Benin

So after a month of going to all the Merlin Halloween events the ‘last’ weekend of the month needed to be something different. As such, discussions were had and plans put in place for a quick jaunt over the Channel on a Friday afternoon to enjoy a weekend of Belgian creds and scary things. The Saturday was at Walibi, which has had an interesting life it must be said, and recently rebranded itself to a rather different park theme of a music band. They also hold one of Belgium’s premier Halloween events, including a character who has a 5 year history as part of the event, roams the park hurling abuse at people and is on Facebook. The event is so popular that the two days prior to our visit the park had to close early due to capacity reasons. Fortunately, as John had been talking to local enthusiasts, we had purchased the R.I.P (in peace) passes. These were €35 (or €25 on other days depending on opening hours) and got you Fastrack on 5 rides of your choosing, all the scare mazes, a visit to the Zombie Bar, priority seating area for Fireworks and 10% off in shops. Limited to 500 a day, this certainly screamed value for money, especially when there are 2 hour queues involved. The park opened at 10 to begin the 11 hour day, and we headed right to the opposite end of the park to the most famous ride in Belgium… Psyke Underground It’s a Schwarzkopf Shuttle Loop! Yaaaay! This has had a chequered history as well, including stalls, being put semi-indoors, noise complaints, closure, etc. But this year the park enclosed the entire thing and added a bit of theming to make it fit the ‘music park’ theme. They also turned the launch into LSMs, which made me happy. The queue was non-existent, so we were straight on and ready to go. A small pre-show occurs (although little context is provided to what’s going on) and we’re slowly set off on our way to a countdown. The launch then kicks in. Chalk another win up for rolling LSM launches above the other types, as you are propelled into the darkness and through the classically intense loop before heading up the first spike and then repeat the loop backwards, dash through the station with strobes going off and slightly up the backwards spike before returning back into the station. It’s simple, effective; it’s rather good in fact. I do hope that the park’s plans to continue improving the experience (the outdoor portion of the queue is dull, and could be turned into a disco scene, more lights and a requirement to play the rather epic soundtrack are also required) come to fruition, because it really is the best coaster on the park. 7/10 We rode it a second time in the front (because the ride experience really differs on your row), before heading off in search of other rides. Firstly, we hit up the Zierer Tivoli for 3 laps of +1, whilst next door was a dark ride I was quite interested in experiencing. Challenge of Tutankhamon A Sally trackless dark ride with multiple (3) possible endings and lots of awesome effects? Where do I sign up? This in the end was quite cool, and we managed to get the super-secret bonus ending first time around. Horray for us! There was however no fire which was disappointing. However most of the animatronics and other effects were very good. Be interesting to see what they do with this considering how it doesn’t fit in at all to the new branding. We next headed into the Wild West area, where Calamity Mine awaited, a Vekoma Mine Train of the standard two lift hill clone type. It was alright I guess; nothing really special to write home about. With the rumours surrounding the Western area in general however the ride could look damn awesome next year. Continuing our walk back to the park entrance we went into the 4D Cinema in French as we thought we might understand it better. We didn’t, but it was quite a decent show unique to the park’s brand. Decent level of effects without resorting to the burdenous leg ticklers either. Good. We then met up with Kristof, local Walibi enthusiast extraordinaire before deciding to go on Cobra, which he quickly backed out of. It is a Vekoma Boomerang after all, but certainly not the worst one I’ve ever done. Again this area of the park had a strange Arabian theme going on, a reminder of the park’s Six Flags days. Hopefully the park will get to a stage where all of the park is themed to WAB. We ventured ahead into the Palace of the Genie which was unsurprisingly a Madhouse. It made no sense at all as to what was going on, which is always a problem with Madhouses and their stories, more often than not they are too wordy to get across to us ignorant English people. However the alternative effects inside were decent and quite subtle in a way to finish the story. We’re still spoilt by Hex though. It was then time for the Music Battle Show, which was new for this year. There was a lot of pre-show pissing about due to some technical issues but eventually the show did start and it was pretty awesome. With awesome projection mapping and standard stunt show stunts before a decent finale. It was certainly worth watching and makes me wish we could have such things. Nic is SUCH a goon We broke for lunch at an Italian place, which was ok, before heading off to the Zombie Bar which was literally located on the park’s lake, to which you had to cross a bridge to access it. There we met Jeroen, another enthusiast who works quite high up on the park. We had our free drink and nattered for some time, being interacted with the Zombies as well for a good while. A very entertaining and unique idea, and probably the best part of our day, especially when one zombie led us on a conga line off the island. The mazes had opened and John, Kristof and Jeroen went onto their first, Project Z, which included a disclaimer and going around alone. After their go through, the report was that John got locked in a cage for several minutes, and there was lots of touching and weird things going on. It even ended in a waist high foam party for some reason. The vote for next things were for creds, so we went to the last two of the park, firstly, a SLC. Vampire wasn’t very good, and had some minimal theming. Others enjoyed it but I found it to be burdenous and juddery. Next door though the Wooden coaster Loup-Garou (or is it Weerwolf?) was much better, even with the set-square corners it had an abundance of airtime and generally I found it to be quite a fun ride. We wandered over to the Zombie River, which normally is a Jungle Cruise style affair, but for Halloween it has actors (3 of them) around to ‘scare’ you. It didn’t have a high scare rating and for good reason, it wasn’t very good. A lot of milling around doing not a lot where 1 actor sat there doing nothing, whilst the other 2 were a simple diversion and scare tactic. They are limited due to the nature of the ride, but they could’ve done better I’m sure. The scare maze doers did Insomnia, which was located on the Dodgems and had a tonne of actors inside, and it was rated as pretty good. We caught the magic show a second time because of being told of another show which unfortunately didn’t exist. We decided that we should head back towards Psyke and thus got the epically themed train over there. Off the train we suggested John and Kristof do the Virus Z1 outdoor maze, which they did, before we rode Psyke again closer to the back and received an even more forceful ride. Horray! We headed back towards the entrance via Villa 13 (which had way too many people going through at once to be effective), did some shopping with our discounts before settling down to watch the fireworks show. It was pretty cool; it had fire, explosions and lasers. What’s not to love? Standard fare really although it had be toned down from last year as they shut the mazes and brought the actors out for it. Made sense to not do that this year. At the point we bid Kristof a farewell as he needed to go home. After that we rode Loup-Garou again in the dark since it was the only other coaster we wanted to re-ride, before me and John headed towards Madhouse 3D but it was shut because of security reasons. On the way out we decided to ride the Breakdance, which we got 2 goes on because the ride op was being lazy and wanted to close his queue early by 5 minutes. Fine by us, because it was on a really epic cycle. I didn’t take any photos of the Breakdance, so have the epically lit Wave Swinger instead… And that was it. My thoughts on Walibi are that it is a park with great potential, but limited due to neighbours, hence all the issues with Psyke. They have a decent line up of rides if rather mediocre in a way, and a very unique theme and brand which they are pushing into the parks they own. I had a very enjoyable day at the park and it seemed to have very good intentions towards the future, and I hope that it succeeds. The Halloween event was good as well, with a fair amount of park theming and LOTS of actors roaming about most of the areas. I mean LOTS. More than our parks have in total numbers. It certainly was the most Halloweeny event I’ve been too this year, and they deserve plaudits for that. Well done.

