "Advanced Scenarios" in the "alphabetical order" of my language (Hongkongese, which is very similar to Traditional Chinese), although I have been playing the games in English.
Kind of no. Yes, even as Electric fields (easiest beginner park) is on a harder range as first RCT1 parks, someone who finished the Pokey, Mystic and Rainbow in RCT1, should breeze trough all three beginner parks and most challenging easily (that being said, it's not just Amity airfield that may be miscategorised. Bumbly Bazar should be in Begginer category).
The difficulty curve in RCT2 also appears to be heavily dependent on the localization. Growing up playing the game in Dutch, all the parks have Dutch translations which makes the order completely different. While it was still not optimal, it was a lot more logical for me than the English order. For example, Amity Airfield is called "Vredig Vliegveld" in Dutch, making it the second to last park in the advanced category, only to be followed by Gravity Gardens ("Zwaartekracht Tuinen"). Until recently I never really understood why people thought Amity Airfield was so difficult, sure it has a hard goal, but for me it was always the second to last one in the advanced category. I recently started replaying the scenario's in OpenRCT2 which keeps the English order of the park, and I now completely understand how messed up the curve is. Similarly, In Dutch you start of with Electic Fields, and the last park in the beginner category is Crazy Castle which is also more logical. I guess most people that have played this game have played it in English, but I wonder if there are other "better" scenario orders in other languages as well.
That's a really cool thing I never thought about? I did have this memory of Electric Fields being the first scenario, but I just assumed I misremembered. Turns out that I didn't misremember as I am also Dutch.
For reference, the complete Dutch order is: Electric Fields (Electric Land) Factory Capers (Fabriekspark) Crazy Castle (Gek Kasteel) Bumbly Bazaar Infernal Views (Infernale Uitzichten) Fungus Woods (Paddestoelenwoud) Botany Breakers (Plantenparadijs) Dusty Greens (Stoffige Greens) Amity Airfield (Vredig Vliegveld) Gravity Gardens (Zwaartekracht Tuinen) Alpine Adventures (Alpine Avonturen) Extreme Heights (Extreme Hoogtes) Lucky Lake (Lucky Meer) Rainbow Summit (Regenboog Heuvel) Ghost Town (Spookstad) It still puts Fungus Woods quite early as quite a difficult scenario, which was definitely a scenario I struggled a lot with when I was a kid, but in my opinion it is a much better progression than the English order
@@roelercoaster I noticed that they're simply listed in alphabetical order. In fact, this is also the case in the English version, too. This would explain a lot, actually...
@@Gameprojordan Razor Rocks had the objective to build 10 different types of coasters with an excitement of at least 6. Scenarios that have OP's objective include Volcania and Dragon's Cove (plus a few more).
I love the end of the first expansion. Geoffrey Gardens, basically Evergreen Gardens' big brother. All that space and the very long time given to bring in enough guests means you have time to really plan what you're doing and work on beautifying your park.
I loved the scenarios in RCT1. Whenever you unlocked a new one it was exciting to see what it was about. I only played RCT2 many years later and got bored with it pretty quickly. It really seems as if for the RCT1 scenarios, the thought process was "how can we make the gameplay different and interesting for every scenario", whereas for RCT2 it was just "what are interesting locations to build a park on".
As a kid, I remember I *really* enjoyed Leafy Lake-just something about the forest scenery and the big lake really ignited my imagination. The difficulty level was great too; just hard enough to feel a bit constrained, but easy enough that I could build a fun park with a variety of rides as a 10 year old :P I must have built parks on Leafy Lake a dozen times but never really spent much time on other scenarios.
I feel the exact same way about Leafy Lake and also Evergreen Gardens. I think it's the loveliest scenarios that came with the games. I have this vivid memory from like 20 years ago of when I lived in Seattle and watching it rain in game while also looking outside where it was raining in real life. Every time I go back and do those two scenarios in OpenRCT2 and it rains, I get this deep feeling of beauty and happiness reminding me of all the fun Ive had playing the games over the years and all the parks I've made.
6 year old me would build a big train ride with stops around the circumference of the park and I would fill the lake up with various rides with a big bridge that would go across the center of the lake. However, I never took into account that building over water was more expensive.
@@marcinmisiek768 Haha, I built a train like that too :). Something really satisfying about a train going around the lake stopping at several different stations.
Leafy Lake is a good one. For extra challenge build rides only on the lake and try to still pass the objective. Then do the opposite and try to pass the objective. For extra extra challenge repay your loan immediately so you have $0 and only make money at first by deleting pathways and upping the entrance fee to $5.00 below the amount of money the guest has. Guests won't come along often at first. It's the ultimate sandbox way of playing. I like to do that with all the scenarios.
I never thought about it, but yeah, RCT1 was incredible in its pacing for my childhood brain. I can still remember some (for me) incredible revelations about the game for just about every scenario: Playing Forest Frontiers waaay past its goal until I bought enough land and researched enough to create a boat hire in the woods; that "whoops" moment in Dusty Dunes when I first found the landscaping tools, clicked and dragged and ended up with a giant, expensive, pyramid-shaped mountain of sand; seeing the sprinklers in Evergreen Gardens and thinking back to a trip to actual, real life Disney Land where they had those too... sooo many memories, now literal decades old, and I still feel like sitting in my dad's office chair playing this game on a Gateway with 266 MHz. Makes me feel old, but in the good way, y'know :)
I think the only flaw with RCT1 (and RCT2) is the lack of a fast forward button (which was rectified years later when RCTC was introduced), imagine having to sit through 4 hours of gameplay of Evergreen Gardens just because you installed RCT1 into a new computer
I remember first realizing that you could build underground in Dynamite Dunes. Because the mine coaster went through wooden structures, I used to believe for a long time that you have to apply the wooden texture on the underground first in order to be able to build tunnels.
Yes, because they can be a bit random. Station brakes failure plus rain when you are just saving all your money to complete the gigacoaster - very risky.
Most of those scenarios have unlimited money, so i usually start with hiring like, 50 or 100 of each employee. That way my park rating almost never drops!
I have memories of Crazy Castle, the first few ones is getting mad at all the guests getting lost and painstakingly moving them to the exit of the park Then learning to just delete the 7 pieces of path that connect the central footpath to the one that goes around the whole park. I agree, Crazy Castle is a terrible first level
Haha same, I felt so accomplished after beating the scenario. I also remember carefully considering which scenario to tackle next, as the difficulty curve seemed random and I noticed that the scenarios were sorted alphabetically underlining my idea that it was just selection menu and not a campaign to be done successively
The biggest offense of the larger RCT2 scenarios is that they don't provide enough unique ride types to reach the guest goals. Amity Airfield would be much more interesting if I didn't have to build 4 inverted hairpin coasters and 4 bobsled coasters to win
Amity airfields was "themed" to be an aviation park, so the ride selections is heavily limited by nature, I find it to be a worse off version of Woodworm Park which thankfully had a decent ride selection. I think the bigger problem with Amity Airfield lies with the pay-to-enter park as this meant slower guest turnovers and ATMs can only help so much to get guests to buy $20 umbrellas, foods, drinks and souvenirs
I'm one of those that started out from RCT2 as a kid, right after falling in love with Chris Sawyer's Locomotion. My PTSD park is actually Crazy Castle, I did spend a ton of hours on it trying to beat it. I ended up playing the beginner parks for fun and not for the objective for a long time before going back to it and actually beat it. Years later I played the original RCT and indeed I noticed how much more fun and chill it was; I think RCT2 was made as a follow-up to RCT, as in an even harder set of parks. If you play them one after the other the transition is almost unnoticeable and you still have fun. To me the most annoying thing of RCT2 is the vast use of multiple-rows-paths. Since as a beginner you take a while to realize how bad the guests' path-finding really is, you end up with your park rating going down and guests getting lost without understanding why midway through your gameplay.
I guess this explains why when I was a little kid I loved playing RCT1, then when I got RCT2 in a cereal box a few years later I randomly tried a few scenarios and quickly rage quit and returned to RCT1.
I thought "Wow, that's extreme", but then I remembered that my sister and I used to play Electric Fields a lot in RCT2 and couldn't get the hang of it either, despite having played RTC1 and picking the easiest scenario. People would get lost on the path that was already there all the time, which tanked our park rating.
I had the same experience as a young kid. I loved RCT1 and played it nonstop, eventually got RCT2 but the scenarios were all a bit too crazy and difficult for me so I went back to building parks on Evergreen Garden in RCT1. RCT1 was excellent in being approachable to even young children, RCT2, despite having more stuff and improvements, failed in that aspect. When I got a bit older I started to enjoy making custom stuff in RCT2 but it could have been enjoyable from the start if it actually had a proper difficulty curve.
Shout out to getting cereal box games and other paraphernalia. So my parents had to make a rule about which sibling got what ever was in the box because we fought so much over it.
I was exactly the same, eagerly tried RCT2 after having spent lots of quality time with 1 and it just didn't "click" for me. Although I believe I actually purchased the full RCT2 at a Scholastic Book Fair.
I think they just assumed everyone had played RCT1 before playing RCT2 so they didn't put much thought in the scenario section. I don't remember struggling much in RCT2 scenarios because I played RCT1 before.
I also didn’t like how in RCT2 had every scene too unlocked whereas in the first instalment, you had to beat other ones to get them activated , gives more of an ambition.
The scenarios in RCT2 were bad in general, and when combined with the 'locked' Six Flags coasters that you couldn't modify make me surprised RCT2 did as well as it did. In RCT1 each Scenario felt like a carefully crafted, balanced location for you to improve, each one had character event before you started. The ones in RCT2 overused scenery pieces to build fairly ugly, unconvincing structures, and were typically uninteresting places. Airfield wasn't just a difficult scenario, it might as well been a blank space, because once you've built a park around it there's nothing really there. It wasn't rewarding to work with. I guess RCT2 survived on having better game mechanics, but the scenarios played a huge role in why I had more fun with RCT1 when it came out than I ever did with the sequel.
I think the reason RCT2 was more successful is because most people just made a giant empty park with unlimited money in the scenario editor and finally had their huge sandbox mode rather than bother with the scenarios. It was such a hugely missed feature in the original game and it "technically" isn't even in RCT2 unless you abuse the scenario editor.
Yes. It is not the scenarios of RCT2 that sells it. It is all the other aspects. If you played RCT1 you likely had fewer issues than someone that started with RCT2, however. But I do think it would have been better to work on the layout and difficulty curve of those scenarios. As I remember it, I was a lot more interested in beating all the scenarios in RCT1 than RCT2.
@@UndyingNephalim Their was this no-money scenario in RCT1 that actually served us as sandbox mode, after, what a surprise, the park got closed down due to inferior park rating - not because it was that difficult, but - let's be honest - who doesn't like to build a twister coaster up to the support limit and go down to zero with a helix tower?
@@Rudl1044 Yeah that was Arid Heights in Loopy Landscapes. Once I discovered that scenario I pretty much never bothered to play any other. It still was not as sandboxy as what you could do in RCT2 (despite being literal sand). For instance you were stuck with certain ride selections where's in the RCT2 scenario editor you could pick any ride you wanted. It's funny that 20 years later I'm more interested in structured scenarios then the free for all unlimited money sandboxes.
