Thrillville
Frontier's mini-game mash-up rocks. Find out why inside.
Published: December 10, 2006
With your staff taken care of the little stuff, you can concentrate on the goodies; taking care of the guests. The best way to do this is to simply give them things to play with. If you build it, they will indeed come, so all you really need to do in the beginning is build stuff; roller coasters, mini-golf courses, shooting galleries, trampolines, bumper cars... the list of attractions is insane -- more then 75 in total. And, best of all, you can play or ride all of them.
Though it doesn't really crop up at first, there's a catch: you can only build in pre-selected zones. At first I thought this a little annoying, but there's a layer of strategy that comes into maximizing what rides you put where because every attraction, coaster, game and stand draws power from that build area. Later on in the game, you're actually tasked with building properly so that every ounce of juice is tapped, which in turn teaches you to balance energy load.
Yes, it means that you're in effect limited to some pre-set configurations if you want to really work your park as much as needed, but this sort of late-game bit of strategy makes you feel like you're really managing every aspect of a park's maintenance and construction, and it's one of the more subtle ways that the game slowly guides you into the full decision making process without it ever feeling overwhelming or something that you have to do.
I remember when the first images of the game started getting squeezed from the LucasArts PR machine, and I scoffed at some of the effects being shown. It wasn't that the game looked impossibly good, it's just that most PS2 games didn't use the sort of fake HDR look that some Xbox games have had for a while, and I assumed that it was just the PS2 HUD slapped on top of Xbox renders. While that may have been the case, the PS2 version of the game most certainly does use the almost blown-out sun highlights on plenty of objects in the game world.
A balance was struck between giving the rides plenty of detail and limiting the amount of complexity to the sometimes dozens of park goers in kid, teen and adult flavors all on screen at the same time. The framerate for the most part, stays solid while on the ground, but once you hop into some of the rides meant to show off some of the park, you're going to get some pretty nasty dips in framerate. With the PSP version, the game looks quite literally identical, you'll just have a fairly choppy framerate from the start and it nosedives even more while on rides. Still, the game is confident in its art design, and it's stronger for it.
Aurally, things are even stronger. Thanks to a licensed game soundtrack that mixes some fairly contemporary alternative tunes with poppy original stuff written for the game, there's a great mix of tunes that both adults and kids will likely dig. It's not head-bobbingly good or anything, but it certainly does work. You'll hear the same basic canned responses in kid, teen and adult flavors when conversing with the park guests, but thanks to some very nicely executed CG lead-ins to each level that help "develop" the ongoing rivalry between Thrillville and Globo-Joy, you get a great introduction to the character of Uncle Moriarty. Little radio chat sessions between a park host and your crazy uncle just add to the whole ambiance.
So those are the basic building blocks of Thrillville. With the exception of the last park, you're never really forced to play any one area you don't like -- at least not passing all of the challenges. LucasArts made a point of casually suggesting that this is a game aimed at the younger crowd, but it really does work for all ages. It also represents one of the first games I've played in a long time that's truly something for both kid and adult, and I'll be giving a copy to my nephew this Christmas in the hopes that it'll help bridge the gap between the business side of his father's day-to-day operations and the passion that my nephew has for games. Hopefully that speaks more for how I feel about the game than any number I could give it.
