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Check out the way the explosion rips through the teal slide, lighting the rings up from the inside.

For a laugh, last weekend myself and @Luke did a "water slide crawl" around a few aquatic centers in Melbourne to try a few new proslide and whitewater attractions. We didn't do all the substantial aquatic centers, but still got to try a few unique ones. If you're a Victorian, and Funfields/Gumbuya just isn't enough, and want to kill a couple of hours one weekend, this is a cheap fun activity. We started at Aquapulse Werribee, which has a Proslide Pipeline , as well as a Tornado 24 / Behemoth Bowl 40 hybrid. The raft slide was pretty pedestrian...Cut Snake at WWW is more intense, though it did have a small drop at the end with a small pop of air. What you see is what you get, with a couple of figure 8s. The hybrid slide was much better. The Tornado section did seem to lose speed a lot quicker than other ones, it seemed to gather a lot more water at the bottom, which made it a little rough, and after a couple of oscillations you'd come to a near halt. The other half was better, particularly when riding backwards, with a bit of a head rush/dizziness in the helix, and more speed in the bowl compared to the quite frankly sluggish Double Bowlseye in Sydney. A steep drop out of the bowl makes for an exciting finish. I've ridden the double Tornado 24 at Watermarc in Greensbourough, and I thought that one had the better funnels. The next stop was Aquanation in Ringwood. This turned out to be the most expensive....All of the centres cost about $9 to get in, but this one charged another $8 or so to use the slides. This one has a Twister enclosed bodyslide, and a Skybox drop slide with a 360 helix. Both of theme were fairly comfortable., but we were getting some shoulder blade marks by the end. The skybox slide felt a little less intense than the wedgie. When you ride, it's bizzare, and you don't notice the steepness of the helix. When you ride it feels more like you are going around a flat turn. The body slide was good fun, but gets pretty wild towards the end, owing to a fairly short recovery distance between one turn and the next, so you'd be coming into the wall of the next turn at a somewhat oblique angle, causing some strong forces and a fair bit of water thrown across you. The final stop was Frankston PARC. We had to laugh when the promotional screens at reception, on their loop of media, had one screen that said something along the lines of "Sometimes staff make mistakes, we are only human, please do not yell at staff". Truly, we were in Frankston. This place has both a Constrictor slide, and an Aquasphere / Python fusion slide from Whitewater West (A Python is one size up from the Rattler seen at Gumubya/WnW Sydney) The Constrictor only had a couple of the actual constrictor elements, so it didn't stack up to the intensity of the one in Sydney. Just as it was picking up speed, it was over, nor was it as dark. The back seat is the better one on this, because you get a bit of a "flick"/drifting type sensation in the helices. The Python slide has had a chequered history. Originally it was three aquaspheres on this ride, but a number of injuries shortly after opening led to its closure. Now there is just one sphere, and the rest of the slide was rebuilt, with the Python element as the new ending. You can just see the aquasphere element below, sort of looking like a soccer ball. The operations here were a bit of a clusterf, with a single harried staff member trying to run both slides, with what was quite obviously a complex procedural process. Each rider had to be weighed every time, and the raft had to be secured with snap on carabiners and cables to hold it in place at the start tub, and then released for dispatch. Neither ride was anywhere near running at capacity. What was cool is that they had one of those vertical raft conveyors, so neither slide required you carry a raft up. So, the Python. This thing is unique. It's the most camp thing ever to start with, owing to being fitted with a control panel at the start where you can pick your sound track and lighting pattern We heard plenty of American surf guitar tunes, "it's raining men" and jingle bells during our rides. The lights were neither here nor there, just a few colour changing led spotlights. As for the slide, the aquasphere part is wild, and you practically go vertical on the first one. I can see how this would have been crazy if there were three in a row. On some rides, the water builds up behind you in the first tunnel, so when you drop into to the sphere and climb the wall, the water behind you rushes in just as you are coming back down, and whack! you get swamped. The following twists and turns are all in the dark and felt a little bumpy between the seams, so you get a bit of a bottom massage. The final python element is pretty wild too, with a steep drop in, and fairly sustained oscilations as you move down the chamber, right to the end. Again, the water that builds up behind your raft follows you into the main chamber, but instead what happens is that it the mass of water just misses you, goes up the wall and is thrown over itself in a tsunami, which is pretty spectacular to watch. So thats our day, to sum up the Werribee slides are quite and enjoyable and refined, the ones at Ringwood are good, but perhaps not the best value for money. The Frankston ones have that wild WTF factor about them.