This is, of course, where being the park manager comes in handy. You can speak to the guests, chatting them up about completely random fun facts, gauging their interest in the different kinds of rides (mellow, thrill and coasters), and basically just going back and forth until you've felt them out enough to raise their friendship, at which point they'll always remember you. Being the manager, you can also tell the customers to piss off and just jump on the ride yourself.

Given their pedigree, it's not surprising that Frontier put coasters in the game, but it is a little shocking to see how well they've planned it all out for the PS2 controller. All the basic stuff of RollerCoaster Tycoon is here; velocity, rider nausea, g forces, structural integrity. With just a few basic tests you can make sure that things like momentum are in place to carry the cars around corners and through loops, and building is as simple as more or less flying through the level and placing pieces at whatever angle you choose. The controls really are intuitive and it only took us about 5 minutes before we were building stuff that would make anyone hurl (and caused an awesome amount of motion blur). If anyone has seen footage from the absolutely masochistic things you can do in RCT, you'll realize that it's entirely possible to create a guaranteed barf-o-matic if you so choose -- though the park and clean-up crews will suffer for it.

The main difference between both theme park and coaster sims of the past, however, is how the rest of the park is presented. Nearly everything in the park is interactive; if you placed it, chances are you can do something with it, and this is where Thrillville is different. In just the first park alone, there were tons of mini-games available; we bounced on a trampoline while doing tricks, played mini-golf, shoved around some sumo saucers (think trying to bounce another flying saucer out of a ring), drove hovercars around tracks, ran a sort of first-person shooter, raced around an RC Pro-Am or Ivan "Ironman" Sewart's Off-Road-style slide-heavy top-down racer, participated in a shooting gallery with a bazillion things to hit, played an arcade shoot-'em-up. What's crazy is that every single mini-game was good. There were some that were better than others, but we were so hooked by them that we couldn't help but retry over and over again until we got at least three stars -- enough to earn some bonus cash that we could pour back into the park.

Now keep in mind that this is just the first park, there are a handful of others with dinosaur, jungle, fantasy, and more, and we've really only scratched the surface here, but we've sat on this preview long enough, and needed to at least get something up. Though our time with the game has been fairly short (blame the stupid amount of games coming out already -- and it's not even the Holiday season yet!), we're already convinced that if the fun factor in the mini-games and the park management sections stay this fun, we could be looking at the sleeper hit of the Holidays. We'll have more if/when we can get some free time.

We also have to apologize to the guys at LucasArts and Frontier for thinking the screenshots they've released with the awesome [ps2feature=26]Thrillville Developer Diary[/ps2feature] were bullshots; the game sports some lighting effects and an amount of density that we thought for sure the PS2 couldn't do at a reasonable framerate and while it's still a little dodgy at times (don't even try looking around while on a coaster), it is for the most part very smooth, and absolutely looks as good in motion as those shots you've seen on [ps2media=1021]the media page[/ps2media].

Now, if we could just get some more free time, there's this mini-golf course from hell that Chris has been talking about...