Baconjack

Rivals cost $30m. There’s no way in hell a flash statue, a barebones queue area, and some 2d signs is adding up to $20m. Maybe a quarter of that at most. If you are being generous a new train with new restraints as pointed out in the concept art is about a mil but I’d say it is largely wishful thinking until parts rock up in BOH.

Given someone’s pointed out the fact the restraints are getting changed the process of commissioning may take slightly longer than expected as opposed to a simple relocation? If this is taking this long to open (considering it was supposed to come here as a capacity boost for peak season yet it’s opening in April) I’m going to say the sea world thing is just a yarn. Also the theming is a massive step backwards but did we seriously expect more? I don’t think we were getting something on the level of Atlantis/Oz here. ”Ride within a ride” I guess Luna Park Melbourne doesn’t exist then? This makes absolutely no sense

Pull it down

Except when it’s perfectly legitimate criticism of incredibly cheap lettering, especially considering how out of place it looks when compared to the rest of the refurbished ride. You can also see it anywhere, be it in the boarding area or when non riders are watching the ride from the ground. There’s plenty of recent examples of dreamworld doing things correctly (Pandamonium -> serpent slayer) and unfortunately giant drop is not that which is disappointing considering the time & money investment: Anyone who has used Microsoft word more than once in their life knows exactly what that text is and can come to a similar conclusion as me. If they changed it to match the ride sign, then it’s great and fits in correctly. by itself, it is not that bad, but you can’t be making yourself look cheap with all of these half hearted details around the park (see: giant construction company banners on dreamworld flyer construction walls etc) for a park that charges $100 for a day ticket.

It looks ridiculously unprofessional, especially when you can identify the font (more people could do this than you think). When you can do that it just looks extremely lazy and screams of some staff member typing "GIANT DROP" in the default font on a powerpoint presentation before saving it as a png and printing out decals.

Wait did they didn’t remove the Microsoft word text from the gondola? That’s a little embarrassing

If I were to take an educated guess either the 2nd gondola is being refurbished and wasn’t ready for re opening (doubtful they’ve had 12 months to do this) or has been broken down for parts for the other gondola (most likely imo). How much would a new one cost from Intamin?

To be fair it wasn’t very good in 2012, no mystic manor, no iron man and probably no big grizzly mountain. Basically in its opening day state with the expansions they put in. Without those big majors to set it apart from the rest of the Disney parks it’s literally just a Disneyland clone with half the budget and effort (compare Hong Kong space mountain to California)

My old man used to live in Hong Kong for a decade so went to this park every time I went over there to visit before he moved back home so I've followed this park pretty closely over the years. The animal exhibits are as you say great and more than adequate. The presentation is excellent, but I think it's degraded quite a bit since it was all new. The park was basically rebuilt a decade ago to compete with Disney and I remember when it was all new and fresh. The fact that Ocean Park is very cash-strapped is very telling through the photos. I don't think its particularly well looked after at all especially compared to how it looked when it won an award usually reserved for Disney, Universal or big European parks. Hair Raiser started out very smooth when it was new but it definitely developed a nasty rattle over time. I think it's a great ride and has a decent layout with a combination of different forces but unfortunately it operates in the wrong climate - I think it's pretty similar to Abyss in that respect. It can get very hot in Hong Kong during peak summer and it's easily worse than the coast thanks to the humidity. The mine train was awesome, truly a fantastic experience and one of my favourite coasters despite being a Zamperla with crappy transitions, no other coaster in the world has the setting quite like what that did. Dragon had an awesome setting too but it was a terrible Arrow looper which says a lot considering I have a bit of a soft spot for them. Some of those transitions were just wrong, you can see them in POV's. Particularly in the helix after the sidewinder. It's a shame they're all still sitting there unused, but it doesn't at all surprise me - I don't think this park has the cash to remove them - there's heaps of rides and buildings down there sitting closed left to rot away including a few flats and a massive log flume. The park is huge so even on a relatively busy day it looked dead on each visit. It's unfortunate because Ocean Park had a huge master plan a few years ago that looked awesome (with a lot of new rides themed to the standard of what's at the top of the peak including a dive coaster and a family launch coaster) which was supposed to replace all those closed rides but they have since been shelved as a result of Covid, the protests that occurred before driving down attendance from the mainland (last time I visited was right before Covid started and the park was nearly empty). From what I hear also the government chose not to give the park money to invest in the expansion. To my understanding they are changing the park's operations to contract out zones to different operators - I think they're quite desperate and the future of at least the amusement side of the park is not looking particularly bright.

Did village finally do away with the go away green grass fence?