Love this, great points. Another thing I believe Evergreen Gardens teaches you is how guests can get lost and unhappy with too many paths leading to nothing. It's wise to "prune" the path network at the start of this garden scenario :)
Just something to add on this list: Evergreen Gardens was probably my favorite park from RCT1 because it showed a lot of layout possibilities using scenario items and trees. Not that I used that in other parks (because I suck at that). Another thing it showed during the learning curve is that people get lost in a park that is too big. And that is something the game tells you early on with a decreasing guests happiness and messages. After that park, I always close off any paths leading into the distance and slowly expand over time.
Evergreen Gardens also introduces the gate fee and makes more rides available for research than any of the parks before it. Those two points combined with its size and long duration make it a great park for experimenting with the game's features.
I remember having trouble with a lot of game systems as a kid that weren't explained to me, until I started watching your video. For example ride prices, G-forces, ride requirements are things that should have be taught by the game
I remember Bumbly Beach being my absolute favorite stage when I was a kid just because it's a beach and I thought it looked awesome. Also Katie's World was like the furthest I could get and I just replayed Bumbly Beach a lot. Oh I'm glad I started out with RCT1, because I remember I was like 10 years old when I started playing RCT2 and the only scenario I could ever beat was Robin Hood.
Great video! A few other scenarios of RCT1 that in my opinion are crucial in learning how the game works: Crumbly Woods - makes you deal with extremely old rides and all consequences coming from that, teaching you that at some point it's worth replacing rides Lightning Peaks - extremely rainy scenario that might encourage you to build underground and learn that guests will still ride underground rides Ivory Towers - teaches you how to recover an absolute mess of a park, turning into a functional one
Corkscrew Follies/Added Attractions builds on that same progression nicely, too. It really feels like an extension of the original scenario pack. Loopy Landscapes goes in a different direction, but that's also not a bad thing since it adds variety and rewards different ways of playing.
I remember a very long time ago on one of the RCT fansites, there was an article about Crazy Castle and something about "to master a thing, you must return to the beginning" because of how damn difficult it was. Amity Airfield was also guilty af.
The first time I found out that crashes were a thing was when Agoraphobia or Claustrophobia crashed due to a brakes failure. Got the shock of my life and immediately chose to put only one train on any coaster, ever. The only coaster where I used more trains was the wooden, if the water splash track piece was available, those couldn't fail in slowing down trains. Only a couple of years ago I found out how mechanics worked, thanks to OpenRCT2 :)
RCT2 dropped the ball when it prevented you from charging for both the park entrance and the rides. I know this is a cheat in OpenRCT2 but it doesn't work properly.
Diamond Heights was my favorite scenario as a kid. I would constantly play it over and over trying new things. Suppose I preferred a prebuilt park I can modify instead of building one from scratch.
Agreed. RCT1 in general has much nicer and more interesting scenarios in very nicely detailed parks, while RCT2 (the base game) tends to have very flat designs, or ones that don't have much design to them outside of randomly using the mountain tool. Parks like Gravity Gardens are there, but there are too few. I never really got familiar with 2's expansions, so I don't know if they got much better with that.
@@SheepyFields I would argue some of the expansion parks are pretty okay, but there's a lot that are pretty bad. they're a lot cooler to look at than actually play in most cases
Haven't seen the video yet, but i completely agree. I had so much fun going through the RCT1 progression and a I just turned of the progressive unlocking in OpenRCT2 for the RCT2 scenarios
Back then, in PC gaming, that wasn't unfair to assume. A lot of sequels back then were just glorified expansions to the base game. There's almost no reason you couldn't just backport DOOM 2 into DOOM 1's campaign, for example.
As a young kid without all the insider info here on this channel, and always trying to build rides I was proud of and not efficient or spammy, the RCT1 difficulty curve was STEEP after around the midpoint. I never got to the later scenarios in any pack. I also never found any enjoyment in RCT2’s scenarios at all. To this day I’ve only beaten a couple. The scenario editor turned into a sandbox mode, and I was free to do whatever I wanted, focusing on aesthetics over management. To this day, I play RCT1 for management sim, RCT2 for sandbox park designer.
My problem was that I consistently undercharged for rides. If I remembered to set a gate fee, it was fine, but I didn't always, and so I often ended up broke. Mothball/Mystic Mountain is the point at which that no longer becomes workable since, unlike most scenarios before it, you don't get an established park to continue from.
I think one of the biggest problems with the scenarios in general, and something that's maybe counteruinitive especially to a younger player, is the massively excessive pathing you start out with in the larger parks. It's pretty much strictly detrimental because guests get lost and spend less time near your attractions when you're starting out. It also then tempts you to build all over the place rather than building close to the entrance, resulting in rides with really low throughput. Worse, you might think the solution to the problem is to build transport rides, not realizing that guests won't purposefully use them to get to your other rides. It seems a little strange that the first thing you should do in many of these scenarios is to immediately cut off 90% of the existing path from the park entrance.
The weirdest thing about the preset pieces you encounter in RCT is how _inexpensive_ they've set everything to be relative to how much the guests will actually pay. The prices seem(ed) to somewhat reflect "real world" prices, and that leads the player to use those low-ball figures as standards, when in reality the game will only reward them for cranking those prices up
i always felt that even the expansions of RCT1 had a clear progression that i loved. the way you described how even just the first 5 do it, is really cool to think about now because i definitely got the experience you're describing as a kid - picking things up through what the game introduces. it still holds up as a great introduction imo.
I remember as kid first beating leafy lake by only staying on the land, because I thought that was the only way I could... But recently I opened the game up and played the scenario again beating it by placing rides only on water. It still isn't that hard, but it's interesting to challenge yourself either way, either avoiding water, and you have limited land, or only water which is more expensive
Sweet video! Here are a few other details: - Diamond Heights shows you how transport rides work with Indiana Railroad - Trinity Islands is the first scenario without any large flat areas (in Diamond Heights the water is shallow enough that you can build over it) This forces players to learn landscaping, either working with the terrain or making enough money to flatten it. - Katie's World shows how you can construct entire rides underwater with Runaway Plumber. - Katie's World also shows that boat hires can be just a dock instead of a closed circuit. It's a detail we take for granted, but a nice one.
Spot on Marcel. I only ever played RCT 1 growing up, and didn't get round to playing 2 until I found your channel and OpenRCT2, but I think that it makes a lot of sense to start people on 1 before jumping to 2. I can't imagine how weird it would feel starting on 2 and going back to 1 afterwards.
Another thing RCT1's scenarios did really well (mostly vanilla game) was that as you progressed you'd discover new rides and coasters. I remember getting excited seeing the Souvenir Stall on Dynamite Dunes and Inverted Rollercoaster in Diamond Heights. And you kept seeing new rides all the way up to White Water Park which was the first one to introduce the Legendary Vertical Drop Rollercoaster.
I actually remember finding Diamond Heights harder than the other scenarios when I was a kid playing this game, simply because I found it was harder to keep park value up. A lot of that was due to me not being particularly great at using space, and finding the rides were already prone to sucking up space. I did like the scenario's park design however; the synchronized loopers are iconic, and I also liked how they did the railway on that one. Speaking of which, you actually can get crashes on Dynamite Blaster and those two as well; it always sucks when it happens too, since they're well done pre-mades and it can fry your run if it does happen. Bumbly's wooden coaster just seems to be more likely to crash when the breakdowns occur, likely due to its train design and set up. As for RCT 2, I just found them lacking and preferred Corkscrew Follies and Loopy Landscapes. More the former than the latter. I will state that a lot of it was due to how BS I found some of their park goals, since those were way too hard for a kid who sometimes struggled to get over 1k people into the park.
you missed the extra area with mine shaft and lake in Forest Frontiers... i remember as a kid i always bought the land and made a railway loop around it, it was so cool little detail, but one of the most memorable ones
if we think whiteout DLC's then no, rct2 have up to 7 different usable paths (Grey, Brown and Green Asphalt, Dirt, Ash, Cobblestone and space), while rct1 have only 4 (Grey Asphalt, Dirt, Cobblestone and Tan Tiles) The road is avaiable for both, but the player can't use them in gameplay DLC paths that added was for rct1 (Brown, Green and Red asphalt, Ash and Bamboo, Grey, Red and Green Tiles) while rct2 have (Rainbow, Forest, Mosaic, Circuit, Pavement and rocky), which bring 8 in dlcs of rct1 and 6 in rct2, so 10 path types in rct1 and 13 path types in rct2, which bring again, as a no, rct2 have more path in general (Of course I don't talk about queue lines as rct2 beat that easily in a 13vs4).
When I first played RCT1, I didn't like deleting trees. So I played the entire list of scenarios in order without deleting a single tree (I did change the terrain elevation sometimes to build underground though). By the time I had gotten to Rainbow Valley, it was one of the easiest scenarios.
There were a few scenarios in RCT1 that were oddly difficult for their placement (Woodworm Park), oddly easy (Mineral Park), or difficult for all the wrong reasons (Micro Park).
I'll just say it like this: In RCT1, I finished every single scenarios, including the Mega Park (which was awful because the game is not intended to be this big without a cash machine or other implantation from RCT2). As for RCT2, I started with Factory Campers because I was used to get a revenue from the entry and the ride revenue was still a mystery of "why I can charge 5$ on something and 1$ is too pricey for something else (the price decrease as the coaster gets older). However, I never finished all advanced scenarios event if I did complete a few experts. Amity Airfield is atrociously hard if you barely understand the new core mechanics. Now, thanks to Marcel, if I were to replay that map, I would pass it with flying colors, but holy heck, RCT1 proved that sometimes, simplicity is better than quantity. P.S. When I first played RCT1, I didn't understand a thing. Even with the tutorial, (which actually scared me because I couldn't control my mouse anymore) I was at a lost. I actually had to watch my Dad play the game to understand it. I was 8, for the reference. It was my first management game and I almost had an horrible experience with it. 😅 (Tutorial is scary)
I think the difficulty curve in RCT1 is fantastic and some things you didn't mention were things you had to deal with too as a newcomer: Pokey Park showing the difference between buying land and construction rights White Water Park showing you different kinds of water rides along with how dinghy slides should be designed Evergreen Gardens for instance was a scenario where I struggled with because I wanted to retain as much of the original spirit as possible. I think this scenario in particular shows that you sometimes have to destroy some pre-built scenery to achieve the goal. BUT you can successfully do it while everything stays intact. I think as a park for beginning players, it's got a lot of replay value. Karts & Coasters, Mel's World, Crumbly Woods, Katie's World making you overthink the pre-built rides and whether they can stay forever or not. It's kind of a similar beast as Evergreen Gardens, just at a larger scale as the rides are usually space-consuming, big rollercoasters which stand in your way all of a sudden. And it's every time really hard for me to tear them down but it's usually for the better.
