Gazza

It's funny you should say that...When the ride was under construction people tended to think the opposite. There was a desire for more rides at SW, and a notion that a roller coaster didn't really fit in at a water park. They did make early attempts to tie it in by having the water jets spraying at the ride, but when they went, so did any sort of link to it being a wet attraction. It's not a bad ride or anything, but it could have suited SW well, being a "not too intense" thrill ride. And of course, surfing is related to the sea, so that's a logical tie in for SW.

Woah woah, calm down guys

Being impatient basically. Some people might only visit this site once per day, so it could well be 24 hours till even one reply is made. And even if none get made, well I guess the thing is just to be quiet and accept it, rather than sooking that nobody replied. Well, mba2012 is only 12 years old, not 30, and he manages to make good posts that are spelled properly and make sense. It's only a 2 year age gap between you and him.

Bro, we've already warned you against being annoying: You started this topic just 4 hours ago. Some people might not have even gotten home from work yet and haven't had a chance to reply. Also, maybe if people don't reply, its because they aren't interested in the topic. I thought you understood all this?

I've been on it as 3/4 year old, so my memories of it are sketchy. I can remember visually some stuff like Tijuana Taxis, the vertical lift on LTRR, the original Batman ride, and the duck and rolling pins going uphill in Young Einsteins Gravity Homestead, but that's sort of it.

^Just on that, Licencing on rides can be a tricky business, and the specific version they use can vary, and hence how characters are depicted. Green Lantern coincided with the Green Latern film this year, but the licence MW seem to be using is the comic book depiction of GL, not the film depiction. That explains stuff like why Sinestro is depicted as being in the Yellow lantern corps in the queue theming, whereas in the film, they never got to that stage of Sinestros life. Similarly, when you ride Spiderman or the Incredible Hulk Coaster at IOA, you're seeing the comic book version of Spiderman and Hulk, not the Toby Maguire/Eric Bana depictions, and the ride logos and theming reflect this. Superman Escape...Again, the same thing. It coincided with Superman Returns, but the logos and colours used on the coaster varied from the film: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6b/SupermanEscapeLogo.jpg Or what about during the DC comics parade season a couple of years back? Notice they used the batman with the grey and yellow outfit, rather than the more modern Batman Begins costume in that parade. So Brad could well be bang on. Arkham has appeared in video games, comics and films, and each is a different interpretation. Heck, even Batman La Fuga at Parque Warner has an Arkham themed queue.

See, this is actually awesome, thanks. I've only ever seen that other POV of the German version with Alf, but bloody hell ours had good theming...Getting pretty close to Disney/Universal standard for sure. It's easy to see how kids would have gotten scared on it though.

Presumably. if anything went between WWF and SDSC, you could treat that pocket of land as a themed area unto itself, so it doesn't necessarily have to be western themed.

^That would have worked pretty well too for their purposes, because they could just' brand' it (As their current marketing/attraction stratergy seems to dictate) around a TV music channel/radio station/australian music personality.

Surely Surfrider deserves a spot though? I think the traveling coasters can be safely left out. Its closer to 26 permanent ones. The thing with Buzzsaw, is that they built the lift hill and first drop, but forgot the actual coaster.

This. Modifying a steel coaster is a costly exercise, and only happens when really necessary. And it's not like the fundamental nature of the ride gets changed (Eg switchinginline twists for loops etc), more they might tweak the curvature of a problematic section: Check out this pic of the first drop of PMBO. They basically cantelievered the turn off the main structure to make it a bit wider: http://www.parkz.com...ax_Big_One.html Still the same sort of thing, just modified to make it safer/more comfortable/maintenance friendly etc. If there is any truth in new track sections for LW, it would be of this nature in IMO. It's not like we'll get a Steel Phantom/Texas Giant job in the next 2 months, thats for sure. Will do.

So in the Spongebob show at Sea World, should they redub the original character voices with equivalent ones that have an Australian accent? To make the show fit in better with the fact that Sea World is an Australian park? Anyway, the point you are missing is that you said the 4D show is set in the "Wild West". The Wild West is in America. So guests watching the movie would be like "WTF why are there bushrangers? How did they get there?"

You misspelled indians/bandits/banditos. Take your pick.

