01 21 00

murderer

Well, my biggest addiction is back. I'm playing Rollercoaster Tycoon again.

After the game's crash, I got disgusted and uninstalled the game. But I installed it again this weekend and I'm hooked again. Never mind that I'm playing scenarios that I've already done before. It's all fresh because my parks are new.

And I realized I'm a terrible sadist.

If you've never played the game before, let me explain it briefly. You are in charge of an amusement park. You decide where the rides go, how many bathrooms there are, and how much ice cream costs. You hire workers to sweep the vomit off the paths, maintenance men to fix the rides, and entertainers to dance around in fursuits.

Of course, the best part of the game is designing the roller coasters. There are several different designs which become available to you through your Research and Development department, such as suspended coasters, wooden coasters, mine rides, steel coasters... You play the part of the engineer, and decide where to put the first hill, that stomach-twisting loop, the double helix. Then you see if people will ride it.

The coasters are all rated by three criteria: excitement, intensity, and nausea. If your coaster is extremely high in any of the categories, no one will ride it. You'll see the little people walk up to the queue line and stop, saying, "Whoa! Too much for me!"

When I first started playing the game I tried designing coasters that I would like to ride. But when I test-ran them, their stats were off the charts. I had one coaster that had an intensity rating of 13.4 and a nausea factor of 11.4 (on a scale of 1 to 10.) So I had to refine the rides, taming them down but not making them dull.

Like I said, it's a bit additive.

But now I'm noticing a disturbing trend in my coaster building. It's off the record (I don't save the games when I'm messing around like this), but I keep thinking, what does this say about me?

I've been designing rides that will kill people.

Coaster crashes are part of the game; if your maintenance personnel get behind in their inspections, there will inevitably be an accident. But I designed a steel coaster that killed a bunch of people. And I thought it was hilarious.

It is a "powered launch" coaster. It starts out from the station by a "push," rather than being pulled by a chain up a hill. It accelerates quickly, goes through a loop, and rolls up a hill to pause. Then it goes backwards, through the loop, and back into the station.

I discovered that if I raised the amount of force used to launch the train, the train goes shooting off the end of the track. And it crashes. And people die.

The true depth of my sickness knows no bounds; I even captured a screenshot of the coaster flying off the track:

What the hell is wrong with me?

But wait, it gets better.

I then realized that you could drown people if there is a body of water in the park. I spent a good fifteen minutes picking people up and dropping them into the water and watching them sink. I even laughed when I got the notice that Guest 1034 has drowned!

I suppose it's better that I'm killing digital people, rather than real ones.

And now that I think about it, there are games that completely revolve around killing people. I just found a way to do it in a "wholesome, family" game.

Is that so wrong?

______ of the Day

Spinning