Marc

You could enjoy the park without fastrack of course (even portaventuta) but you would IMO struggle to get on everything. The way I see it is if I'm traveling / paying a lot of money on a trip, if the park offers fastrack to ensure I will 100% get on everything I want to then there's no doubt I'll take up the offer. It's easy to blame fastrack for queues, id be intrested to see how much difference it actually made, the queues may feel faster as you would move more but I'm not convinced it makes queue times as much longer as is made out.

Thing is it's easy to say that when your a regular and know the park inside out, Thorpe is getting to the stage where on a reasonably busy day it's difficult to do it all in just one day - so you either buy fastrack or stay over. I can totally understand why a non regular uses it, as a regular I rarely use it unless there's somthing I really want to go on - but when I go to parks I don't visit often / new parks I'll always choose to buy fastrack

No thanks - fastrack is very useful in certian situations!

Yep everything in there has been replaced! All the affects are new in the building too, before they only had water from the ceiling the rest was in the seats, now theres a bunch of other effects around the building too

I think this is important for this to work well. They have Thorpe Live over the weekends in Summer (some of the artists have actually been pretty good!) which does attract a fair crowd at times, but a show along with that will help even more. I guess theres now also Angry Birds 4D to help too.

Don't see why you would want it to fail - if, and its a big if, it ultimately works how the park would like it to standing in long coaster queues at the park (and id assume all other merlin parks too) will be a thing of the past (in theory!). I was there for one of the trails, can't remember which one, we logged on and registered and joined Swarms "virtual" queue, at our time went over and was on the ride within 5 minutes, that said they did seem to struggle with the backwards queue and that was forming a lengthy wait in the actual queue its self. I said this at the time that it might actually work better if they bit the bullet and put it on all coasters for a trial - I've no doubt it will cause some confusion, but I think being on all coasters people will have no choice but to understand how it all works and to use the system. The biggest problem the park will have is people come to theme parks and expect to stand in line, get on the ride, they are totally changing the concept of visiting a theme park for the majority of guests, but if they are able to overcome that can see this being pretty cool. When they were doing this when I was there I think it was a 7PM close and they were giving out time slots up till around 8 it seemed, to give people who would join the queue at closing time the same kind of thing I guess.

I know it was rumoured it would get a bird on top but I'm not too sure where this rumour came from - They would of needed planning permission for such a thing. They could retheme the cage to a nest although not to sure how practical that would be with engineers needing to go up each day!

Ha - lets just hope this is the last of the major work it needs and from here on it has a few good seasons!

And in all them years only once has it opened in March and closed in November (and even then it had a couple months down) - theres a reason that only 2 were ever sold and that the other ones now been removed. I do commend thorpe for the amount of effort they have put into keeping Slammer running, they deserve a lot of praise for that IMO, and am very much looking forward to getting back onto it but I suspect if any major work is required in the near future they will cut their losses and remove t unfortunately.

It was the busiest ive seen the park this season, I guess with it being the only good day weather wise of the bank holiday everyone decided to visit then!

Fastracks already in and didnt seem to have any excessive queues on a very busy Sunday?

Vortex / Rush area plays the lost city ambiance. As far as I know theres just Chart music on the beach and dome at the moment. One step at a time!

That will just be part of the tests they need to do, looks like it was maybe e-stopped?

I saw all the roof has been taken off, id guess a problem has come up which needs to be fixed as soon as possible

Probably - although it probably did in the direction the park were going before!

Great news to hear its back - much more fitting to the park than just having chart music played! Good work thorpe!

Yesterday morning the screens were not there at all so they've done quite a good job! It will look good when the graphics are up either side of the screen, not going to lie though can't wait to hear entrance music back

It sounded much louder yesterday than it was earlier in the season, unless its been turned down again!

New for 2014 - King Pigs Wild Hog Dodgems! They were pretty fun yesterday - they run at a good speed and the length was pretty good, hopefully they are able to run it like this during the busy months too.

The effects used are... Thats all I can remember for now.

Detonator was/is close to perfection anyway its audio suits it down to a tee!

Maybe there are things like that for a reason? The "angry birds" bit on the sign is their brands logo so can totally see why maybe Rovio didn't want it in the same font?Don't see why anyone would "laugh their heads off", everyone seemed to be enjoying them selves in the area yesterday whilst enthusiasts will slag it off the vast majority will enjoy it which is surely the main thing for the park, we would love things like the swarm each year but budgets would never allow it. As long as the park continue to progress forwards I'm happy, some will be smaller than others but this is a huge improvement over the miss mash they had before and the whole area has a nice atmosphere too.

Yeah its one movie - although its very well and professionally done - it looks good and people seemed to love it!

Found some new Swarm pens today which make the actual Swarm noise when you push down the button - love it!

Slammer was testing again today - I'm guessing it must be getting close now!