I fully agree with the sentiments here. RCT1 was so great in expanding slowly, that it was great fun. Meanwhile RCT2 scared me off with those weirdly difficult scenarios. The first thing I always did was pause the game, delete half of the pathways and install tons of boring maintenance stuff, so the park can function at all. Otherwise it quickly turns into a path finding nightmare which ruins your park scores. I barely finished any RCT2 scenarios, tbh. Quite a shame. RCT1 on the other hand I beat almost all the way through.
another thing, rct1 has a full-on tutorial stage that uses Forest Frontiers and guides you through multiple different aspects of the game. You don't necessarily need it to understand the game, but I believe rct2 doesn't have that in any form. Using that tutorial was how I learned how to play when I was little.
IIRC, RCT2 actually had a tutorial level, but it was hidden away in the main menu It's what taught kid me that you can place doors on smaller attractions, like the mouse coaster
@@Devilhar I think you may be right because after I commented this I actually did a search for the tutorial level in rct1, and I noticed that the main menu option that represents it is also on the main menu for rct2. rct2 to my knowledge still boots up on Windows 10 so I'm actually going to go check it real quick. here's a link to a video of RCT1's tutorial, which I noticed Marcel actually commented on a couple of months ago ruclips.net/video/XVy5gqKp2d8/видео.html Edit: just checked and you are correct, roller coaster tycoon 2 actually has three separate tutorials in it. I'm going to look around and see if they're preserved on RUclips in any way and if they're not I'm going to record them myself
@@Devilhar this person has an archive upload of the beginners tutorial for rct2, but I'm searching RUclips and it seems like the custom rides tutorial as well as the roller coaster building tutorial are missing, so I might just record those myself and upload them. ruclips.net/video/n5K-VUlBgQ8/видео.html Edit: not going to upload them myself, rct2 was originally designed for 832x624 aspect ratio, and for some reason whenever you boot up the tutorial it resets the screen size to 800x600 and looks bad. I poked around in the game's files to try and find the file that will let me change the base values but I can't find it. OBS doesn't like aspect ratio changes when recording so I'd rather just not do it and see if somebody else can
While RCT1's difficulty curve is great, I've got to give a shoutout to RCT Classic in this regard. While overall I prefer OpenRCT2, I believe RCT Classic has the best difficulty curve out of all the versions.
Though Dusty Greens being placed way too high in difficulty was a bit strange. 5K a month from ride income is cake and the Sceario is in like the top three difficulty levels.
Because all of the pre-built steel mini coasters in RCT1 don’t have any banked turns, AND Arachnophobia at Diamond Heights doesn’t have any banked turns, it was actually _years_ into playing that I realized that the steel mini coaster could do banked turns!
@@Demorid Dynamite Blaster only crashes if you mess with it or in an extreme fluke following a safety cut-out. In its starting configuration, it's perfectly safe during a station brakes failure.
@@reillywalker195 I remember sawing one time Dynamite crashing during brake failiure, as the train was full of guests. But often, either claustophobia or agrophobia crashes.
Its so interesting that im seeing this video now! My brother and i grew up playing rct2 and we never played anything but the sandbox tutorial since all of the scenarios were impossible
When I was 6 years old, I had no concept of what a loan was (and had no idea how to fix ride prices to make the most money), and I remember discovering the feature to take out a loan when out of money on bumbly beach. I would just take out as much money as possible and use it build oversized rides that never paid off and I would eventually go deep in the red. I would then play to beat the park objectives before I would go bankrupt from loans.
As a kid who grew up with RCT2 but never RCT 1, this video makes so much sense about why the game was hard for me, and I wish I could go back in time and start with RCT1.
Diamond Heights also teaches that maintenance of rides is significant because I remember the dueling coasters would always crash due to brake failure and plummet my park rating. I would close them and add brakes to the end.
This. RCT2 is a great game in it's new rides and how some old ones were revamped, but the scenarios are just overall bad. It looks like the dev team didn't fully understand/aknowledge their game limitations and problems, and expected everyone to have the same grasp as people who know the game code by memory. So you have ludicrous, unfun scenario goals that push you to "exploit" the game mechanics on really bad, confusing and poorly designed map layouts (looking at you, Crazy Castle)
@@dwarf9938 I just failed Crazy Castle yesterday, lol. Funny enough I kept playing and now I'm almost at 1500 guests with no real mayor changes.. for some reason.
Yes! Thank you for articulating so many of my feelings about the difficulties in RCT1 and 2! I completely agree. RCT2 was definitely meant for people who already knew what they were doing, and I can appreciate that. But there was no sensible ordering of the scenarios. I also REALLY appreciated unlocking a scenario first before you could try it in RCT1 which we didn't see in RCT2. That was a big difference as well
Ah i never really thought about this but I do remember it! Back before I knew what a difficulty curve was, in RCT1 where you had to unlock new scenarios by completing previous ones it made the difficulty curve more linear, whereas in RCT2 you can pick any scenario to start with.
I've been watching your channel for over a year simply because I enjoy analytical content like this, but this video has sparked serious interesting playing RTC for me. Is there a guide about which version to start with and a cheat sheet for stat requirements?
My opinion is to get both rct 1&2 on steam, then get open rct2 and link them to it. That way, you can play all the scenarios from both with the improved UI of rct2. Plus, any savegames you have in either game will be accessible in open rct2 as well.
For stat requirements, most roller coasters are as simple as building a high enough drop and not getting G forces in the red (especially lateral G's). A few rides do require something special like an inversion for full stats though. You won't regret playing this game, it's still extremely fun after all these years!
This is because Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 was basically a standalone expansion pack for RCT1. It added more content and levels but was not really a sequel at all. RCT3 was the first real sequel with all the good and bad that came with it. Chris and the team assumed everyone had played RCT1 before playing RCT2 so they didn't put much effort into the scenario section, really it was probably going to be an expansion pack, but executives saw dollar signs in their eyes by releasing it stand alone.
One lesson that is underrated: evergreen gardens tells you that even though you start with a massive amount of land and scenery, you still need to start out in segments. Sure, it's all pretty, but without maps and without a good way around, peeps WILL get lost. So delete paths and rebuild them later!
Huh, I don't remember Bumbly Beach for the coaster constantly crashing. I remember it for the Urban Scenery you could never get and that you could build on the beach itself. Or close to it using Construction Rights. It took until Loopy Landscapes much later to be able to use Urban Scenery even though it was in the base game...
Another interesting thing to mention is that Agoraphobia spends most of it's time over a large open lake while Claustrophobia has underground sections and passes closer to other attractions and trees.
I think something cool about dynamite dunes is how the existing roller coaster teaches you about ride age. I remember being surprised that everyone was complaining about this cool coaster - I think not building though other good coasters made it a lot harder in my first play through! Good video as always
You left out something that always confused me when I was younger - in electric fields the guests have the "prefer less intense rides" flag set, but you get loads of intense rides in the research. That was the hardest of the beginner parks for me before I figured out why haha
I remember playing and completing every scenario in the base RCT1 game, and having to start over a few times due to the DST bug. I was so excited for RCT2, but was put off by the difficulty. I ended up going back to RCT1 and tried completing all the expansion pack scenarios, and didn't pick up RCT2 again for several years.
I was never good at RCT and when I played RCT2 I found the "beginner" parks uncomfortably large. After one go of Amity Airfield I gave up playing. Most of my memories of the game are from Diamond Heights. The twin and mobius coasters there are so cool! I still have a soft spot for it, even though Claustrophobia/Agoraphobia kept crashing for me. I didn't know how to stop it happening except to restrict them to one train each. I did the same with Bumbly Beach so never had a crash there.
The key to do it without block brakes is to try as hard as possible to prevent the trains from going too fast when they reach the station without brakes, as in RCT1 the station brakes failure also affects regular brakes. One way to prevent this is to keep those trains moving at any cost; set their set-off time to the absolute minimum waiting time and keep them leaving the station. If a roller coaster suffers from brakes failure in these conditions, the train will simply move past the station and begin another circuit instead of crashing into another train.
Your videos have single handily reignited my love for the roller coaster tycoon series. I loved them as a kid and I’m having equal fun as an adult in new ways
RCT1 had the better scenarios by far, even the expansion scenarios were well designed and fit well with the rest of the game and I've fond memories of most of them. RCT2 on the other hand I remember finding the scenarios either too difficult or uninteresting, most of my time with RCT2 was spend making my own parks and rides with the editor
When discussing Crazy Castle I would have also mentioned the fact that the scenario is a Pay For Rides scenario. As a kid that was a huge barrier for me because I always ran out of money and would get stuck even after maxing the loan. It's not obvious to a new or very young player how much you can charge for a ride without a lot of experimenting. Plus as a young kid I assumed that the default number was close to the highest amount I could charge for the ride when the reality was most of the time I was probably undercharging.
I think Big Pier and Lightning Peaks are also important scenarios in that they cover scenarios entirely over water (BP) and on mountainous terrain (LP). Oddly enough, it wasn't the coaster in Bumbly Beach that would crash often for me. For me, it was either of the dueling coasters in Diamond Heights, or The Storm or Runaway Plumber in Katie's World.
This analysis is *exactly* what I experienced, moving from Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 to 2. Rollercoaster Tycoon 1: gradual difficulty curve, eventually leading to the really interesting scenarios (I also liked the one entirely over water - I think it was a pier-related one?) Rollercoaster 2: we hope you're already good at the game because here you are! Even though I knew what I was doing (except for anything added in RCT2), it was so overwhelming that I gave up after not very long and went back to 1 ^^; I'll give RCT2 another go at some point. And I'll bear this video in mind, aheh.
You're right about RCT1. That's Big Pier/Paradise Pier, which follows another interesting scenario: Crumbly Woods. Thunder Rock is a nice denouement following Rainbow Valley, meanwhile-a long but easy and fun scenario to let your imagination run wild.
I really liked in RCT1 how you couldn't access all the scenarios from the start. You had a few available to start with, and harder ones unlocked as you progressed, which made it rewarding to beat a scenario so you could see what challenge came next. With RCT2 you could just open all of the scenarios, realise there's no real reward for completing a park, and give up.
