Hethetheth

Roses are Red
 
Violets are Blue
 
I have limited patience...
 
...for lame cryptic Clues

Roses are Red
 
Violets are Blue
 
I have limited patience...
 
...for lame cryptic Clues

Roses are Red
 
Violets are Blue
 
I have limited patience...
 
...for lame cryptic Clues

Roses are Red
 
Violets are Blue
 
I have limited patience...
 
...for lame cryptic Clues

To counter the longer posts:
 
I like the look of it!

Not going to lie, it looks absolutely dreadful.

Not going to lie, it looks absolutely dreadful.

And there was much rejoicing.

1. The size - It's so compact and easy to navigate, which means it's easy to just turn up, do a few rides and leave when you want. I rarely spend a full day there now, but it's sometimes nice to pop in and do some rides.
 
2. The coasters - World beating? No. Fun? Yes. Sure it could do with some more of them, but Stealth, Inferno and Swarm are solid.
 
3. Fright Nights - for the last few years this is the main reason I've gone. It's good fun!

I mean if the rumours are coming directly from Gil himself then this will definitely enlarge and thicken my belief.

I’ve heard the same thing! Mr Gul Lible messaged me the other day. Forbidden Tomb is returning!

This fails to make my belief thick.
 
The "I heard from some guy who knows another guy whose dog walker is husband of someone who overheard someone from Merlin say that this was happening" school of rumours isn't exactly overwhelmingly belief thickening.

This fails to make my belief thick.
 
The "I heard from some guy who knows another guy whose dog walker is husband of someone who overheard someone from Merlin say that this was happening" school of rumours isn't exactly overwhelmingly belief thickening.

This fails to make my belief thick.
 
The "I heard from some guy who knows another guy whose dog walker is husband of someone who overheard someone from Merlin say that this was happening" school of rumours isn't exactly overwhelmingly belief thickening.

I agree with the above
 
Bubbleworks in 1990 > Gruffalo > Bubbleworks in 2016.
 
Yes, Gruffalo is an improvement on what immediately preceded in, but that doesn't make up for years of disrepair.

I agree with the above
 
Bubbleworks in 1990 > Gruffalo > Bubbleworks in 2016.
 
Yes, Gruffalo is an improvement on what immediately preceded in, but that doesn't make up for years of disrepair.

I first rode Derren Brown's Ghost Train in 2017. I've made my feelings clear about the very muddled story in this thread before, but I ultimately did find it a flawed but generally enjoyable ride. Not worth a long queue or the money spent on it, but it was fine.
 
Fast forward to Fright Nights 2019, and oh boy have my feelings changed.
 
The queue for the ride was advertised as a 50 minute wait. Ok, that's fairly long but it was Fright Nights and everything was busy. 60 minutes later we were still not in the batching area. In the 30 minutes that followed, we saw only 3 batch groups enter. One every 10 minutes! Really?! I know this ride isn't great with capacity, but I cannot understand operations being this bad.
 
The pre show was as boring and disconnected from the experience as usual, but at least it all worked. Once it ended we moved onto the next waiting area and waited. And waited. And waited. We were there for 5 minutes. Worsening the wait was that the room is lightly themed with no music (I thought IMA score made 90 mins of music, and yet it plays only in the queue, why?) and we were waiting with the worst actor / staff member they could find. This preemptively killed any momentum the pre show gave the experience.
 
Despite the lengthy wait, when we did move into the hanging carriage room we were hurried through to board. This room is probably the only decent bit of the ride and yet we barely got to experience it. Genius move Thorpe. Genius.
 
Once onboard we had VR segment one. It was fine, but very little happens really on reflection (it occurs to me that the whole VR segments contain 2 'ghosts' in total, which is ridiculously low).
 
After the VR segment we were asked to wait on the train for a bit. At this point we all sat in the awkward and silent carriage. No music, nothing. People around us muttered "is that it?" and "that was s***". 
 
We eventually moved into the abysmal middle section. There were no sound effects or music. We all wandered around an empty set of cages and then (would you believe it) we reached the end and waited for ages. In silence....again. 
 
Eventually we went into the 2nd VR segment and saw the final of the two 'ghosts' of the experience. The segment was fine.
 
Once over we went into the shop for the fake-out finally. We waited there for ages before anything (what a shocker). When it did begin we merely got a man in a t-shirt rather than a demon. Really?!
 
