![]() I can open it anyway, though, without fearing an eventual coroner visit and regulatory shutdown because, unlike the Rollercoaster Tycoon games, Planet Coaster’s human riders can’t die - though it hasn’t stopped a selection of players from Googling to check. In my case, I discovered that people actually wouldn’t be too keen on being G-forced to death: while the Hate Coaster’s fear and nausea ratings are off the scale, it’s not actually a particularly exciting ride. It’s health and safety gone mad, obviously, but it’s also a useful way to gauge whether guests will actually enjoy the monstrosity you’ve created, as the tests spit out values for excitement, fear, and nausea that help determine a ride’s popularity and the amount you can charge for tickets. Before players can open rides in Planet Coaster’s parks, they have to test them, putting a gaggle of white plastic crash test dummies through an ordeal to make sure flesh-and-blood humans won’t get turned inside out along the way. My first riders don’t die, though, because they’re not human. I have, I realise after connecting up the final piece of track, inadvertently built a version of the theoretical Euthanasia Coaster - the attraction designed specifically to kill its riders. With the infinite money open to me in Planet Coaster’s sandbox mode, I settle on a design: a slow climb to the top of a horrible mountain, before a sheer plunge down 20 storeys provides the speed to make it through five loop-the-loops, each sharply veering left, then right, then back again. Frontier’s game - the spiritual successor to the glorious Rollercoaster Tycoon series - lets players construct their own coasters, noodling on every twist, turn, and terrifying drop to squeeze the most vomit out of its riders. ![]() Planet Coaster is largely accommodating of these dark urges. I want to make something so fast, so rickety, and so nauseating that its riders feel as uneasy as I do when I think about the Red Hot Chili Peppers song Love Rollercoaster. ![]() Unlike the Red Hot Chili Peppers, though, I don’t want to make a Rollercoaster of Love. “Your love is like a rollercoaster baby, baby I wanna ride,” the Red Hot Chili Peppers famously sang on their awful song Love Rollercoaster. Update Night is a fortnightly column in which Rich McCormick revisits games to find out whether they've been changed for better or worse.
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