Some things you didn't touch on: Added Attractions/Corkscrew Follies and Loopy Landscapes just continued the difficulty curve from where RCT1 originally left off. By the end of AA/CF, you have some real challenging scenarios like Pickle Park and Fiasco Forest that require a knowledge of things like what makes for efficient ride design, preventing crashes, pulling in guests, balancing finances, and raising park values. You also have the first "Build 10 coasters over X excitement" objective in Coaster Crazy. Loopy Landscapes immediately turns the difficulty to 11 by introducing the pay-for-park-entry OR pay-per-ride divide that dramatically cuts income while introducing some of the longest and most challenging scenarios yet, like "Build 10 obscenely long coaster" monsters Octagon Park and Nevermore Park. I've always imagined Chris Sawyer as designing RCT2's scenarios a little half-hazardly and just picking up the difficulty curve where Loopy Landscapes left off. An additional shame is that when he *did* get the chance to remake the RCT1 scenarios for RCT2 in the form of RCT Classic, he forced RCT2's hard pay-for-park-entry OR pay-per-ride divide (RCT2 scenario file format won't let you do both like in RCT1) onto the original scenarios - making them all harder. 7:03 Bumbly Beach's coaster is no more likely to crash than Dynamite Blaster or Diamond Height's coasters (or any pre-builts like Woodchip). Bumbly Beach is where purchasable construction rights are introduced though (not that many players use them in that scenario). It also has to be a pain to play RCT1 scenarios in RCT2 and have to retrofit block brakes onto every coaster. It feels weird to me to even have access to block brakes in some scenarios, as the art of making a coaster without block zones that can last years and never crash is especially valuable in Octagon Park and Nevermore Park (the latter of which gave me an incident where I missed that mechanics couldn't access a ride's exit, and that ride experienced a station brakes failure and kept running for multiple in-game months before I noticed) www.reddit.com/r/rct/comments/28cn7f/you_know_your_coaster_is_reliable_when_you_fail/ The biggest thing that pains me when seeing new players try RCT1 scenarios in RCT2 is the new scenery tools, though. Raising scenery off the ground and making buildings and stuff was never in the design scope of RCT1 (though Chris Sawyer tried to half-bake those ideas in with the building-style landscape textures included in Loopy Landscapes). And as freeing as those RCT2 features are for creative expression, I think they fail to offer mechanical depth (something Parkitect would try to rectify with its scenery rating mechanics) and complicate things too much for newer players. Also limitation breeds creativity - something Rainbow Valley illustrates to a painful degree. People will fundamentally play the game differently between vanilla RCT1 and RCT1-in-OpenRCT2 (or even worse, RCT Classic). I've never seen anyone agree with that take, though. I'm probably too much of a RCT1 purist (and I can't even play the game anymore (without resorting to autohotkey) since the in-game key rebind tools don't allow you to map the arrow keys onto WASD, something OpenRCT2 and Parkitect have turned into my default control style).
As a RCT1 purist myself I agree, I've played RCT2 plenty of times and the new scenery and features are all nice and all but I have to question myself to what point it becomes overdone to game experience. While creativity in RCT2 is more settled around scenery apart from completing the objective. RCT1's creativity is more settled around expanding your park right with the objectives and scenario, to which results that you will always have an unique experience each different scenario. Loopy Landscapes is what RCT2 in my opinion should've been. providing interesting yet challenging objectives that would challenge the player to get creative especially when you have to build coasters for the objective. The one big reason why people prefer RCT2 over RCT1 is due to its creative freedom and more stuff to play with despite it having a very linear scenario experience and a very flawed progression system that is pretty much non-existant (cause all parks are already unlocked from the start). RCT2 does provide the advanced toolbox for building your custom parks, but for me that is about the only big positive compared to its predecessor, yet it also is its major drawback as a game. It is kinda like Minecraft, yet RCT2 does not have survival mode to which RCT2 evolved into a different kind of game. You can be really creative in RCT2, but in RCT1 you need to be creative.
Wait, I don't think Loopy LAndscapes introduced "Pay for entry/Free rides" or vice versa .I remember Loopy Landscapes forcing all park entries to FREE in the scenarios.
The most facinating thing for me about RCT 1 & 2 is, that Sawyer wrote the entire game in assembly, or machine language. Putting so much effort into a game paid off in the end!
I also liked how in rct1 you had to beat the first few scenarios to unlock more. In rct2 all the scenarios were available at the start so it felt like there was no progression. I used rct2 mostly as a sandbox creating my own parks
I’m thrilled you made a video on a topic I’ve wanted to see covered before. I tell people I like RCT1 over 2 and get weird looks all the time, so seeing this is uber validating, considering my primary issue with 2 is the scenario design
I remember struggling a lot with Diamond Heights as a kid. Not sure if it was genuinely more difficult, or if I just didn't quite understand the objective. I also remember the two Phobia coasters being very prone to crashing.
You're not wrong. Diamond Heights is a step up in difficulty and has an obscure objective. The two looping coasters are also both prone to crashing and, in RCT1, need to be converted to each run a single train instead.
Even having played RCT1 first and being good enough to unlock Urban Park in the Corkscrew Follies expansion, I still had trouble with Crazy Castle. I think I beat Electric Fields easily, beat Factory Capers by deleting most of the path before doing anything else to unlock the Advanced Parks. I obviously tried Amity Airfield first, had no chance of beating it, and went on to play Build Your Own Six Flags until Wacky Worlds came out and introduced new beginner scenarios that are probably easier than Crazy Castle. Also, the only big anomaly in the RCT1 difficulty curve is Harmonic Hills. Otherwise, you can pretty much go through all the parks in the base game and then the two expansions in order with a heart perfect difficulty curve. Only the last few parks in each set deviate from this, and not nearly as much as Amity Airfield.
I've never played RCT2 but grew up playing RCT1, and I definitely agree that the difficulty curve for RCT1 was great because 6-yr-old me was able to beat each of the parks after a few tries.
I totally agree with everything you said. Adding to that: In the German version of the game, the scenarios had translated names and the order was alphabetic by these translated names. Thus Crazy Castle ("Verrückte Burg") was the last "Beginner" scenario. However, Amity Airfield ("Amity-Flugplatz") was still the first "Advanced" scenario in the list.
Chris Sawyer's genius knows no bounds. He actually made the difficulty curve of RCT2 look like a roller coaster.
Ya, start at the highest difficulty and only go down and around from there KEKW
3 meta 5 me
Yeah, but it’s a Zamperla.
RCT2 was made for people who wanted more RCT and were already veterans of the first game. I prefer the first game with its expansions for many reasons.
@@F0nkyNinja same. I was underwhelmed by RCT2 when it first came out. RCT1 knocked it out of the park
Great content as always. It's worth noting Claustrophobia has underground and "confined" sections, while Agoraphobia is in a big open space over the water. Probably obvious, but it wouldn't surprise me if that got past some people.
Well this is the first time I am aware of it. It's so obvious yet I never noticed it.
Mind blown
Thanks for sharing, I never noticed haha.
Only upon repurchasing the game on steam years ago did I understand the reference (I was much younger when I first played and bought the game). Whenever I built new rollercoasters in Diamond Heights I tried to fit in with the name theming, as the Mini Steel rollercoaster was named Arachnophobia. I think I tried Coulrophobia but I got lazy with painting it with rainbow colors.
@@RainingMetal
Is it really a theme of Phobias if it's only half the park? :P
The Miniature Railway, Log Flume and Wooden Mine Ride are not named after any...
Unless Doppelganger is supposed to relate to the phobias?
Something else I think helps rct1's difficulty curve (especially for impulsive kids - speaking from experience) is the locking of more difficult courses until enough earlier ones are completed. While a bit annoying for new installs where they'd need to be beaten again, they keep new players from just jumping straight in the deep end of something like rainbow valley and losing interest.
I obviously knew about that but I completely forgot to mention it. Along with the simplicity of Forest Frontiers it is another thing that stops the player from being overwhelmed.
Completely agree. I remember being disappointed that RCT2's scenarios were all available from the start. The reward and incentive to play through like RCT1 just wasn't there, especially when there was essentially a sandbox mode in the Build Your Own Six Flags park. I just ended up playing that one most of the time.
I think my favorite part of the unlocking mechanism in RCT1 as a kid was that it always provided 5 unbeaten scenarios at a time. Always gave me hype about eventually getting to the new scenario I'd just unlocked (or jumping straight from Forest Frontiers into Bumbly Beach just to check out the new park), and presented a good variety of different situations so you never really felt bored while playing, even on the long stretch of 3/4 year scenarios -- you could always just save and quit for now and try another one out!
Me as a 5 year old child has lost that rct2 tutorial probably over a hundred times. But man did(and do) i love building fun parks with ridiculous murder coasters! There might be some things wrong with me...
That was the reason why I played and beat every single RCT1 scenario, and can‘t remember attempting most of the RCT2 scenarios.
I mostly made and played my own scenarios in RCT2.
This really makes me feel like they expected you to finish RCT1 before even starting RCT2.
I always thought of RCT2 as a sequel game/expansion. I even thought that you'd have to complete all scenarios of RCT1 before starting to play RCT2.
I think Chris and the team treated it like a really big expansion pack and then made it a standalone game when they realized how much content they were adding and how many sales they would miss out on if RCT1 was required
@@shukterhousejive That's exactly how it was lambasted almost universally by critics at the time. They called it "an expansion pack sold to you as a whole new game." I wonder if this had any affect on sales at all.
@@SergeantExtreme I got my first copy of the game as a prize in a cereal box so my blind guess is "quite a bit"
Uhhh, yeah, obviously. That was pretty normal when these games came out, there was a lot less hand holding and if you were playing Whatever 2 it was assumed that it was because you liked Whatever 1 and didn't need it all explained again.
I only had RCT2 as a kid and you're totally right. The high difficulty of the early scenarios made me ignore scenario play entirely as a kid. I basically only played sandbox mode
Yep. I was maybe 4 years old the first time I saw a rollercoaster tycoon game. I wasn’t really all that good at ANY video game, and it was just fun to make crazy coasters in the track designer.
This is quite impressive given the lack of sandbox mode in RCT2.
same, build your own six flags park was my go to
@@HeelBJC you could create your own scenarios and give yourself infinite money, that was essentially "sandbox mode", probably what they mean, that's what I did as a kid anyway
@@HeelBJC Its impressive you think theres no sandbox mode in RCT2, hows it feel to discover a new thing over 2 decades after the game came out?
Pleasant difficulty curve versus ALPHABET
(A)lphabets (B)efore (C)urves!
Game design vs. UI design
This is where a cloud support system would be nice. Each game would report back to the cloud if the user completed the level, and how long the user took (i.e. just send the scenario name and failure/time, no user data). The cloud system would determine how many people have finished which scenarios (if the time is zero, then it is assumed the user failed that scenario), and pass that list back whenever the game is booted up. On boot-up, the game would list the different scenarios in decreasing order of which ones have been completed the most. So players could play any scenario in any order, but steadily the easier ones would go to the front of the list, and the harder ones would go to the back of the list. I.e. if one scenario has been completed 90% of the time, it would tend to be towards the front of the list, while another scenario that has been completed 10% of the time is towards the back of the list.
This would allow the game programmer to see which scenarios are easy vs hard, and try to adjust them if needed (i.e. if the highest success rate is 60%, you might want to make your scenarios easier). A future expansion would allow for custom games, but the player has to complete the scenario first (hopefully without falsifying the data). So the new scenario would initially be near the front of the list (since its success rate is 100%), but as people try it out the success rate% will change.
Also don't forget Ivory Towers, which shows the bad effect disgusting paths can have on your park.. And Crumbly Woods, which lets you deal with very old rides! I think the good thing about the RCT1 scenarios is that most of them are centered around one aspect/gimmick of the game, which is often a good way of designing levels in any game.
I remember when I was a kid, I didn't like playing on any level but Forest Frontiers. I would also start the game through the tutorial button, and then fight the tutorial as it tried to place a merry go round.
