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The C. View

A blog by JoshC. in General

  • Entries

    62

  • Comments

    136

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    57155

About this blog

Detailed, sometimes rambling, entries about rides and attractions..

Entries in this blog

Phantom Fantasia - 30 Years On

As we'd expect, 30 years ago, Thorpe Park was a very different place. In fact, it wasn't really until 1983 that the park saw investment in 'theme park rides'; until then, the park was a more educational/leisure area. One attraction which opened in 1983 saw Phantom Fantasia - the first incarnation of what many knew as Wicked Witches Haunt. The ride was rethemed into WWH in 1994, before its untimely closure in 2000 due to the infamous Thorpe Park Fire. Whilst I never got a chance to ride the o

The Story Behind Detonator

As we know, next month will see Thorpe Park give a slight retheme to their 115ft drop tower, Detonator. A general shift in target market has to led to the perhaps knee-jerk reaction to bring in a family-themed area, and the easiest way to go about that would be an IP. So we have 'Angry Birds Land', and Detonator will become 'Detonator: Bombs Away'. Who knows what this slight retheme will bring? Well, we will find out in little under a month's time anyway. With most eyes focused on the futu

The Swarm - Forwards vs Backwards

As we know, following a poor response to marketing of Swarm last year, Thorpe decided to "revisit" Swarm's image and increase the "'thrill factor' for visitors". This was despite very positive reviews for Swarm as it stood last year. So, along with the new billboard theming elements, the back two rows have been turned backwards. Now, in a way, it's very hard to do a comparison between the two. They are, essentially, the same ride - they follow the same layout, you more or less experience th

'A Look Back' - Colossus

After trawling through the planning portal again, which is always interesting I find, I came across the original plans for Colossus. Much like with the http://forum.maniahub.com/topic/151-tidal-wave/page-30#entry164771]original Tidal Wave plans, they are quite different. But before I divulge into that further, let's look at how a new coaster came about in the first place... As is well known, in 1997, the Tussauds Group took over Thorpe. Prior to that, as you'd expect, it was hard for the

Why Angry Birds Land is better than Diagon Alley

Next month, Universal Studios Florida introduce their 'Diagon Alley' expansion to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. It sees the headline attraction 'Harry Potter and the Escape from Gringotts', the Hogwarts Express, as well as numerous shops from the Harry Potter universe. As to be expected, everyone is excited about the development. However, why should we be so excited? We've got a newly opened area which is much better than Diagon Alley ever could be - Angry Birds Land at Thorpe Park! Trav

Why X:\ has No Way Out of my Heart

Back in 1995, Thorpe Park was an extremely different place. Rather than being an island screaming out to the world about its thrills and spills, it was a quaint little family theme park, that kept itself to itself. Instead of the skyline being dominated by the likes of Stealth and Swarm, a large diving pole was the centre point, with Loggers Leap and Depth Charge being the highest rides on park at 60ft and 40ft respectively (and yet wouldn't really obstruct the skyline from outside the park too
  • JoshC.

How do you Solve a Problem like Fastrack?

This is a blog entry that relates to the hot topic of Fastrack and Fastrack sales. So why's it in here, and not in that topic? The aim here is to illustrate how Fastrack sales affect the main queue of a ride, and demonstrate what many bring up - those who pay for the premium service (Fastrack) negatively affect the service of those who do not pay for such a service (those who use the main queue). Unfortunately, this will be quite mathematically thought out, will ramble on a bit, and uses many
  • JoshC.

Linnanmäki Trip Report

Finland had never exactly been on my radar; it was more somewhere that I thought "it'd be nice to go there one day", as opposed to a "I'll go there in a few years". Then, Taiga happened, and all of a sudden, my interest popped up dramatically. And so Linnanmäki happened this weekend. I looked at trying to combine the trip with other Finnish parks (like Power Park and Särkänniemi), but given how widespread they are, Finland being the 8th most expensive European country, and time being limited, I
  • JoshC.

