Mark9

I can round up my trip for you if you like. Shambhala - Awesome, as good as I remember and a proper crowd pleaser. Dragon Khan - Better then I remember. NOT samey, NOT too American. Just pure class from start to finish. Furius Baco - Abomination in ride form. Not a single enjoyable moment for me in any row, any seat. Just atrocious.

Admittedly when I saw the title I immediately thought you were talking about Inferno is a fine rollercoaster. Its lucky that not every rollercoaster has to be the best ride ever and Inferno has its place at Thorpe Park as the old reliable, the one that always works and eats through people like candy. It's my favourite Thorpe rollercoaster and this year has proved itself to be a great roller coaster; It's never ridden better then this year.

Add Baco trains to Rita.

83rd best topic on TPM.

I'll try to attend if we get rid of the name Maniacs.

Big fan of the lack of pre drop. What a colour scheme though, it looks so eye catching.

I don't know many people not going to Spain this month..

I can see Tidal Wave being added to that list as well. Rumba and Tidal Wave don't have very high ridership during Fright Nights and as some of the more expensive rides on park to run, they are logically the first to close. Surprised Tidal Wave isn't first on the list but then again they run that ride very oddly. On those freezing temperature days in March, Tidal Wave was one of the last to close.

It wasn't faff, at least if you were passionate about your role as a platformer, working on Vampire with three trains was The best experience you could have in the park. Managers and staff pulling together and working as fast and efficiently as possible to get trains in and out in 25 seconds. Of course I'm talking about a time where hey gave a damn about to roughputs ad reducing queue lengths. When it comes to it, Vampire will never run three trains again because it is cheaper to maintain two trains rather then three.

Day started with a 15 minute queue for breakfast. This was slightly chaotic with hundreds of people going for breakfast at the same time, a lot of people coming an hour early and not being turned away. Wouldn't happen at Towers From there it was on to Studios Park, our first stop Crush's Coaster. We didn't arrive dead on ten so when we got to Crush, the queue was already displayed at 60 minutes. We decided to bite the bullet and just go for it. This was the only ride where we saw a queue line monitor, a staff member regularly throwing out queue jumpers which was refreshing to see. Turns out, the queue for this isn't as bad as I first thought and its all down to Disney efficiency. Sure, this is a low throughput effort for Disney but even here the queue moves at a very steady pace. And its all down to the park running all twelve cars at once. As we watched we noticed cars are sent out every nine seconds. That is frankly astonishing to watch and throughput works out at roughly around 1200 an hour. So even for a low throughput affair, that is some impressive numbers from a Maurer. The ride itself is nice and quirky featuring some nice dark ride sections, a speedy lift hill and a reasonably good layout inside. I could argue that inside the shed, there's very little effects or theming but then again, its dark down below the water and the lack of things to look it increases the disorientation. This is far superior to Caligostro at Rainbow Magicland. Our next stop was Rock N Rollercoaster. Too say I'm not the biggest fan of the Florida version may be an exaggeration, here I find the ride just tiresome. I think the major problem is that for me, this just isn't a Disney type ride. Rip Ride Rockit at Universal Studios has issues but as a ride with a soundtrack it works fine. Here, Aerosmith just isn't a themed experience and I find the idea behind the ride so tedious. The theme here is... Aerosmith want to do something. I have no idea as unlike in Florida, the pre-show is very short and it seems to play continuously so you either walk in when its half way through or miss it completely. The station itself is similar to Florida except the cars are more pimped up and a tad silver. And as for the ride. I didn't notice how tedious the actual ride is in Florida because as the only upside down coaster at Disney World, it had a bit of difference to it. Here at Paris, which has Mission 2, a far superior version of what is the same ride type, Rock N Roller is just a little bit dire. Plain exteriors. Our next stop was Aarmageddon. Now I have a real problem with this type of attraction. If you told me that we were actually going into Space and we encounter problems then I'd probably come out loving it. But tell me I'm just an actor in a short scene being filmed for a film and I immediately switch off. It's exactly the same problem I have with similar rides in Florida. If anything, this is the only attraction that fits the bill of a studio park but I want to feel like I'm part of a narrative, not just being slotted in around loads of fire effects and smoke. Imagine if in the Hollywood Hotel you were told you weren't actually part of the narrative and just testing the ride system for the TV experience. It would be rubbish. Same applies to Armageddon so yes, probably my most hated experience in the day. Our next stop was Tower of Terror where we ended up queuing an hour. Crazy really, but it is the best ride in the entire resort so what the hey. After that we went for an English showing of Stitch Live where I was picked on by the character. I am Mark from the London and I am wanted for crimes against aliens. There we are, something new we learn everyday. I must have really bad luck as I was also picked on in the Laugh Floor in Florida.