Wasn't Mr Wann leaving the directing field after whatever he released this year? Evidently Lionsgate aren't doing very well to drag this back up...

It's only popular because of the attached brand, not because it's a good ride... Be interesting to see if it was equally 'liked' without the IP... I doubt it...

A closed season where we haven't got anything major being built to distract us... This is gonna be a crap few months then... Though of course, if people were REALLY desperate to ride things, sure some actual research would lead them to parks that remain open during the winter...

You're NEVER going to get consistency with mazes due to their nature...

Wouldn't think it was a ride soundtrack this...

Whole tonne of pics on Facebook... https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.713281738701395.1073741852.119312944764947&type=1 Meanwhile, in other news, IMAScore have announced they're doing the theme, and posted a teaser of it... Opens on 26th April... Mark your calenders...

Probably because they hire decent construction teams and also have less H&S red tape to get through... And like to have plenty of time to build theming...

Inferno has been running extremely well this year though... Good old B&M...

Testing begins...

Be interesting to see if both Thorpe and Towers bring back their respective versions... Due to the secrecy, it's hard to tell if either were actually popular or not, especially with such minimal advertising...

I had a nose around their website, consider me unsure as to whether or not these people are involved...

Why can't we have nice things? That was fab <3

Were the Fastrack queues overflowing though like mentioned in the person's report? That's the point I'm making... Thorpe have much more of a history of packed out normal AND Fastrack queues... Alton seem to be levelling Smiler's reasonably well since upon my last visit it was only reaching the entry into the indoor queue, although not on 3 trains (surprise that a lower throughput makes the Fastrack queue longer)... Though it would seem on Thirteen the 3rd train is broken since it wasn't in use on last Sunday night...

Consistency is a typical problem of scaremazes though, for every good run, there will be a crap run for various reasons (actors not in, effects not working, staff being rubbish, etc)... As for Thorpe overselling Fastrack, this is very consistent as it happens regularly on busy days... Shame... But people need to physically complain on the park (and probably be given priority passes as a result) to get anything done about it...

Alpen Hotel returns! Nothing else is needed...

Never heard of unexpected setbacks? Of course the park would aim to get it open for Fright Nights, indeed, that's the minimum aim they should have been doing... But it's clear sommat else came up and as such has caused this ride to be once again shut for extended periods of time... Every year it gets less and less worthwhile keeping...

Priority Passes were probably given out due to Fury conking out and been told that they could use it on Vampire... As such, cannot be considered a burden in the same way as Fastrack because it's down to unexpected things...

Won't stop the ride from being completely and utterly meh though... And be miles away from any major pathway... The exit path was longer than the ride I'm sure of it...

Perfect Day was used in the You're Next film, as the major theme because of irony.

The issue here I would say lies with the fact that these two rides are completely different, yet in an attempt to probably save money not needing to manufacture a new chassis cover, they've cloned the Swarm trains... It's not a clone, whereas with Disney, even their clones usually have completely different features or layouts (Raging Spirits vs Indiana Jones, the MMV Indiana Jones rides, Matterhorn/Space Mountain)... Most of the time the obvious clones are the flat rides or indeed, the Paris/Cali versions of Tower of Terror... So really the majority of Disney clones are because you can't do much with the theme of a flat ride... Although of course the issue of having 3 clones of the same ride in one park is a different arguement all together...

It was (the last time I did it at night many years ago) pitch black... It was also raining so heavily only my boat was loaded and it was the most terrifying ride experience I've had at Thorpe...

Merlin don't do backstories? What about Swarm and Smiler's ones then?

Very long... Like, seriously, even indoors it can take FOREVER...