JoshC.'s Review of the Season - 2013

Here it is - the 2013 Review of the Thorpe Park season! I'll be sticking to a similar formulaic approach as the 2011 (sorry about the pictures being broken here; I'll be sorting it out asap!) and the 2012 Season Reviews I've done. If anyone has any suggestions on how to improve the style / format of it all, let me know! Sorry about the length of this; it's hard to a balance between a detailed review and keeping it short. Also, for anyone wondering, I won't be doing any for other parks, simply du
  • JoshC.

Halloween Fright Nights - Walibi Holland

It's only taken me 4 months to get around the posting this..   Walibi Holland's Halloween Fright Nights is well respected in the scare industry. They pump serious amounts of money into their attractions, and have TONNES of actors to boot. They go all out. And that's one of the many reason it had been on my to-do list for so long, and why I eventually went last year.   Now I actually wrote a trip report in Word a while back trying to cover the whole event. That report ended up

2015 Containment Review

Captain Obvious Alert - This blog may contain spoilers. So on Sunday, I did Containment, the new escape experience at Thorpe. I've never done one of these escape room things, and I've always been a bit sceptical about the idea - so many things can go wrong which can ruin the experience. But nonetheless, I was still excited to try it out... One thing which is worth noting was our group was made up of only 6 people (4 TPMers and 2 randomers), rather than the full 10. This was at the 4pm slot, so
  • JoshC.

Why Saw is actually a really good coaster.

Back in 2009, we were graced with arrival of a new coaster at Thorpe, yet again breaking the overall investment the park had spent on one attraction - £13.5 million, beating Stealth's £12 million (which, as we know, has now been beating again by The Swarm's overall investment). Before Saw - The Ride opened, fans were buzzing from excitement, and were hoping that the ride would perhaps be the park's best themed attraction, or at least the best since Tidal Wave opened in 2000. After all, Euro-
  • JoshC.

JoshC.'s Review of the Thorpe Season - 2014

2014 is almost over, which can only mean one thing...it's time for my review of Thorpe's season! In a way, it kind of feels silly to do a 'season' review on behalf, since I've "only" made 8 visits this year (by far my smallest Thorpe tally in memory!), so there's a few gaps here and there, and my views may not be fully representative of the season. However, I hope this review will end up giving a nice roundup of the season, and my views on what's gone down. If anyone wants to see my reviews of p
  • JoshC.

Symbolica Review

To me, Symbolica was the biggest new European attraction for 2017 for theme parks. It's not exactly a difficult feat to achieve, with little of note actually happening this year. But I found the prospect of Efteling, a park known for creating highly detailed and love dark rides, investing their biggest sum in a ride ever, much more exciting than Port Aventura sticking Ferrari Land at the edge of their park and adding a taller and faster Stealth to their line up.   It's difficult to rev

Breaking Free from the Merlin Machine - Drayton Manor

For the first in about 10 or 11 years, I visited a non-Merlin theme park. It's been a long time coming, and anywhere was a start. And that start was to be Drayton Manor. After such a beautiful week, Saturday decided to take a turn for the worst, and give us rain, thunder, lightning (though with a couple of breaks of sunshine during the day!). Adam picked me up and we arrived at Drayton around 9ish. Even though we were early, we could tell it was gonna be quiet day, and thank goodness, aft

BelGerAnd Day 3 - Walibi Beglium

After a fab night's sleep in our lovely hotel, it was Walibi Belgium day. Out of all the park's we were visiting, Walibi Belgium was the park I was most 'meh' about visiting. All the other parks had one or two attractions that I was really interested in trying out, and in some cases, were parks I wanted to try out for quite a while now. Given how I'd only heard about Bellewaerde a few months ago as well, this perhaps shows how blasé my expectations were for the park. We set off, giving ourselve

Liseberg

So I visited Liseberg back in July, and I just wanted to share a few thoughts on the park...  Majority of my photos were like so bad so I'm just stealing photos from the park's website to break things up.   Ultimately, I was left a bit...unfulfilled? by the park.  I don't know how to describe it.  The quality of some of the attractions at the park is really good, but the park itself just do 'it' for me.   Helix Let's get this out the way.  Helix is truly fantastic.  It's
  • JoshC.