Problem is someone joins the queue at 11am and queue displayed is 30 minutes. They queue an hour. They ring the helpline have a moan after their ride. By the time they've queued and got on, the queue may have gone down to 20 minutes. Thorpe recieve the call and change the queue to 60 minutes based on someones experience. The queue can change quickly so I'd like to know how Thorpe are going to base queue time changes based on how quickly or how slowly a queue fluctuates.

With my season effectively at an end, this is my top ten new rides for the year. Top ten new rollercoasters for 2013. 1. Juvelen. A sublime rollercoaster. Needs to be ridden to be believed. 2. Piraten. Two for two at Djurs Sommerland. Piraten is a perfect ride, particularly after several hours of running. 3. Rustchebanan (At Tivoli Gardens). Adore this ride. It looks so unassuming, then on you get and its fantastic. 4. The Smiler. Great roller coaster, sure it has issues but then what ride doesn't? 5. Wodan. A fantastic ride. Relentless. 6. Thors Hammer. A surprisingly excellent family rollercoaster. Very enjoyable 7. Big Thunder Mountain (At DLP). A decent coaster sandwiched between an excellent beginning and finale. 8. Space Mountain: Mission 2. Has issues but it is a very solid attraction 9. Polar XPlorer. A great beginning let down by a poor finale. That beginning is very good though. 10. Crush's Coaster. Big fan of this, the throughput is staggering for what is a Maurer spinner.

I'm hoping for an interactive laser mission ie Tomb Blaster or Duel. That would be amazing.

Of course they do. They make instant profit and have managed to make it seem that to enjoy your day, you need fastrack. Hence why people will queue immediately to buy fastrack at the beginning of the day even though the queues for the ride may be non-existant.

I have complained about it. Nothing has changed. I've done all I can to change the situation. Now I can just sit back and think 'Gee its ironic that all these people queuing five minutes for their rides are ruining everyone elses day'

With fastrack you still have the massive queues except you have half the guests waltzing straight onto the ride and the other half standing around having to wait double the time for their ride. At least without fastrack the queue continually moves and everyone waits their turn equally.

Don't make me laugh. Chessington gave me my first rollercoaster, my first upside down experience, my first taste of what a proper theme park is. Does that mean that an achievement 15 years ago, gives them the right to be operationally poor now, conning their customers with poor admission price bands, rides closed because of their own poor refurbishment records. No it doesn't. Why should the visitors of this season be hurt and its all fine because the park did something well two decades ago. It's not on. The thing is though, and I'm not saying Chessington are lazy here but we have seen parks all over the world complete ride layouts and theming efforts and in that time Chessington have managed to pull down the theming and paint the track. What if there is a poor winter and the Runaway Train ends up getting more and more delayed because they haven't started the theming early enough. What if the ride opens again in March and because it hasn't been running for over a year and half, is operationally poor and refuses to work. We've seen what poor planing has done to the Smiler and other delayed ride projects (like Chiappa at Phantasialand). Why have they done barely anything when they've had six months so far to start it.

It probably had a full inspection back in the closed season of 2004-2005 when all the track from the first drop and immelman was replaced to determine whether more supports were needed for the lift hill which is where the major wobble is.

With the rain coming down it seemed like everyone rushed to the nearest food place. As we were at the back of Fantasyland we were stuck with Toads Hall, a tinyish place which could't cope with the amount of people coming in. People were arguing and fighting over tables and staff couldn't control who was next in wait for a table. We were lucky, a lovely French couple noticed I'd been waiting the longest and offered me the table, even telling off others who tried to take it from me. We had fish and chips which was about the only interesting thing the place sold. It was fine and we moved onto Pirates of the Caribbean which was now open. I 100% preferred this version to Florida and I think part of it is that Jack Sparrow from the films hasn't been shoehorned into the attraction. The Paris version is just lovely to ride, full of atmosphere, high throughput and well themed. Really like the ending with all the skeletons as well. It's only drawback is that it is hidden away at the very back of the park and doesn't get the attention it properly deserves. With the rain getting heavier we decided to take refuge and do some indoory things such as explore Sleeping Beauty's castle, the cave underneath which rather shamefully ruins what is hidden inside because its called Cave of the Dragon. *sighs* The rain was in heavy heavy mood so it was back to Discoveryland to try out Space Mountain again and ride Star Tours. I've done the Adventure continues at Florida so I was interested into how this version would be. Thankfully the queue was only five minutes long so we got on pretty much straight away. It's so early 90's I can't help love it. Sure its completely outclassed by its sequel but its still a decent enough ride. Next was Captain EO which was just as bad in Paris as it was in Florida. It may have been made by some very talented people but each one got it wrong here. Embarressing. Cake was had on Main Street and we next attempted to get on the Railroad. The queue advertised was 45 minutes and we weren't sure how this could be. Well when you are only running one train on a very long circuit and no one gets off at your station then it suddenly dawns on you. This will be a waste of the time. The bigger curiosity is that the other stations weren't open to board the train. You could get off at Frontierland for instance but no one would be able to get on. So were people just going round and round on the railroad. Instead we walked back to Fantasyland and did a few more attractions over there including the Carousel and Mad Tea Party which we never got the chance to ride in Florida. I can see why we skipped them. And with dawn quickly approaching we took a last ride of the day on Big Thunder Mountain (Two train operation, Florida this is not) and headed to Main Street for Dreams. Dreams is absolutely stunning. I wasn't going to waste time watching it through a camera lens or paying more attention taking photos then watching the artisty in front of me, I wanted to enjoy the show. And it is brilliant, featuring some of the greater Disney songs like Can't wait to be King and Never had a Friend like me. I also never knew how popular Merida from Brave is but everytime she came on the crowd cheered louder then the others. I was also pleased to see Dr Facillier from the Princess and the Frog feature so heavily, a very under-rated villian. The finale is of course an inspirational song (second star to the right), a load of fireworks and lots of flashing lights. My kind of show! Dreams is as good if not better then the Florida equivalents, not to be missed at any time on a Paris trip. And with that it was sleepy times, ready for the next day in Studio Park.