For those of you who didn't know (Marcel Vos included), the scenario order in RCT2 was alphabetical in every language., Which made (in my own language for example) Factory Capers the first RCT2 scenario, followed by Crazy Castle then Electric Fields. Sadly, Amity Airfield still was next...
That's interesting, and provides insight into why it's alphabetical.
I wonder if this also means Marcel played it in English as a kid, instead of Dutch
@@nthgth as a Dutch kid in the 90's I remember the parc names being in English (while the rest could be set to Dutch in the settings when installing)
@@jonnnnniej hmm, so maybe the scenario names were not localized like the rest of the game, just reordered based on that language's alphabet.
I guess it's that names don't really have translations as such. The Arc de Triomphe and the Nurburgring Nordschliefe are called those names in English too, and probably Dutch.
Interestingly, as a Hongkonger, Amity Airfield also comes first in the "Advanced Scenarios" in the "alphabetical order" of my language (Hongkongese, which is very similar to Traditional Chinese), although I have been playing the games in English.
So this could have been solved by renaming them from "Crazy Castle" to "3. Crazy Castle" with no issues?
The RCT2 levels feel more like an expansion pack to RCT1, assuming that the player already completed all the scenarios from the first game
That's what I thought all along.
Kind of no.
Yes, even as Electric fields (easiest beginner park) is on a harder range as first RCT1 parks, someone who finished the Pokey, Mystic and Rainbow in RCT1, should breeze trough all three beginner parks and most challenging easily (that being said, it's not just Amity airfield that may be miscategorised. Bumbly Bazar should be in Begginer category).
"Mission pack sequel" is a term often used for games like this.
The difficulty curve in RCT2 also appears to be heavily dependent on the localization. Growing up playing the game in Dutch, all the parks have Dutch translations which makes the order completely different. While it was still not optimal, it was a lot more logical for me than the English order. For example, Amity Airfield is called "Vredig Vliegveld" in Dutch, making it the second to last park in the advanced category, only to be followed by Gravity Gardens ("Zwaartekracht Tuinen"). Until recently I never really understood why people thought Amity Airfield was so difficult, sure it has a hard goal, but for me it was always the second to last one in the advanced category. I recently started replaying the scenario's in OpenRCT2 which keeps the English order of the park, and I now completely understand how messed up the curve is.
Similarly, In Dutch you start of with Electic Fields, and the last park in the beginner category is Crazy Castle which is also more logical.
I guess most people that have played this game have played it in English, but I wonder if there are other "better" scenario orders in other languages as well.
That's a really cool thing I never thought about? I did have this memory of Electric Fields being the first scenario, but I just assumed I misremembered. Turns out that I didn't misremember as I am also Dutch.
For reference, the complete Dutch order is:
Electric Fields (Electric Land)
Factory Capers (Fabriekspark)
Crazy Castle (Gek Kasteel)
Bumbly Bazaar
Infernal Views (Infernale Uitzichten)
Fungus Woods (Paddestoelenwoud)
Botany Breakers (Plantenparadijs)
Dusty Greens (Stoffige Greens)
Amity Airfield (Vredig Vliegveld)
Gravity Gardens (Zwaartekracht Tuinen)
Alpine Adventures (Alpine Avonturen)
Extreme Heights (Extreme Hoogtes)
Lucky Lake (Lucky Meer)
Rainbow Summit (Regenboog Heuvel)
Ghost Town (Spookstad)
It still puts Fungus Woods quite early as quite a difficult scenario, which was definitely a scenario I struggled a lot with when I was a kid, but in my opinion it is a much better progression than the English order
@@roelercoaster I noticed that they're simply listed in alphabetical order. In fact, this is also the case in the English version, too. This would explain a lot, actually...
My favourite scenarios in RCT1 were the expansion pack scenarios where you'd complete the partially built coasters and get a certain excitement rating
Damn no way!
Razor rocks?
@@Gameprojordan Razor Rocks had the objective to build 10 different types of coasters with an excitement of at least 6. Scenarios that have OP's objective include Volcania and Dragon's Cove (plus a few more).
@@youngwii ohhh right right
I love the end of the first expansion. Geoffrey Gardens, basically Evergreen Gardens' big brother. All that space and the very long time given to bring in enough guests means you have time to really plan what you're doing and work on beautifying your park.
I loved the scenarios in RCT1. Whenever you unlocked a new one it was exciting to see what it was about. I only played RCT2 many years later and got bored with it pretty quickly. It really seems as if for the RCT1 scenarios, the thought process was "how can we make the gameplay different and interesting for every scenario", whereas for RCT2 it was just "what are interesting locations to build a park on".
As a kid, I remember I *really* enjoyed Leafy Lake-just something about the forest scenery and the big lake really ignited my imagination. The difficulty level was great too; just hard enough to feel a bit constrained, but easy enough that I could build a fun park with a variety of rides as a 10 year old :P
I must have built parks on Leafy Lake a dozen times but never really spent much time on other scenarios.
I did the same, but I always built the Wooden Roller Coaster blueprint "Mischief" on the lake out of habit.
I feel the exact same way about Leafy Lake and also Evergreen Gardens. I think it's the loveliest scenarios that came with the games. I have this vivid memory from like 20 years ago of when I lived in Seattle and watching it rain in game while also looking outside where it was raining in real life. Every time I go back and do those two scenarios in OpenRCT2 and it rains, I get this deep feeling of beauty and happiness reminding me of all the fun Ive had playing the games over the years and all the parks I've made.
6 year old me would build a big train ride with stops around the circumference of the park and I would fill the lake up with various rides with a big bridge that would go across the center of the lake. However, I never took into account that building over water was more expensive.
@@marcinmisiek768 Haha, I built a train like that too :). Something really satisfying about a train going around the lake stopping at several different stations.
Leafy Lake is a good one. For extra challenge build rides only on the lake and try to still pass the objective. Then do the opposite and try to pass the objective. For extra extra challenge repay your loan immediately so you have $0 and only make money at first by deleting pathways and upping the entrance fee to $5.00 below the amount of money the guest has. Guests won't come along often at first. It's the ultimate sandbox way of playing. I like to do that with all the scenarios.
I never thought about it, but yeah, RCT1 was incredible in its pacing for my childhood brain. I can still remember some (for me) incredible revelations about the game for just about every scenario: Playing Forest Frontiers waaay past its goal until I bought enough land and researched enough to create a boat hire in the woods; that "whoops" moment in Dusty Dunes when I first found the landscaping tools, clicked and dragged and ended up with a giant, expensive, pyramid-shaped mountain of sand; seeing the sprinklers in Evergreen Gardens and thinking back to a trip to actual, real life Disney Land where they had those too... sooo many memories, now literal decades old, and I still feel like sitting in my dad's office chair playing this game on a Gateway with 266 MHz. Makes me feel old, but in the good way, y'know :)
I think the only flaw with RCT1 (and RCT2) is the lack of a fast forward button (which was rectified years later when RCTC was introduced), imagine having to sit through 4 hours of gameplay of Evergreen Gardens just because you installed RCT1 into a new computer
I remember first realizing that you could build underground in Dynamite Dunes. Because the mine coaster went through wooden structures, I used to believe for a long time that you have to apply the wooden texture on the underground first in order to be able to build tunnels.
The hardest scenarios for me are the ones that say “don’t let your park rating go below ___ at any time!”
Yes, because they can be a bit random. Station brakes failure plus rain when you are just saving all your money to complete the gigacoaster - very risky.
Most of those scenarios have unlimited money, so i usually start with hiring like, 50 or 100 of each employee. That way my park rating almost never drops!
Yeah the Great Wall, i was rly happy when i saw infity money, but holy that park kicks sometimes ass.
@@nlsoy good strategy. In that case, maybe you could survive a brakes failure if your guests otherwise have nothing bringing their happiness down
really?? those are super easy and boring for me because they usually have no money so whatever lowers your rating you can fix immediately
I have memories of Crazy Castle, the first few ones is getting mad at all the guests getting lost and painstakingly moving them to the exit of the park
Then learning to just delete the 7 pieces of path that connect the central footpath to the one that goes around the whole park.
I agree, Crazy Castle is a terrible first level
Haha same, I felt so accomplished after beating the scenario. I also remember carefully considering which scenario to tackle next, as the difficulty curve seemed random and I noticed that the scenarios were sorted alphabetically underlining my idea that it was just selection menu and not a campaign to be done successively
Crazy Castle was pretty satisfying as a first park for someone who has played RCT before, but not for the last 20 years.
The biggest offense of the larger RCT2 scenarios is that they don't provide enough unique ride types to reach the guest goals. Amity Airfield would be much more interesting if I didn't have to build 4 inverted hairpin coasters and 4 bobsled coasters to win
Amity airfields was "themed" to be an aviation park, so the ride selections is heavily limited by nature, I find it to be a worse off version of Woodworm Park which thankfully had a decent ride selection.
I think the bigger problem with Amity Airfield lies with the pay-to-enter park as this meant slower guest turnovers and ATMs can only help so much to get guests to buy $20 umbrellas, foods, drinks and souvenirs
I'm one of those that started out from RCT2 as a kid, right after falling in love with Chris Sawyer's Locomotion.
My PTSD park is actually Crazy Castle, I did spend a ton of hours on it trying to beat it. I ended up playing the beginner parks for fun and not for the objective for a long time before going back to it and actually beat it. Years later I played the original RCT and indeed I noticed how much more fun and chill it was; I think RCT2 was made as a follow-up to RCT, as in an even harder set of parks. If you play them one after the other the transition is almost unnoticeable and you still have fun.
To me the most annoying thing of RCT2 is the vast use of multiple-rows-paths. Since as a beginner you take a while to realize how bad the guests' path-finding really is, you end up with your park rating going down and guests getting lost without understanding why midway through your gameplay.
Maybe a tier-list going from the easiest to the hardest scenarios for both games, or separately, would make for an interesting video
Agreed! This would make a great video.
this
Yes please! This would be great
i mean, Amity Airfield is straight up the hardest scenario in the entire game.
I guess this explains why when I was a little kid I loved playing RCT1, then when I got RCT2 in a cereal box a few years later I randomly tried a few scenarios and quickly rage quit and returned to RCT1.
I thought "Wow, that's extreme", but then I remembered that my sister and I used to play Electric Fields a lot in RCT2 and couldn't get the hang of it either, despite having played RTC1 and picking the easiest scenario. People would get lost on the path that was already there all the time, which tanked our park rating.
I had the same experience as a young kid. I loved RCT1 and played it nonstop, eventually got RCT2 but the scenarios were all a bit too crazy and difficult for me so I went back to building parks on Evergreen Garden in RCT1.
RCT1 was excellent in being approachable to even young children, RCT2, despite having more stuff and improvements, failed in that aspect. When I got a bit older I started to enjoy making custom stuff in RCT2 but it could have been enjoyable from the start if it actually had a proper difficulty curve.
Shout out to getting cereal box games and other paraphernalia. So my parents had to make a rule about which sibling got what ever was in the box because we fought so much over it.
