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An awful lot of arms length knowledge on how atmospheric effects work in this thread. 1) Dry Ice machines can never produce atmospheric haze type effects for use with lasers. They are inherently expensive and hazardous to operate (you are putting pellets of solid CO2 into boiling water) and all your get is low hanging vapour that sits on the ground and then vanishes - totally impractical for something like Scooby. 2) Most all water based ‘hazers’ are neither of those two things. They use glycol and water mixture, so when they say ‘water based’ they mean not oil basically. They then use a traditional smoke machine style pressure pump and heating block to produce smoke and then combine it with a fan to make the ‘haze’. The cons are more cloud like haze that will set off any sort of detection system based on particles, and they tend to use a lot of fluid which is expensive (think $400+ for one 25L bottle). 3) People have a a misinformed idea that Oil Based Hazers = mess and CO2 powered hazers = expensive to operate. They are both inaccurate. The indisputable best haze system on the market is from a Canadian company and uses both Mineral Oil based fluid, and CO2. It uses their proprietary tech to break down the mineral oil under heat and pressure into tiny micro controls particles which result in an extremely fine, dry haze that leaves no residue, lasts for hours and uses very very little fluid. Rather than a pump it uses pressurized CO2 to push the fluid through the system, and tiny amounts of that to. Its both cheap to operate, works great, is reliable and in many cases won’t even set off particle detectors it’s so fine. So you then probably ask, “why doesn’t everyone use it?” Most simply because of scare opinion that Oil = Bad so they don’t even try. But in fact Village themselves use the same system at the Outback Spectacular show, uses so little consumables it uses maybe 2.5L of fluid a fortnight and runs off the waste CO2 gas from their low fog system. So it’s not about amazing detectors, or being too cheap or any of that. It’s about perception by the powers that allow these things or not. And if the risk analysis won’t allow something then no amount of ‘passion’ or ‘attitude’ is going to change anything. It’s perception at that level that requires altering and that’s much harder than buying a fancy purple haze machine

Nobody said it came in purple! /s

I think early on we saw an image of them scanning the disco room - and I don't know about anyone else but it lead me to make the assumption that projection in the entire disco room was going to happen... naturally disappointing when 'next gen' was revealed.

It’s great to see the place full and thriving. Real competition between the parks only drives further improvements and developments which is a win for all. They have heaps of space they can expand, only need to look to European parks to see how much can be done within small footprints. Sounds like good times ahead on the Gold Coast.

I gave these a whirl on Saturday night. During Dive in movies, the River Rapids, Zoom Zone, Aqua Racer and Constrictor stay open, and by that point in the day the park had begun to empty out, so probably waited 20 mins each time. At the base there are two separate queues at ground level for the “Loopers” and the “Twisters” . A “grouper” weighs a few riders at a time before sending them up the tower, so there is no waiting on the stairs. (The attraction has 6 staff running it. 1 greeter, 1 grouper, 1 person at the top collecting cards, 2 dispatchers and 1 lifeguard at the run out.) If you are riding the “Loopers” you are given a card to hand to the lifeguard at the top, and then sent down one of two short queues on the top platfom… I guess this i to make sure someone doesn’t queue up for one and ride the other. For the Twisters, there’s a teal and orange one, both felt fairly similar though the teal ones have tighter turns. The slides are mostly pitch black, save for the transparent light effect sections. I actually preferred the orange for the smoother transitions. The Loopers are similar to the old Wedgie at WWW, sans the trapdoor start. Yellow is a single helix, dark blue is a double helix but tighter. On balance the dark blue was probably a bit better, just because it lasted a bit longer. Yellow was probably faster but its hard to tell in the dark!