Getting the cars inside Coney Island is a ridiculous effort considering you have to go through BOH then through the side door. At that point why don’t you just leave it there where it belongs and chuck a tarp over them so they don’t get faded? Plenty of room there they’ve kept wild mouse track there too in the past

Correct me if i'm wrong but isn't the top of the coaster supports being painted green to resemble a tree? I recall seeing it on some concept art somewhere

Isn't that mostly empty because it was cleared for the lazy river that was never built? Plenty of room for the globe in BOH I would have thought

The concept artwork kind of gave that away as it looked similar to lethal weapon/arkham in layout. Most of the buildings in that lethal weapon courtyard area will be kept (such as the petrol station entrance & theatre pre show building which will get the emerald city facade). If they weren't being reused they would have been ripped down along with the coaster, a number of the buildings will get new facades. I think the pre-show won't be like lethal weapon where there is a film, I suspect it would be more of a photo op as the queues for the coasters look to be outside that building.

12 months of refurbishing and they still haven't removed the calibri lettering. Hopefully this job gets done before re-opening when they apply the new decals

LSMs are almost impossible to integrate into the layout too whether or not you raise the top hat. They simply aren't powerful enough yet to get a train to 100 km/h in the space required. Superman already crawls over the top hat so you'd need double the power if you were to raise the top hat which cannot be done without a swing launch (which is straight up impossible to fit inside the show building) There is almost no reason for them to replace the system yet. Perhaps within the next 10 years it's a possibility but for the time being it runs well and Village take good care of it. I think it's more likely that Superman gets updated trains like Roadrunner or Scooby than a launch system upgrade.

I would have expected Village to wait and see the performance of Dragster before going down the Superman Escape Next Generation route. (now I don't think TPSN is gospel by any means but broken clocks can be right twice a day, they've gotten a few things right in recent months re: surfrider but this a can of worms worth opening)

My understanding is that it's a retrack in most places. Last year I saw newly fabricated track pieces sitting under Big Dipper on one visit.

Yong probably reads these forums. Everyone on here wanted the dreamworld tower to be converted to a sky jump back when Tower closed. Would have been pretty awesome but he’s right - the average punter is already put off by how high giant drop is (which is why it never gets a line), let alone adding a feature which makes guests face the ground at that height. Also Tower wasn’t being launched anywhere close to that speed in its final years. The LSM’s and control system could only handle about 100-110km/h and the care that dreamworld put in (or lack thereof) pre 2016 made that problem worse. It also sat closed for months at a time unscheduled every year. I think six flags are lucky to get that much height out of theirs.

Perfectly good except it barely made it halfway up the tower and was consistently shut for extended periods of time in its last years

Well to be fair surfrider was taken apart and removed from wet n wild overnight. It won't take long for this to go up

If I were to take an educated guess it probably had the same mechanical problems that Doomsday faces currently and the park couldn’t be stuffed keeping it around. It closed before we got ours.

This is a bit different though. It’ll be even more confusing for punters given both track types are very similar if not the same. It will look very strange when you walk in towards the fountain and see Superman and red Surfrider next to each other. The catwalks and supports don’t look like they’ve been repainted so maybe they’ll do that during the install. I’d take a guess at this opening during the September holidays so there’s still plenty of time for this to get done

Mack is easily more expensive than B&M these days anyway (from my understanding their American projects have been quite expensive just like ours) and yet three of them exist here costing at least $30m each. There is no way one of those small scale dive coasters would cost more than the likes of Rivals or Taipan. Also the cost of shipping from America (where their parts are made) is probably a bit cheaper as opposed to Germany. Jungle Rush will probably end up costing more than a basic B&M too with all its demo, theming, landscaping and show buildings considered. From my understanding Village considered B&M products to replace Arkham before they settled with Oz. I for one think a dive coaster is a slam dunk for our parks as those things are huge attention draws and crowd pleasers. Surf coasters probably not, I would wait to see Pipeline’s reliability given our parks don’t have an excellent track record with installing reliable rides I think back in the day this was correct but saving a buck (ie Buzzsaw, green lantern, motocoaster, jet rescue) is a thing of the past now, especially after one park killed people trying to do just that. Village/Ardent are more than keen to splash the cash for something signature which is what they have spent the last few years doing.

Lol this is straight up wrong. Atlantis was announced in mid 2019 a couple of years after building Rivals & Topgolf (which weren't cheap either). Many years before BGH were in the picture. Village weren't healthy on cash and the parks lost a lot of foot traffic post 2016 (which people have seemed to forget). Not unlike down the road. Presentation is improving. Superman has opening day effects back which I hadn't seen before since I was too short to ride last time they worked. Rides are being renovated, repainted & removed. Hedges are being trimmed. Say what you want about the cheap printed signs, non working effects on West & uniforms (among others) and I've never been a fan of these but cleaning up the mistakes of the past takes years (Dreamworld have done it for 6 years and still aren't finished). Look at Atlantis and that seems to be the standard going forward.