Now, for the rest of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. PICS! http://www.parkz.com.au/photos/members/page536.html from the bottom of the page and all pages numerically after it. I didn't ride Flight of the Hippogriff. Dragon Challenge was as good as ever, lucky I got to ride it before they stopped dueling it a few weeks after my visit. Once upon a time Hungarian Horntail/Ice Dragon it was my #1 coaster, but I have ridden stuff like Nemesis and Texas Giant since, which has pushed it down a bit. The theming is not as good as it used to be, and the skull filled caverns and hallways with dramatic music now just have floating candles and are much quieter. Cant complain about a 5min wait queue though! But, now for a spoiler filled review of Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey. Basically, the ride system works by having 4 seater benches on the end of a robotic arm. This robotic arm sits on a base that follows a track through a building. Normal dark rides have you following this track. The next step up might spin the vehicle (Eg Buzz Lightyear) The next step up might tilt the vehicle a bit (Eg Indiana Jones, Spiderman) This ride literally lifts you up and town, tilts, sways and flips you around like nothing else. So anyway, you head into an entrance at the bottom of the rocky hill the castle sits on, and there are lockers for loose items. It is very crowded down here, and there can be a wait for the lockers, so travel light if you can. From there the main queue starts, through the dungeon tunnels. A staircase takes you up to a single rider queue, but for at least one ride be sure to go through the main queue to see the full story. Normally many rides have an extensive zig zag switchback section under a roof or shade sail. Here however you go through the castle greenhouses, and you can even see stuff like some screaming baby mandrakes in pots. So you can potentially do a lot of queing in this bit, but fortunatley the queue hadn't spilled over to this section. The whole greenhouse has been rusted and has a real victorian style to it...Very nice. You then enter the castle and follow some hallways and pass through Dumbledores office. The room is a semicircle shape and the queue goes back and forth a couple of times, giving you a chance to hear what he has to say. He welcomes you to the castle, but warns that things aren't always as they seem. The queue then continues to the defense against the dark arts classroom. Up on a balcony you see a door open and close by itself, and Ron, Harry and Hermionie appear from under an inivisbility cloak, and tell you that as part of your visit to Hogwarts you will be having a 3h lecture with Prof. Binns about the history of Hogwarts. They feel this is too boring, and offer to take you to a house quiddich match instead, by flying you there. Rons carelessness with his wand causes it to snow in the classroom (a similar system to the snow in main street at MW at white christmas) Once they have spoken they duck under their invisibilty cloak again and the door opens and closes by itself again as they sneak out. This section also has the queue zigzagging up and down the length of the classroom. Next you head through some more hallways (with talking portraits) to the Gryfindor common room. Here a number of portraits are arguing about who is better at the sport of quiddich. One of them brags about how good he is at flying enchanted benches, and does so by moving from his own frame, to another painting on the wall of one of the enchanted benches, strapping himself in, and going for a fly! Finally you approach the loading area. 3 queue lanes come together (Child swap, single rider, standby). They actually cross over, and the attendant sorts people into the 3 lanes. At the end of the hallway an animatronic sorting hat on a shelf gives his safety poem, with memorable lines such as "These benches aren't safe if you're too small, you must be more than goblin sized...42 inches tall". The ride grouper is the most on the ball park employee you will ever encounter, simultaneously juggling the 3 queues. First they will grab a group of 4 from the main queue, if its a group of 3 (or a group of for example 7) they will grab a single rider. If its a pair, they try and get another pair, and if not, 2 singles go through. (The moral of the story is that the single rider queue works REALLY well) They seemingly never let a bench go out without 4 people onboard, to the point that a bench nearly went out with a seat empty, and they got a whole group to get up and run to the next one to make sure the numbers worked out. So, in the station its basically a bit long room themed to be like the "room of requirement", with a continuous stream of 4 seater benches moving through (think of what happens when you board haunted mansion or Buzz Lightyear at Disneyland). You walk to one end of the station (against the direction of benches, walk around a U turn, step onto a slow moving conveyer belt, step foward onto a faster moving one, and then turn around and sit down in your bench. Cleverley, the back wall of the station is mirrored, except for a thin slot that the end of the robotic arms can pass through, so the whole ride mechanisim is hidden from view. The harness comes down easily, and a ride op with an RFID wristband taps your bench to let the ride system know it's safe to dispatch. The loading station is very long (obviosuly to give heaps of buffer for even the slowest guest) because obviosuly any sort of stoppage breaks the flow of the experience for those out in the ride itself. You spend a good 30 secs moving along sideways before you approach the end of the station. You see Herminonie up on a balcony, and she tells you to shout the word "Observatory" before tossing some floo powder at you. At that moment you leave the station and pass into a fireplace in a puff of green smoke. Immediatley you are tipped onto your back by the robo arm, and face up to a giant elongated screen that shows footage of travelling up a chimney. The image on the screen moves along with the ride vehicle at the same speed. Finally you are spat out into the observatory tower, and your bench moves along, swaying from side to side past a giant bit of 19th century astronomy equipment. Out the windows you can see the rest of the castle, and this is where it gets cool...You 'fly out the window' where Ron and Harry