I was exactly the same, eagerly tried RCT2 after having spent lots of quality time with 1 and it just didn't "click" for me. Although I believe I actually purchased the full RCT2 at a Scholastic Book Fair.
I think they just assumed everyone had played RCT1 before playing RCT2 so they didn't put much thought in the scenario section. I don't remember struggling much in RCT2 scenarios because I played RCT1 before.
Indeed.
Same
I also didn’t like how in RCT2 had every scene too unlocked whereas in the first instalment, you had to beat other ones to get them activated , gives more of an ambition.
If you use OpenRCT2 you can lock the scenario's in the same way RCT1 does
The scenarios in RCT2 were bad in general, and when combined with the 'locked' Six Flags coasters that you couldn't modify make me surprised RCT2 did as well as it did. In RCT1 each Scenario felt like a carefully crafted, balanced location for you to improve, each one had character event before you started. The ones in RCT2 overused scenery pieces to build fairly ugly, unconvincing structures, and were typically uninteresting places.
Airfield wasn't just a difficult scenario, it might as well been a blank space, because once you've built a park around it there's nothing really there. It wasn't rewarding to work with.
I guess RCT2 survived on having better game mechanics, but the scenarios played a huge role in why I had more fun with RCT1 when it came out than I ever did with the sequel.
I think the reason RCT2 was more successful is because most people just made a giant empty park with unlimited money in the scenario editor and finally had their huge sandbox mode rather than bother with the scenarios. It was such a hugely missed feature in the original game and it "technically" isn't even in RCT2 unless you abuse the scenario editor.
@@UndyingNephalim ✋🏻 can confirm, that's all my friends and I did with RCT2 back in the day
Yes. It is not the scenarios of RCT2 that sells it. It is all the other aspects. If you played RCT1 you likely had fewer issues than someone that started with RCT2, however. But I do think it would have been better to work on the layout and difficulty curve of those scenarios. As I remember it, I was a lot more interested in beating all the scenarios in RCT1 than RCT2.
@@UndyingNephalim Their was this no-money scenario in RCT1 that actually served us as sandbox mode, after, what a surprise, the park got closed down due to inferior park rating - not because it was that difficult, but - let's be honest - who doesn't like to build a twister coaster up to the support limit and go down to zero with a helix tower?
@@Rudl1044 Yeah that was Arid Heights in Loopy Landscapes. Once I discovered that scenario I pretty much never bothered to play any other. It still was not as sandboxy as what you could do in RCT2 (despite being literal sand). For instance you were stuck with certain ride selections where's in the RCT2 scenario editor you could pick any ride you wanted. It's funny that 20 years later I'm more interested in structured scenarios then the free for all unlimited money sandboxes.
Love this, great points. Another thing I believe Evergreen Gardens teaches you is how guests can get lost and unhappy with too many paths leading to nothing. It's wise to "prune" the path network at the start of this garden scenario :)
"...Which introduces the concept of water"
I cant believe Chris Sawyer invented Water, Truly ahead of his time.
Just something to add on this list:
Evergreen Gardens was probably my favorite park from RCT1 because it showed a lot of layout possibilities using scenario items and trees. Not that I used that in other parks (because I suck at that).
Another thing it showed during the learning curve is that people get lost in a park that is too big. And that is something the game tells you early on with a decreasing guests happiness and messages. After that park, I always close off any paths leading into the distance and slowly expand over time.
Evergreen Gardens also introduces the gate fee and makes more rides available for research than any of the parks before it. Those two points combined with its size and long duration make it a great park for experimenting with the game's features.
I remember having trouble with a lot of game systems as a kid that weren't explained to me, until I started watching your video. For example ride prices, G-forces, ride requirements are things that should have be taught by the game
I remember Bumbly Beach being my absolute favorite stage when I was a kid just because it's a beach and I thought it looked awesome.
Also Katie's World was like the furthest I could get and I just replayed Bumbly Beach a lot.
Oh I'm glad I started out with RCT1, because I remember I was like 10 years old when I started playing RCT2 and the only scenario I could ever beat was Robin Hood.
Great video! A few other scenarios of RCT1 that in my opinion are crucial in learning how the game works:
Crumbly Woods - makes you deal with extremely old rides and all consequences coming from that, teaching you that at some point it's worth replacing rides
Lightning Peaks - extremely rainy scenario that might encourage you to build underground and learn that guests will still ride underground rides
Ivory Towers - teaches you how to recover an absolute mess of a park, turning into a functional one
Corkscrew Follies/Added Attractions builds on that same progression nicely, too. It really feels like an extension of the original scenario pack. Loopy Landscapes goes in a different direction, but that's also not a bad thing since it adds variety and rewards different ways of playing.
I remember a very long time ago on one of the RCT fansites, there was an article about Crazy Castle and something about "to master a thing, you must return to the beginning" because of how damn difficult it was. Amity Airfield was also guilty af.
The first time I found out that crashes were a thing was when Agoraphobia or Claustrophobia crashed due to a brakes failure. Got the shock of my life and immediately chose to put only one train on any coaster, ever. The only coaster where I used more trains was the wooden, if the water splash track piece was available, those couldn't fail in slowing down trains.
Only a couple of years ago I found out how mechanics worked, thanks to OpenRCT2 :)
RCT 1 has the best scenarios, RCT 2 went a bit zany, even if it has many qol and technical improvements over the first game.
RCT 3 Scenarios on the other hand😬
@@aturchomicz821 never played it, am curious
@@aturchomicz821 haven't played it in years but I remember rct3 scenarios looking nice & having a neat variety of goals
RCT2 dropped the ball when it prevented you from charging for both the park entrance and the rides. I know this is a cheat in OpenRCT2 but it doesn't work properly.
@@RainingMetal that mechanic was introduced in the Loopy Landscapes expansion for RCT1, if I remember correctly.
Diamond Heights was my favorite scenario as a kid. I would constantly play it over and over trying new things. Suppose I preferred a prebuilt park I can modify instead of building one from scratch.
Agreed. RCT1 in general has much nicer and more interesting scenarios in very nicely detailed parks, while RCT2 (the base game) tends to have very flat designs, or ones that don't have much design to them outside of randomly using the mountain tool. Parks like Gravity Gardens are there, but there are too few.
I never really got familiar with 2's expansions, so I don't know if they got much better with that.
The RCT2 expansions somehow do it worse than the base game. Especially a few in wacky worlds…
@@SheepyFields I would argue some of the expansion parks are pretty okay, but there's a lot that are pretty bad. they're a lot cooler to look at than actually play in most cases
Haven't seen the video yet, but i completely agree. I had so much fun going through the RCT1 progression and a I just turned of the progressive unlocking in OpenRCT2 for the RCT2 scenarios
Seems to me that RCT2 assumed that everyone played RCT1. Almost like a prerequisite.
Back then, in PC gaming, that wasn't unfair to assume.
A lot of sequels back then were just glorified expansions to the base game.
There's almost no reason you couldn't just backport DOOM 2 into DOOM 1's campaign, for example.
As a young kid without all the insider info here on this channel, and always trying to build rides I was proud of and not efficient or spammy, the RCT1 difficulty curve was STEEP after around the midpoint. I never got to the later scenarios in any pack.
I also never found any enjoyment in RCT2’s scenarios at all. To this day I’ve only beaten a couple. The scenario editor turned into a sandbox mode, and I was free to do whatever I wanted, focusing on aesthetics over management.
To this day, I play RCT1 for management sim, RCT2 for sandbox park designer.
My problem was that I consistently undercharged for rides. If I remembered to set a gate fee, it was fine, but I didn't always, and so I often ended up broke. Mothball/Mystic Mountain is the point at which that no longer becomes workable since, unlike most scenarios before it, you don't get an established park to continue from.
I think one of the biggest problems with the scenarios in general, and something that's maybe counteruinitive especially to a younger player, is the massively excessive pathing you start out with in the larger parks. It's pretty much strictly detrimental because guests get lost and spend less time near your attractions when you're starting out. It also then tempts you to build all over the place rather than building close to the entrance, resulting in rides with really low throughput. Worse, you might think the solution to the problem is to build transport rides, not realizing that guests won't purposefully use them to get to your other rides. It seems a little strange that the first thing you should do in many of these scenarios is to immediately cut off 90% of the existing path from the park entrance.
The weirdest thing about the preset pieces you encounter in RCT is how _inexpensive_ they've set everything to be relative to how much the guests will actually pay. The prices seem(ed) to somewhat reflect "real world" prices, and that leads the player to use those low-ball figures as standards, when in reality the game will only reward them for cranking those prices up
i always felt that even the expansions of RCT1 had a clear progression that i loved. the way you described how even just the first 5 do it, is really cool to think about now because i definitely got the experience you're describing as a kid - picking things up through what the game introduces. it still holds up as a great introduction imo.
RCT1 Deluxe is top tier for its campaign
I remember as kid first beating leafy lake by only staying on the land, because I thought that was the only way I could... But recently I opened the game up and played the scenario again beating it by placing rides only on water.
It still isn't that hard, but it's interesting to challenge yourself either way, either avoiding water, and you have limited land, or only water which is more expensive
Sweet video! Here are a few other details:
- Diamond Heights shows you how transport rides work with Indiana Railroad
- Trinity Islands is the first scenario without any large flat areas (in Diamond Heights the water is shallow enough that you can build over it) This forces players to learn landscaping, either working with the terrain or making enough money to flatten it.
- Katie's World shows how you can construct entire rides underwater with Runaway Plumber.
- Katie's World also shows that boat hires can be just a dock instead of a closed circuit. It's a detail we take for granted, but a nice one.
Spot on Marcel. I only ever played RCT 1 growing up, and didn't get round to playing 2 until I found your channel and OpenRCT2, but I think that it makes a lot of sense to start people on 1 before jumping to 2. I can't imagine how weird it would feel starting on 2 and going back to 1 afterwards.
Age of Empires reference? I like it. 👍🤓
Man, the love I had as a child for this game has suddenly returned out of the blue. Time to build some new parks in my spare time!
I remember as a kid I finished almost all RCT1 scenarios, but in RCT2 I didn't even manage to complete the first one :/
Another thing RCT1's scenarios did really well (mostly vanilla game) was that as you progressed you'd discover new rides and coasters. I remember getting excited seeing the Souvenir Stall on Dynamite Dunes and Inverted Rollercoaster in Diamond Heights.
And you kept seeing new rides all the way up to White Water Park which was the first one to introduce the Legendary Vertical Drop Rollercoaster.
Oh man, Amity Airfield. The scenario which you start by painstakingly removing all the paths forming the airfield.
I actually remember finding Diamond Heights harder than the other scenarios when I was a kid playing this game, simply because I found it was harder to keep park value up. A lot of that was due to me not being particularly great at using space, and finding the rides were already prone to sucking up space. I did like the scenario's park design however; the synchronized loopers are iconic, and I also liked how they did the railway on that one.
Speaking of which, you actually can get crashes on Dynamite Blaster and those two as well; it always sucks when it happens too, since they're well done pre-mades and it can fry your run if it does happen. Bumbly's wooden coaster just seems to be more likely to crash when the breakdowns occur, likely due to its train design and set up.