This ride was ok at first but now it is utterly abysmal. There is NO sense of theatrics at all anymore. In 2017 there was a serious effort to keep the pace going and maintain some story. There was an energy from the actors and the middle section was seemingly the glue that held it all together. Now there were awkward silences, confusion and waiting it was an embarrassment and I struggle to see how anyone enjoys it in it's current state (if anyone does I'd love to know why). Judging from the people in my train the public seem to hate it.

/\ likewise, I only knew it existed from online forums and never saw any adverts for it.

I wonder if it also had anything to do with profit, cash and spreading themselves thin. Merlin might be 2nd largest in size to Disney, but that doesn't mean their profits and cash are proportional.
 
If Phantasialand makes money it is spent on Phantasialand. If Merlin parks make money it has to be spread out and budgeted across numerous other parks, and I would surprise me if that money was proportionally lower than that of Phantasialand.
 
E.g. if Phantasialand makes £1 million then it gets to spend it on itself. If Merlin makes £10 million, but has 20 parks (for the sake of this analogy) then each has the equivalent of £500k, but Merlin might choose instead to reinvest that in their 21st park instead.
 
With the above example Merlin are still 'larger' and more profitable than Phantasialand overall, but not per park.

I saw this topic in Coaster Force and though this could prove interesting.
 
‐-----
 
For me the 2010s mean quite a few things depending upon which country or continent or even park I look at.

Europe:

The Good:
I am extremely pleased that parks are developing more coasters which are focused on providing thrills rather than trying to break records or out-do other parks. Rides like the Smiler and Formula Rossa appear to outliers, and I'm pleased to see rides like Taron, Lost Gravity, Baron 1898, Wicker Man etc. being opened.

Generally mainland Europe's parks have been doing well with some of my favourite major parks expanding with an array of different ride types and not just coasters. The likes of Symbolica, Popcorn Revenge, Maus Au Chocolat, Pulsar and Chiapas suggest that other rides are improving, not just coasters.

The Bad:
The UK....oh, the UK. It's not been great has it? The 2010s have been bad over here. There have been great coasters added to some parks (Wicker Man, Icon), but on the whole the 2010s have been about the closure of classic rides and the decline in quality of others. Many of those lost were already butchered in the 2000s (Bubbleworks), whilst others were ruined and closed within the decade (Loggers Leap). Alton Towers was the only park to see successful major additions, whilst others saw mostly rethemes or the odd coaster. Compared to the 1990s boom (2000s boom for Thorpe) this was pretty shocking.

The Ugly:
I hope the trend of VR dies with the decade. Derren Brown's Ghost Train was at first an admirable disaster as it attempted something new, but now it has declined within 3 years to become an utter catastrophe of a ride. VR additions to other rides have also added very little beyond cheap CGI and longer wait times.

This is the year I've felt least enthused to go to Thorpe Park, and this year I've missed it the least. Nowadays what keeps me returning is the simple fact it's the biggest park near to me rather than anything else.
 
Visits to Thorpe since 2015:
 
2015: 2
2016: 5
2017: 4
2018: 3
2019: 1
 
The reasons are simple.
 
1. Thorpe are taking rides away and replacing them with nothing.
2. The only additions are temporary upcharge experiences or rethemes.
 
What I do miss though are Stealth, Inferno, the Swarm and Walking Dead, which I actually rather like despite the bizarre retheme choice. I look forward to Fright Nights next year also.

I have limited sympathies though as it still relates to the design of the ride in the first place.
 
When a pirate in Pirates of the Caribbean breaks the ride is still pretty much a good experience. The experience does not lean heavily on one animatronic.
 
If the demon suit breaks or VR doesn't work (or the train crash scene fails and is replaced by metal fences) then the entire DBGT experience is ruined instantly. At the end the day the attraction is essentially a projection of Derren Brown, a hanging train set piece, 2 videos, a bunch of metal fences and a man jumping out at you.

I have limited sympathies though as it still relates to the design of the ride in the first place.
 
When a pirate in Pirates of the Caribbean breaks the ride is still pretty much a good experience. The experience does not lean heavily on one animatronic.
 
If the demon suit breaks or VR doesn't work (or the train crash scene fails and is replaced by metal fences) then the entire DBGT experience is ruined instantly. At the end the day the attraction is essentially a projection of Derren Brown, a hanging train set piece, 2 videos, a bunch of metal fences and a man jumping out at you.

The shop ending used to be cool until it was replaced with a man in a shirt.

The shop ending used to be cool until it was replaced with a man in a shirt.