meet you on their broomsticks and tell you to follow them. All this is done like a simulator, with a dome shaped screen surrounding your ride vehicle making it fully immersive. The ride vehicles on this attraction never stop moving, so there are sets of 6 dome shaped screens, mounted on a carouse, facing outwards. Each bench matches the speed of rotation of the carousel, moving along in tandem. This has allowed them to included projected sequences, without needing to stop each bench in front of it. Anyway...you fly up and see Hagrid...he has lost his dragon, but Ron and Harry tell you to hurry up and follow them to the Quiddich pitch. Right at that moment Hagrids dragon swoops in and begins chasing everyone. your bench sways and banks to avoid it, but it comes around for the attack, you get knocked sideways and crash into a wooden building. At this point you peel away from the projection dome and move back into a real life set. Out the window you can see the dragons giant wing flapping and hot embers drifting down, your bench tilts up to face the celing, and as you move throug the building holes are progressiley ripped in the roof by the claws of the dragon. You reach the end and an animatronic dragon sticks his head through the wall and blows a bit of warm steam right in your face (The nature of the ride means they can move the bench right up close to the theming) You then drift off into the forbidden forest, with spiders dropping down all around you, and you feel little spits of water. Aragog appears (A giant spider), again right in your face). In a crevice you can see hermionie (video projection), she tells you the forbidden forest isn't safe, and to watch out for the whomping willow. At this moment you are lifted up and face the roof again, and you are right up at the whomping willow, which tries to whack you with its branches. Eventually it does and you get knocked across (rather comically) into the Quiddich pitch. This is where the 2nd projection dome carousel begins and you are right in the middle of the match. Harry and Draco Malfoy get into a fight on their brooms, bumping into each other. The distraction causes ron to let through a goal, causing groans from the crowd. Immediatley, dementors start decending from the sky and attacking (Hectic day at Hogwarts I guess!), one of them starts chasing you and Harry, and you wildly fly at high speed trying to get away. The dementor knocks harry off his broom and as a result we all plunge into a hole, into the chamber of secrets. This is where you transition from the projection domes to the real life set, and its a really cool transition. Basically, the image on the screen 'stretches' away at high speed, giving the impression you are falling really fast. The moment you get in this room an animatronic dementor leers violently at you, and then another! Next you travel along sideways past the dead skeleton of the basalisk (which for some reason blows steam out of its skull). Your bench spins around to face a corner of the room where you can see the dark mark floating in the air on a fogscreen, you then turn around and another dementor leers at you. You feel a rush of cold air and a heartbeat in the back of the seat. You then see another fog screen in front of you which shows the faces of everyone on the bench....Your soul is being sucked out. Your bench turns around again into the 3rd and final projector dome carousel. Harry appears on his broomstick and uses the patronus spell to banish the dementors. As a result the chamber of secrets begins to cave in, and you get some classic motion sim action as you dodge falling rocks. Your bench tips a fair bit side to side as you make some sharp banks. You make it out safely and fly back to the castle and in through the front doors. Again, a pretty good transition from the projectors to the real world. Basically they have built a giant half door, and as you move along the rotating dome screen moves behind this and the door overlaps.The last image you see on the screen is the door, and it all happens so quick that it merges together. Anyway, you arrive in the great hall, (a very large scale scene!) and a couple of video screens through archways show crowds of students clapping and cheering. You then pass through another cloud of green smoke, and travel back down the chimney network, back to the chamber of secrets, where you can unload. Overall, its the best ride I've ever been on, and dethrones Spiderman as my favourite. The real life set scenes in the ride are awesome, and has that real sensation of the ride feeling like being in a dream (The same feeling you get on Pirates of the Carribean near the start when you arrive in that vast scene with the ship shooting cannonballs).....Will have to wait a week to see how Transformers at USS compares. Bad points: -Projection domes had dark luminosity. I guess they wanted to make it fit in with the fact most scenes are dark and mostly unlit, and hence not wanting to shock your eyes, but still, it made it a bit hard to see. -Perhaps skewed a bit too much towards the projection dome carousels. With a ride system this expensive and with its level of capability, it could have spent more time heaving you around near misses with theming, and less time being a quasi motion simulator. -I'd love to say they were perfect and you could never see the robotic arm system, giving riders the impression they are actually flying....But they didn't do this well enough in parts and it kills the magic a bit. The fact is in the first scene in the observatory you can see the other benches, and that is without craning your neck or anything. If you ride in the middle seats and look dead ahead the whole time, you can avoid it a bit, but there are still a couple of points where you cross sightlines and can see the bench ahead. To their credit, they do set off the onride photo in the forbidden forest, to make one such instance less of an impact, but in chamber of secrets, you can see the group ahead having their souls sucked out before it happens to you, and this is a bit sloppy. I reckon in the Hollywood version of this ride they need to make the sides of the benches bigger to avoid distractions from the left and righ, and consider doing something adding extra movements, like tipping the bench to face the roof at the points where it crosses sightlines, so it basically prevents you from looking straight ahead.

