As the story goes, your dear old Uncle Mortimer has been so impressed by your 'coaster designs that he’s assigned you the task of managing all of his Thrillville theme parks whilst he busies himself inventing new rides and taking care of the competition. Upon starting a new profile, you’re taken to a character selection screen that allows you various options to customise your character. It isn’t as in-depth as other games, and basically lets you change minimal features, such as the gender and clothing colour of your character. From there on you’re taken to the Superville theme park, which acts as a sort of tutorial level introducing you to the basics of managing a park. Each theme park is made up of different areas mimicking that of Disney World, where they have the different kingdoms.
Management is the real meat of the game and includes the fields of building, hiring/firing staff, guest happiness and trying your hand at the park’s attractions. Building is perhaps the most important feature of Thrillville and, providing you have enough money to do so, you can build arcades, rides, miniature-golf courses and food stands anywhere in the park. However, there are some limitations. Firstly, you’re restricted to open-spaced areas in the park, so you have to decide which attractions should be included and which ones should be axed. Secondly, you want your attractions to retain a profit, so it’s important to make sure attractions don’t compete with each other (an example: two rollercoasters built in the same area of the park). Rollercoasters and racetracks are further limited to special 'coaster areas only.
Eat the visitors! They keep on complaining about the toilets.
Taking the building side of the game further, you also have the ability to build and design your own rollercoasters, racing tracks and miniature golf courses. Thrillville doesn’t just throw you into the mix however - there are a great variety of tutorials that teach you how to build your dream ride. The tutorials also force you to carry out the given instructions – something the less machinery-oriented people out there will be thankful for. There's a decent amount of options on offer for the 'coasters, including creating loops, drops and even selecting the type of rollercoaster to build. Racing tracks and golf courses on the other hand have less options available, but still enough to keep you happy. Rest assured, if you don’t have the skill to build your own rides, there's a fantastic range of pre-built models for you to purchase.
Managing the staff is based on a basic hire-and-fire process. Hire entertainers, groundkeepers and mechanics to keep everything around the park in top shape. Don’t need that extra mechanic? Consider him cut. If you want a minimal amount of staff to excel at their respected jobs, they’ll require some training in the form of mini-games. Thus, the entertainer's (or cheerleader as we call them) training game sees you take control of the entertainer to perform a dance in front of a crowd. Music plays in the background while you hit the corresponding buttons on the controller that appear on screen whilst tilting the analogue stick in the direction the buttons are coming from. The groundskeeper mini-game sees you vacuum up rubbish scattered across the surrounding area, as well as cleaning vomit from customers who couldn’t keep their lunch down. The mechanic mini-game takes place on a ride’s circuit board where you have to connect all the wires together to ensure the ride works perfectly, and so on. Depending on how many mistakes you make, your staff will be rewarded with experience points.
While training is enjoyable at first, it gets a little repetitive once you reach the later theme parks. Although as you would expect, the mini-games get increasingly harder, if anything this just makes things worse as you’ll make more mistakes, causing your staff to get fewer experience points. Needless to say, you won’t be bothered with training them to their full potential after a while.
The needs of your consumers play a major role in the game. If there is a lack of food or drink stands for instance, you’ll be hearing more than a few complaints as you pass by them. If you want a little more information on their thoughts however, you can walk up to them and have a conversation. This also is a stage for becoming friends with your customers, ensuring they’ll keep returning to the park. If they happen to be a lovesick teenager of the opposite sex, you can even flirt by using some questionable lines including, “I lost my phone number, can I have yours?” and “you’re ugly but I see something else I like about you.” Sadly, these conversations get tiring after a while because the game has a basic comment selection screen which lets you choose a random fact to say to the guest which follows a response indicating their approval or disapproval. It’s very limited and as such, dialogue is repeated often.
This looks very familiar from somewhere.
Managing a park isn’t all about work, however. If you feel like taking a break from building and shuffling staff around, you can indulge yourself in the park attractions. When you go on some of the carnival and coaster rides, you're treated to a sequence featuring a close-up of your character on said ride. It’s like watching those old home movies of yourself riding the bumper cars: dull and painful. That being said, Thrillville does have a mixed bag of mini-games for you to play, including miniature-golf, arcade games, shooting games, racing, bumper cars – the list goes on. To be honest though, many of the mini-games simply aren’t engaging enough to retain your interest. The racing games, for example, last roughly half a minute each and see you drive around a few bends and curves. Saucer Soccer is even worse, as it has you play a team versus match of soccer while riding in a UFO. The thing that makes it undesirable to play is the simple fact it feels like a gimmick.
There are a few gems amongst this lot, however. Miniature golf is surprisingly simple yet fun enough to sustain long-term interest – that and there are multiple courses for you to play on. The arcade games manage to recapture some of the more classic moments of arcade history, including those fighter plane sims where you would be able to collect upgrades for your plane’s guns. You would take down waves of enemy aircraft only to die when the end of level boss overwhelms you with tremendous firepower. Yet despite the odd highlight, the mini-games lose all their appeal and you’ll end up playing them purely for the sake of completing missions.
Missions serve as a way to score park completion points and unlock new parks. They’re generally objectives in the discussed areas of the game that you have to meet, such as building fourteen rides with an average thrill rating of 70. Taking a step into a broader range of ideas, some missions will even require you to increase the park’s teen and adult visitor ratios by focusing advertising on those markets. We find it strange however that some missions require you to “build a new 'coaster” with a significant drop distance and all you have to do is sell a rollercoaster that was in already in the park to start with and then simply rebuild it.
Multiplayer is included in the package but let's be honest: there’s a lot of party games available across the PlayStation 2’s library, and keeping in mind the fact that many of Thrillville’s mini-games are a little dull, you won’t be returning often with friends. Regardless, there is multiplayer support for up to four players, providing of course you have the multi-tap accessory for your console. Mini-games range from full screen to multiple screens, depending on the game you play. There’s no need to go wondering around the parks to select the game either; instead, you can just select the “Party Play” mode at the title screen to easily access all mini-games. There’s also a “Tourney Mode” which lets you have a small tournament with your friends to see who rates the best out of all the mini-games you play.
Pimp my 'coaster!
Graphically, Thrillville doesn’t look too pretty. People’s faces are a little too square for comfort, and at times attractions disappear off the screen because the game can’t keep up with drawing times when there are hundreds of people in the one area. This does however make us a little forgiving towards the less-than-perfect visuals, as the game never slows down, but even when playing mini-games everything looks a tad pixelated. Sometimes, even the camera got stuck under roofing for no apparent reason, only to correct itself five seconds later.
Some care has been given to the audio throughout the park. Radio interviews with Uncle Mortimer play in the background as well as appropriate music that is suited to theme park areas. People’s voices are a little undistinguishable every now and then, but are otherwise fine. Aside from this, there's nothing in particular that stands out in terms of the soundtrack, which is a disappointment.
To put it simply, Thrillville is a rushed game. It had the potential to be a great theme park sim, but the mini-games are a little dull and, when combined with poor graphics, there’s nothing to be overly impressed with. The main meat of the game is definitely in the construction and management side of the park. If that is what interests you the most, then Thrillville isn’t too bad; just bear in mind there are some better theme park sims available on the market.
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