What was the thing with The Antelope?

Back when I was about 8 or 9, I visited Gulliver's World (Warrington). The trip was unplanned really, and only lasted a couple of hours (well, from 10 til after lunch). However, the one thing that has always made me remember this trip is The Antelope - one of only 2 wooden coasters to be built in the UK in the past 50 years. At the time of riding, I'd never heard of Antelope before (heck, I'd only heard of Gulliver's Warrington a couple of days before my visit!), nor had I heard any reviews
  • JoshC.

15 Years of Fear

Fright Nights might be over, and it might be closed season, but I'm doing a belated 15 Years of Fear Celebration!  I've been fortunate enough to visit every Fright Nights, and do all but one Fright Nights maze-style attraction, so I'm going to do a quick worst-to-best ranking (16 to 1) of all those mazes.  Naturally, mazes change year-on-year, and even one run through can be dramatically different to another on the same night, so I'm being nice and judging these off my best runthroughs.  A

Should Thorpe Park Welcome Families?

Since the turn of the century, we've seen Thorpe accelerate from a quaint family theme park into a park which offers one of the largest array of 'thrill rides' in Europe. During this period, there has been quiet on obvious shift in target market - from families looking for a nice day out to young adults (which arguably is the 16-34 region in this case) looking to do something for a day. Many question the viability of this strategy, mainly from an economic perspective. However, are Thorpe righ
  • JoshC.

Is the concept of a 'Vanilla Coaster' dying?

In the past two decades or so, roller coaster manufacturing has seen many technological advances. Back in the 1980s, the idea of having a roller coaster where the trains were underneath the track or having a launched roller coaster was about as technologically superior as the industry has reached. The first 'suspended' coaster, 'The Bat' at Kings Island in America, opening in 1981, only to close two years later due to being highly temperamental, whilst the first launched coaster, 'King Kobra'
  • JoshC.

10 Years of Afterburn

10 years ago, Thorpe Park were graced with the introduction of Nemesis Inferno. It was B&M's 22nd Inverted coaster, a type of roller coaster which had proven most popular over the previous ten years. Billed as 'the world's greatest roller coaster experience' and having a name that obviously was leading itself to be a successor to the extremely popular Nemesis, the ride had a lot to live up to. Unfortunately, Inferno didn't live up to hype. From what I can gather, it's not a particularly
  • JoshC.

Polishing off Creds - Legendia

It feels like half of the European coaster community has decided to venture over to Poland this month, following the opening of that small coaster Hyperion, and with rapid expansion taking place at the two major Polish parks - Legendia and Energylandia. But how do they actually fair?   We flew to Katowice on a Saturday evening, arriving at our hotel late, giving us the perfect opportunity to arrive at Legendia Sunday morning. Legendia is based in Silesia, an old mining district of the
  • JoshC.

Can a Coaster in the UK be the 'Next Nemesis'?

Regularly with new projects in the UK, and even some internationally, are compared to Nemesis; Alton Towers' map-defining roller coaster. It's natural really when you consider that Nemesis is pretty much in every enthusiasts' top 10 coasters / rides, and usually near the top as well, and that it's been ranked even as a top 10 roller coaster in the world at one point/ So, with new projects, there's always talk of 'Will it be better than Nemesis?', 'Will it do a Nemesis?' and so forth. But what
  • JoshC.

Ninjago - The Brief Review

It's been a while since I dedicated a whole blog post to a ride review, but this seems like a suitable time to do one.   WARNING:  There will spoilers.  If you don't know what the ride system is, or want to completely avoid knowing what some of the effects used in the ride are, turn back now.       For those completely unaware, it is a 3D-screen based shooter ride, where you use hand motion to 'fire'.  Sitting in rows of four, with your 3D glasses, a lap bar comes d

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