B&Ms are good because they are very smooth...Smoother than say Superman Escape. You can tell when you ride them they have been calculated very precisely, so when you twist and turn it is all very controlled rather than a sudden jerk...Think about when you see footage of a fighter jet bankd into a turn, and the way it moves....Thats what they are like.

Isn't it obvious those broken test dummies are CGI anyway...You can tell they are that crisp white computer rendering style. Still, it's cool they are using the near misses as a selling point. In the advertising for Raptor they used bits of footage and sound effects to emphasise that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YffoXEO9yMw Probably my thoughts too on each of them, but I do have a soft spot for the theming on the Swarm ...Wild eagles layout is good, but it really should have an inline twist because that is sort of the signature elment of a wingrider...Its a bit like building a flying coaster but not having the pretzel loop. Train design on Wild Eagle looks a bit odd too, its kind of like an avian version of the human centipede.

Nemesis Inferno is at Thorpe Park.

http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/193875-rollercoaster-tycoon-2-windows-screenshot-a-rollercoaster.png Ctrl+Z indeed!

So weve been going for two weeks, and no actual pics of the theme park being built, just a lot of pointless discussion. Topic is dead.

Hogsmeade Village, in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter @ Universals Islands of Adventure, Orlando, FL Time to get this all done before I head off on my next trip in a few days. Pics begin on this page: http://www.parkz.com.au/parks/US/Orlando/Islands_of_Adventure/photos/page16.html I'll review the rides later, but lets just focus on the general area. Its very well themed and detailed, with things like small animatronics in the shops and windows, plenty of actors for photo ops and to watch short shows, and nice music. Everything a themed area should hope to be. It is also very crowded, and the main street curves the other direction to the rest of the paths in the loop around the park, so I accidentally found myself walking the wrong way a couple of times. I didn't really buy any souvenirs, but I did try a few of the foodstuffs. They were 'a bit' expensive, (Bear in mind this was when the AUD was at parity, so I can imagine for domestic visitors the prices would have seemed totally obscene by comparsion) but things like the choc cauldron cakes were excellent. Fizzing Whizbees from Honeydukes were nothing special though....It was just cheap compund popping chocolate pieces in flavours similar to clinkers. I did quite like the Butterbeer too. I stuck to the frozen variant because I dont really like carbonated drinks. The frozen version is nicer anway, and has a layer of marshmallow fluff type stuff on the top. Sort of a caramel/butterscotch/shortbread/creaming soda sort of taste. I never saw the wand show at Olivanders because it seemed like too much of wait for something so simple...Time better spent racking up rides on Forbidden Journey.

I kinda disagree with the notion that LWs roughness adds to the ride or anything like that. It's not like with B&Ms you hear people saying "Oh, it needs to be rougher". Well, I'm going to be over there in a couple of weeks, so I guess I could be potentuialy spited by the park if a coaster opens next year or the one after. But hey, I'm happy to finally check the place out.

Terminator Salvation....

I'm curious as to why the ride needs fresh paint.... It's not rusted or faded is it?

More like, barb in an ocean. Bam!

I was thinking SW marine rescue had found the specimen that killed Steve when I read the topic title.