As for RCT 2, I just found them lacking and preferred Corkscrew Follies and Loopy Landscapes. More the former than the latter. I will state that a lot of it was due to how BS I found some of their park goals, since those were way too hard for a kid who sometimes struggled to get over 1k people into the park.
you missed the extra area with mine shaft and lake in Forest Frontiers... i remember as a kid i always bought the land and made a railway loop around it, it was so cool little detail, but one of the most memorable ones
RCT2 has much fewer path types than RCT1.
Also, RCT1 can choose support type apart from the path type whereas RCT2 follows the path type itself.
openrct2 added the missing terrain types from rct1, hopefully they can do this too
if we think whiteout DLC's then no, rct2 have up to 7 different usable paths (Grey, Brown and Green Asphalt, Dirt, Ash, Cobblestone and space), while rct1 have only 4 (Grey Asphalt, Dirt, Cobblestone and Tan Tiles)
The road is avaiable for both, but the player can't use them in gameplay
DLC paths that added was for rct1 (Brown, Green and Red asphalt, Ash and Bamboo, Grey, Red and Green Tiles) while rct2 have (Rainbow, Forest, Mosaic, Circuit, Pavement and rocky), which bring 8 in dlcs of rct1 and 6 in rct2, so 10 path types in rct1 and 13 path types in rct2, which bring again, as a no, rct2 have more path in general (Of course I don't talk about queue lines as rct2 beat that easily in a 13vs4).
When I first played RCT1, I didn't like deleting trees. So I played the entire list of scenarios in order without deleting a single tree (I did change the terrain elevation sometimes to build underground though). By the time I had gotten to Rainbow Valley, it was one of the easiest scenarios.
Rainbow Valley isn't bad if you're used to building custom rides and working with the terrain. Its low guest goal relative to time makes it bearable.
There were a few scenarios in RCT1 that were oddly difficult for their placement (Woodworm Park), oddly easy (Mineral Park), or difficult for all the wrong reasons (Micro Park).
I'll just say it like this: In RCT1, I finished every single scenarios, including the Mega Park (which was awful because the game is not intended to be this big without a cash machine or other implantation from RCT2). As for RCT2, I started with Factory Campers because I was used to get a revenue from the entry and the ride revenue was still a mystery of "why I can charge 5$ on something and 1$ is too pricey for something else (the price decrease as the coaster gets older). However, I never finished all advanced scenarios event if I did complete a few experts. Amity Airfield is atrociously hard if you barely understand the new core mechanics. Now, thanks to Marcel, if I were to replay that map, I would pass it with flying colors, but holy heck, RCT1 proved that sometimes, simplicity is better than quantity.
P.S. When I first played RCT1, I didn't understand a thing. Even with the tutorial, (which actually scared me because I couldn't control my mouse anymore) I was at a lost. I actually had to watch my Dad play the game to understand it. I was 8, for the reference. It was my first management game and I almost had an horrible experience with it. 😅 (Tutorial is scary)
I think the difficulty curve in RCT1 is fantastic and some things you didn't mention were things you had to deal with too as a newcomer:
Pokey Park showing the difference between buying land and construction rights
White Water Park showing you different kinds of water rides along with how dinghy slides should be designed
Evergreen Gardens for instance was a scenario where I struggled with because I wanted to retain as much of the original spirit as possible. I think this scenario in particular shows that you sometimes have to destroy some pre-built scenery to achieve the goal. BUT you can successfully do it while everything stays intact. I think as a park for beginning players, it's got a lot of replay value.
Karts & Coasters, Mel's World, Crumbly Woods, Katie's World making you overthink the pre-built rides and whether they can stay forever or not. It's kind of a similar beast as Evergreen Gardens, just at a larger scale as the rides are usually space-consuming, big rollercoasters which stand in your way all of a sudden. And it's every time really hard for me to tear them down but it's usually for the better.
I fully agree with the sentiments here. RCT1 was so great in expanding slowly, that it was great fun. Meanwhile RCT2 scared me off with those weirdly difficult scenarios. The first thing I always did was pause the game, delete half of the pathways and install tons of boring maintenance stuff, so the park can function at all. Otherwise it quickly turns into a path finding nightmare which ruins your park scores.
I barely finished any RCT2 scenarios, tbh. Quite a shame. RCT1 on the other hand I beat almost all the way through.
another thing, rct1 has a full-on tutorial stage that uses Forest Frontiers and guides you through multiple different aspects of the game. You don't necessarily need it to understand the game, but I believe rct2 doesn't have that in any form. Using that tutorial was how I learned how to play when I was little.
IIRC, RCT2 actually had a tutorial level, but it was hidden away in the main menu
It's what taught kid me that you can place doors on smaller attractions, like the mouse coaster
@@Devilhar I think you may be right because after I commented this I actually did a search for the tutorial level in rct1, and I noticed that the main menu option that represents it is also on the main menu for rct2. rct2 to my knowledge still boots up on Windows 10 so I'm actually going to go check it real quick.
here's a link to a video of RCT1's tutorial, which I noticed Marcel actually commented on a couple of months ago
ruclips.net/video/XVy5gqKp2d8/видео.html
Edit: just checked and you are correct, roller coaster tycoon 2 actually has three separate tutorials in it. I'm going to look around and see if they're preserved on RUclips in any way and if they're not I'm going to record them myself
@@PSPMan Explanation of what and where, link to video, and list of actions of how to proceed
You good sir, are a gem
@@Devilhar this person has an archive upload of the beginners tutorial for rct2, but I'm searching RUclips and it seems like the custom rides tutorial as well as the roller coaster building tutorial are missing, so I might just record those myself and upload them.
ruclips.net/video/n5K-VUlBgQ8/видео.html
Edit: not going to upload them myself, rct2 was originally designed for 832x624 aspect ratio, and for some reason whenever you boot up the tutorial it resets the screen size to 800x600 and looks bad. I poked around in the game's files to try and find the file that will let me change the base values but I can't find it. OBS doesn't like aspect ratio changes when recording so I'd rather just not do it and see if somebody else can
While RCT1's difficulty curve is great, I've got to give a shoutout to RCT Classic in this regard. While overall I prefer OpenRCT2, I believe RCT Classic has the best difficulty curve out of all the versions.
TRUTH. Was thinking about this the whole video
Though Dusty Greens being placed way too high in difficulty was a bit strange. 5K a month from ride income is cake and the Sceario is in like the top three difficulty levels.
Because all of the pre-built steel mini coasters in RCT1 don’t have any banked turns, AND Arachnophobia at Diamond Heights doesn’t have any banked turns, it was actually _years_ into playing that I realized that the steel mini coaster could do banked turns!
It only got banked turns if you had Loopy Landscapes installed, actually.
7:10 "The coaster is prone to crashing, which not only scares the crap out of you..."
Too true, Marcel, too true.
I actually remember claustraphobia and dynamite blaster crashing as well so this wasn't even my first experience.
@@Demorid Dynamite Blaster only crashes if you mess with it or in an extreme fluke following a safety cut-out. In its starting configuration, it's perfectly safe during a station brakes failure.
@@reillywalker195 I remember sawing one time Dynamite crashing during brake failiure, as the train was full of guests. But often, either claustophobia or agrophobia crashes.
Its so interesting that im seeing this video now! My brother and i grew up playing rct2 and we never played anything but the sandbox tutorial since all of the scenarios were impossible
When I was 6 years old, I had no concept of what a loan was (and had no idea how to fix ride prices to make the most money), and I remember discovering the feature to take out a loan when out of money on bumbly beach. I would just take out as much money as possible and use it build oversized rides that never paid off and I would eventually go deep in the red. I would then play to beat the park objectives before I would go bankrupt from loans.
I don't even play Rollercoaster Tycoon, but these videos are so interesting I get stuck watching more and more of them.
As a kid who grew up with RCT2 but never RCT 1, this video makes so much sense about why the game was hard for me, and I wish I could go back in time and start with RCT1.
Diamond Heights also teaches that maintenance of rides is significant because I remember the dueling coasters would always crash due to brake failure and plummet my park rating. I would close them and add brakes to the end.
RCT2 didn’t just have a worse difficulty curve, it just had worse scenarios in general
This. RCT2 is a great game in it's new rides and how some old ones were revamped, but the scenarios are just overall bad. It looks like the dev team didn't fully understand/aknowledge their game limitations and problems, and expected everyone to have the same grasp as people who know the game code by memory. So you have ludicrous, unfun scenario goals that push you to "exploit" the game mechanics on really bad, confusing and poorly designed map layouts (looking at you, Crazy Castle)
@@dwarf9938 I just failed Crazy Castle yesterday, lol. Funny enough I kept playing and now I'm almost at 1500 guests with no real mayor changes.. for some reason.
Yeah, Amity Airfield definitely messed up that curve.
I agree. I remember really liking the scenarios cause it actually taught you to get better with more constraints.
Yes! Thank you for articulating so many of my feelings about the difficulties in RCT1 and 2! I completely agree. RCT2 was definitely meant for people who already knew what they were doing, and I can appreciate that. But there was no sensible ordering of the scenarios. I also REALLY appreciated unlocking a scenario first before you could try it in RCT1 which we didn't see in RCT2. That was a big difference as well
The first time I played Evergreen Gardens in 1999- 7 year old me was devastated when my junior coaster crashed.
Ah i never really thought about this but I do remember it! Back before I knew what a difficulty curve was, in RCT1 where you had to unlock new scenarios by completing previous ones it made the difficulty curve more linear, whereas in RCT2 you can pick any scenario to start with.
I've been watching your channel for over a year simply because I enjoy analytical content like this, but this video has sparked serious interesting playing RTC for me. Is there a guide about which version to start with and a cheat sheet for stat requirements?
My opinion is to get both rct 1&2 on steam, then get open rct2 and link them to it. That way, you can play all the scenarios from both with the improved UI of rct2. Plus, any savegames you have in either game will be accessible in open rct2 as well.
For stat requirements, most roller coasters are as simple as building a high enough drop and not getting G forces in the red (especially lateral G's). A few rides do require something special like an inversion for full stats though. You won't regret playing this game, it's still extremely fun after all these years!
This is because Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 was basically a standalone expansion pack for RCT1. It added more content and levels but was not really a sequel at all. RCT3 was the first real sequel with all the good and bad that came with it.
Chris and the team assumed everyone had played RCT1 before playing RCT2 so they didn't put much effort into the scenario section, really it was probably going to be an expansion pack, but executives saw dollar signs in their eyes by releasing it stand alone.
One lesson that is underrated: evergreen gardens tells you that even though you start with a massive amount of land and scenery, you still need to start out in segments.
Sure, it's all pretty, but without maps and without a good way around, peeps WILL get lost. So delete paths and rebuild them later!
Huh, I don't remember Bumbly Beach for the coaster constantly crashing. I remember it for the Urban Scenery you could never get and that you could build on the beach itself. Or close to it using Construction Rights.
It took until Loopy Landscapes much later to be able to use Urban Scenery even though it was in the base game...
