aaronm

That’s annoying. Visiting next weekend, didn’t expect it to be down for maintenance so soon, these sort of rides are usually pretty reliable.

No idea how you got that impression. My comment was about the park’s bad theming choices.

The broken mirror turntable makes zero sense in the context of the ride. Rides shouldn’t rely on people having seen a low-budget sequel to be coherent.

If by “around April” you mean sometime in the 2024 calendar year, then yes I would think that is possible.

I hope someone from VRTP has visited Prater and tried out Insider. The absolute gold standard of how to theme an indoor mouse, no unnecessary weird mirrors, broken screens, mistimed audio or other gimmicks, just a very well thought-out series of lights, plenty of fog, and a banging soundtrack. It really shouldn’t be too hard to get right.

Thing is, it's rarely the safety checks that slow things down. The Gold Coast ride ops seem to lack any sense of hustle when it's busy - everything is done at a very leisurely pace. I'm not blaming the park staff for this. At some point management have confused safety with just doing everything slowly, so there's no incentive or encouragement to reduce wait times. Add on non-safety related steps that lengthen load times further (such as waiting for the entire station to clear before allowing new riders to board) and it's no wonder operations are slow and wait times high. Agree paper maps are dead. A handful of printed map signs around the park, combined with digital wait/show time display boards would be helpful even when the app is working, and especially if it isn't.

Surely with the ride being out of action for so long a 3D sign would have been worth the investment? 😉

Normal operations at the Gold Coast parks make Six Flags look like Disney, and in the past few years the parks have consistently taken steps to make them generally slower still. While nobody should be surprised to find the parks busy during school holidays it’s unfair to blame guests if adequate crowd control/mitigation measures aren’t in place.

I’m not sure I consider wave swingers to be a “spin and spew”. They’re fairly gentle rides, perhaps the fountains add a little excitement but it would be pretty rare for someone to experience nausea on one of these.

Makes sense that Leviathan would go down for shorter periods but more often, gotta look after that wooden track. 2 weeks maintenance, 6 weeks operational cost savings 😄

I still remember seeing someone try to bring a full size rollaboard suitcase onto SDSC one time. Staff politely wheeled it through to the unload station.

We're coming up on 18 months since they announced this project and they're still just pushing around dirt. I'm going to be shocked if it's open in 2024.

If this was a Village park they'd be raving about having "Australia's only powered coaster that isn't portable"

This was my immediate thought as well. An indoor stage show would be a welcome addition to the park, particularly while Scooby Doo is out of action for an extended period and Oz is still mostly dirt.

As a child of the 1980s I wholeheartedly endorse this new sign.

It’s priced to sell One Passes, not individual tickets. If White Christmas and Carnivale cost >$80 each the One Pass looks like excellent value, especially for locals.

It’s all speculation at this point. Arguably CF/SF merging helps them compete with Disney and Universal, hopefully we won’t see another Geauga Lake situation but even the closest competing parks (CGA/SFDK, KD/SFA, Knotts/SFMM) are over an hour apart do essentially serve different markets. Still a wild move, that all-chain season pass will be amazing value going forward.

Very interesting. No doubt worth a few ‘rare’ points on coaster-count.

While onboard lighting is usually cool, I quite like that sections of the track are unlit at night. Definitely adds to the sensation of speed and surprise.

There’s a balance between safety, practicality and aesthetics to be sure. Based on those photos the ride seems safe and loading will be practical, but the floor looks ugly as hell. Perhaps a shallower pool with a thigh-high fence would have worked better? I guess we’ll never know.

I’ve been on it, the ride platform is only as big as necessary to load/unload the ride. The water is fairly shallow and they basically operate on the assumption nobody would be dumb enough to step in.

I know it's not finished but that metal mesh is nasty, hopefully the completed ride looks a little less industrial. Seems like there's plenty of space outside of the ride load area so it's weird to cover the entire 'pool'.

We gave Trident a go on Friday night for the first time, took the crew five attempts to get everyone locked in because the seatbelt sensors weren't triggering properly. No wonder this ride struggles for capacity. Perhaps they can retrofit manual key-style locks in the next maintenance period?

Peeking between the construction fences on Saturday, it seems there is plenty of 'fountain' infrastructure going in. Even if this isn't as impressive as Phantasialand it should still look nice. Orientation of the queue/op buildings is weird though. I would have thought the open section would point towards the entrance rather than the chicken restaurant. Ride looks good this just seems an odd choice. Glad to see they have retained the 'classic' Main Street design with the buildings, hopefully Sky Voyager gets a new facade one day to bring it all together.

If past trends are anything to go by, VRTP management can always find a reason apart from their own poor planning to justify mediocrity. I'm waiting for the day when multiple major attractions are closed "as a result of guest feedback" 🙃