I love the RCT 1 campaign. Such good memories. RCT 2 feels like an expansion pack/upgrade for people who have already learnt the game from RCT 1.
Another interesting thing to mention is that Agoraphobia spends most of it's time over a large open lake while Claustrophobia has underground sections and passes closer to other attractions and trees.
I think something cool about dynamite dunes is how the existing roller coaster teaches you about ride age. I remember being surprised that everyone was complaining about this cool coaster - I think not building though other good coasters made it a lot harder in my first play through!
Good video as always
You left out something that always confused me when I was younger - in electric fields the guests have the "prefer less intense rides" flag set, but you get loads of intense rides in the research. That was the hardest of the beginner parks for me before I figured out why haha
I remember playing and completing every scenario in the base RCT1 game, and having to start over a few times due to the DST bug.
I was so excited for RCT2, but was put off by the difficulty. I ended up going back to RCT1 and tried completing all the expansion pack scenarios, and didn't pick up RCT2 again for several years.
I was never good at RCT and when I played RCT2 I found the "beginner" parks uncomfortably large. After one go of Amity Airfield I gave up playing.
Most of my memories of the game are from Diamond Heights. The twin and mobius coasters there are so cool! I still have a soft spot for it, even though Claustrophobia/Agoraphobia kept crashing for me. I didn't know how to stop it happening except to restrict them to one train each. I did the same with Bumbly Beach so never had a crash there.
It's hard without block brakes...
The key to do it without block brakes is to try as hard as possible to prevent the trains from going too fast when they reach the station without brakes, as in RCT1 the station brakes failure also affects regular brakes. One way to prevent this is to keep those trains moving at any cost; set their set-off time to the absolute minimum waiting time and keep them leaving the station. If a roller coaster suffers from brakes failure in these conditions, the train will simply move past the station and begin another circuit instead of crashing into another train.
Your videos have single handily reignited my love for the roller coaster tycoon series. I loved them as a kid and I’m having equal fun as an adult in new ways
RCT1 had the better scenarios by far, even the expansion scenarios were well designed and fit well with the rest of the game and I've fond memories of most of them. RCT2 on the other hand I remember finding the scenarios either too difficult or uninteresting, most of my time with RCT2 was spend making my own parks and rides with the editor
When discussing Crazy Castle I would have also mentioned the fact that the scenario is a Pay For Rides scenario. As a kid that was a huge barrier for me because I always ran out of money and would get stuck even after maxing the loan. It's not obvious to a new or very young player how much you can charge for a ride without a lot of experimenting. Plus as a young kid I assumed that the default number was close to the highest amount I could charge for the ride when the reality was most of the time I was probably undercharging.
I really loved to play RCT1 as a kid, but never got that spark for RCT2. This might be the reason; I still remember how Pokey Park was my favourite!
I think Big Pier and Lightning Peaks are also important scenarios in that they cover scenarios entirely over water (BP) and on mountainous terrain (LP).
Oddly enough, it wasn't the coaster in Bumbly Beach that would crash often for me. For me, it was either of the dueling coasters in Diamond Heights, or The Storm or Runaway Plumber in Katie's World.
Runaway Plumber shouldn't crash in its starting configuration, at least in RCT1. Its cars re-enter the station below 30 MPH even when fully loaded.
This analysis is *exactly* what I experienced, moving from Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 to 2.
Rollercoaster Tycoon 1: gradual difficulty curve, eventually leading to the really interesting scenarios (I also liked the one entirely over water - I think it was a pier-related one?)
Rollercoaster 2: we hope you're already good at the game because here you are!
Even though I knew what I was doing (except for anything added in RCT2), it was so overwhelming that I gave up after not very long and went back to 1 ^^;
I'll give RCT2 another go at some point. And I'll bear this video in mind, aheh.
You're right about RCT1. That's Big Pier/Paradise Pier, which follows another interesting scenario: Crumbly Woods. Thunder Rock is a nice denouement following Rainbow Valley, meanwhile-a long but easy and fun scenario to let your imagination run wild.
One thing that Dynamite Dunes introduces aswell is how to work with slopes / different heights, while the first scenario is completely flat
I really liked in RCT1 how you couldn't access all the scenarios from the start. You had a few available to start with, and harder ones unlocked as you progressed, which made it rewarding to beat a scenario so you could see what challenge came next. With RCT2 you could just open all of the scenarios, realise there's no real reward for completing a park, and give up.
I don't think all the scenarios are available from the get-go in RCT2 either though?
@@ShaCaro I thought they were but I could be wrong - it's been a long time!
Some things you didn't touch on: Added Attractions/Corkscrew Follies and Loopy Landscapes just continued the difficulty curve from where RCT1 originally left off. By the end of AA/CF, you have some real challenging scenarios like Pickle Park and Fiasco Forest that require a knowledge of things like what makes for efficient ride design, preventing crashes, pulling in guests, balancing finances, and raising park values. You also have the first "Build 10 coasters over X excitement" objective in Coaster Crazy. Loopy Landscapes immediately turns the difficulty to 11 by introducing the pay-for-park-entry OR pay-per-ride divide that dramatically cuts income while introducing some of the longest and most challenging scenarios yet, like "Build 10 obscenely long coaster" monsters Octagon Park and Nevermore Park. I've always imagined Chris Sawyer as designing RCT2's scenarios a little half-hazardly and just picking up the difficulty curve where Loopy Landscapes left off. An additional shame is that when he *did* get the chance to remake the RCT1 scenarios for RCT2 in the form of RCT Classic, he forced RCT2's hard pay-for-park-entry OR pay-per-ride divide (RCT2 scenario file format won't let you do both like in RCT1) onto the original scenarios - making them all harder.
7:03 Bumbly Beach's coaster is no more likely to crash than Dynamite Blaster or Diamond Height's coasters (or any pre-builts like Woodchip). Bumbly Beach is where purchasable construction rights are introduced though (not that many players use them in that scenario).
It also has to be a pain to play RCT1 scenarios in RCT2 and have to retrofit block brakes onto every coaster. It feels weird to me to even have access to block brakes in some scenarios, as the art of making a coaster without block zones that can last years and never crash is especially valuable in Octagon Park and Nevermore Park (the latter of which gave me an incident where I missed that mechanics couldn't access a ride's exit, and that ride experienced a station brakes failure and kept running for multiple in-game months before I noticed) www.reddit.com/r/rct/comments/28cn7f/you_know_your_coaster_is_reliable_when_you_fail/
The biggest thing that pains me when seeing new players try RCT1 scenarios in RCT2 is the new scenery tools, though. Raising scenery off the ground and making buildings and stuff was never in the design scope of RCT1 (though Chris Sawyer tried to half-bake those ideas in with the building-style landscape textures included in Loopy Landscapes). And as freeing as those RCT2 features are for creative expression, I think they fail to offer mechanical depth (something Parkitect would try to rectify with its scenery rating mechanics) and complicate things too much for newer players. Also limitation breeds creativity - something Rainbow Valley illustrates to a painful degree. People will fundamentally play the game differently between vanilla RCT1 and RCT1-in-OpenRCT2 (or even worse, RCT Classic). I've never seen anyone agree with that take, though. I'm probably too much of a RCT1 purist (and I can't even play the game anymore (without resorting to autohotkey) since the in-game key rebind tools don't allow you to map the arrow keys onto WASD, something OpenRCT2 and Parkitect have turned into my default control style).
As a RCT1 purist myself I agree, I've played RCT2 plenty of times and the new scenery and features are all nice and all but I have to question myself to what point it becomes overdone to game experience. While creativity in RCT2 is more settled around scenery apart from completing the objective. RCT1's creativity is more settled around expanding your park right with the objectives and scenario, to which results that you will always have an unique experience each different scenario. Loopy Landscapes is what RCT2 in my opinion should've been. providing interesting yet challenging objectives that would challenge the player to get creative especially when you have to build coasters for the objective. The one big reason why people prefer RCT2 over RCT1 is due to its creative freedom and more stuff to play with despite it having a very linear scenario experience and a very flawed progression system that is pretty much non-existant (cause all parks are already unlocked from the start). RCT2 does provide the advanced toolbox for building your custom parks, but for me that is about the only big positive compared to its predecessor, yet it also is its major drawback as a game. It is kinda like Minecraft, yet RCT2 does not have survival mode to which RCT2 evolved into a different kind of game. You can be really creative in RCT2, but in RCT1 you need to be creative.
Wait, I don't think Loopy LAndscapes introduced "Pay for entry/Free rides" or vice versa .I remember Loopy Landscapes forcing all park entries to FREE in the scenarios.
@@DoktorVicTim true, they are all free so you have to limit yourself on rides only
Dynamite Blaster is immune to brakes failure crashes if you don't tamper with its train length.
You are 100% accurate about RCT1. It was great to progress slowly and slowly learn everything. This was PC my first game as a kid.
The most facinating thing for me about RCT 1 & 2 is, that Sawyer wrote the entire game in assembly, or machine language. Putting so much effort into a game paid off in the end!
I also liked how in rct1 you had to beat the first few scenarios to unlock more. In rct2 all the scenarios were available at the start so it felt like there was no progression. I used rct2 mostly as a sandbox creating my own parks
It’s a great day when I come home to an extra long Marcel Vos video.
I’m thrilled you made a video on a topic I’ve wanted to see covered before. I tell people I like RCT1 over 2 and get weird looks all the time, so seeing this is uber validating, considering my primary issue with 2 is the scenario design
I remember struggling a lot with Diamond Heights as a kid. Not sure if it was genuinely more difficult, or if I just didn't quite understand the objective. I also remember the two Phobia coasters being very prone to crashing.
You're not wrong. Diamond Heights is a step up in difficulty and has an obscure objective. The two looping coasters are also both prone to crashing and, in RCT1, need to be converted to each run a single train instead.
Even having played RCT1 first and being good enough to unlock Urban Park in the Corkscrew Follies expansion, I still had trouble with Crazy Castle. I think I beat Electric Fields easily, beat Factory Capers by deleting most of the path before doing anything else to unlock the Advanced Parks. I obviously tried Amity Airfield first, had no chance of beating it, and went on to play Build Your Own Six Flags until Wacky Worlds came out and introduced new beginner scenarios that are probably easier than Crazy Castle.
Also, the only big anomaly in the RCT1 difficulty curve is Harmonic Hills. Otherwise, you can pretty much go through all the parks in the base game and then the two expansions in order with a heart perfect difficulty curve. Only the last few parks in each set deviate from this, and not nearly as much as Amity Airfield.
As much as I unironically like Harmonic Hills, I agree that it appeared too soon in the scenario list. It should've been near the end.
I've never played RCT2 but grew up playing RCT1, and I definitely agree that the difficulty curve for RCT1 was great because 6-yr-old me was able to beat each of the parks after a few tries.
I totally agree with everything you said. Adding to that: In the German version of the game, the scenarios had translated names and the order was alphabetic by these translated names. Thus Crazy Castle ("Verrückte Burg") was the last "Beginner" scenario. However, Amity Airfield ("Amity-Flugplatz") was still the first "Advanced" scenario in the list.