The pods flood and its generally miserable and uncomfortable for guests in the rain. So yeah it closes in the rain.

One of Europa's main complaints by guests is that it doesn't offer a fastrack system. Even more fair play to Europa for not bowing to every whim and just building high capacity rollercoasters time and time again It's why I'm slowly turning away from the parks getting high capacity rollercoasters. Whats the point in any of them getting a 2000 people per hour giant if I know I'm still going to be waiting ages because 1000 people an hour are paying £5 fastrack and I'm just standing there wondering why I bothered visiting. I was a huge fan of The Smiler but because Alton decided over half the people allowed to go on it an hour were fastrackers then I haven't visited since. I wonder how many others out there a like me and have voted with their feet and not voiced their viewpoint to the parks.

How many would you like?

So the issue is rides staff aren't updating the queue time often enough and fastrack people are capitalising on this.

Big Thunder is the quintessential family roller coaster. Mildly fast, full of variety and not too many large drops to scare kids. The general consensus is that Paris's version is the best of the four. While I can only compare to Florida, I'd go as far as agreeing with aspects of that opinion. The only real part where Paris falls down is its queue line. There seems to be various ways that the ride is run and none of them seem that great. On the first day for example, fastpass was available but there was no one batching into the main queue and unlike Florida, the fastpass queue didn't get their own side of the station. So what you had was fastpassers having to split into the queueline whenever a gap appeared. The second damaging thing was that at some point in the queue, it splits into two sides. If you decide to queue on the right you get whacked by a longer queue length, fastpass people attempting to join and that is also the side where disabled guests get on. If you opt for the left hand side you almost walk straight into the station, undeterred by distractions. It's the most bizarre operations and despite it being a very high capacity rollercoaster, has so much faff going on. Florida doesn't have any of these problems so it's almost like Paris decided to try something different and it doesn't quite work. The ride itself is similar to Floridas version with two key differences. The first is a fantastic start to the ride with the train dipping into an underground tunnel and gathering a lot of speed before it engages with the first lift hill. It's great to see that with thirty years of running, the Big Thunder lift hills still have the loudest lift chains out there. I wouldn't be surprised if kids were more scared of the noise then the ride. What happens for the majority of the rest of the ride is the same as Florida, California and Tokyo so I won't bore by describing the ride in detail.. except the ending. I was always a bit meh about Floridas dull ending through some rocks and skeletons. Paris is far superior with the train lurching violently to the left, into a cave and descending under the river, gathering so much speed like it really is out of control. I'd bet that it isn't as steep as it feels and yet works very well. The trains pulls up out of the tunnel into the break run and everyone is a bit blown away by that ending. Great finale and really makes the Big Thunder island concept work very well. We decided to have another go, what with it being a ten minute queue and chose the left hand side of the queue line. It was then off to face one of my greatest terrors; Indianna Jones! I'm not sure what the point of this ride is. It doesn't fulfil the quota of upside down rides as there is already Space Mountain and there's already a ride themed around a mine car at Big Thunder. I can only think that this was a desperate attempt at another ride in the park for adults. Whatever the reason, I know it has a poor reputation for being rough, boring and unnecessary but I kind of liked it. Sure it can't do straight lines or hills without whacking your head on a restraint but as a ride it was perfectly acceptable. It had a five minute queue the majority of the time so I don't think it entirely fits into the park in anyway. If Disney got rid and went for a ride like the version at California, I wouldn't say no. Our next stop was Pirates of the Caribbean but was for some reason unavailable. We had the same problem at Florida on our first trip so had no worries that it wouldn't open at some point. We decided on doing some Fantasyland rides such as Pinocchio and Snow White which we queued 10 minutes a piece for. I like this rides because they aren't flashy and "look at me" like some dark rides and they do their job of telling their respective stories adequately. Sure they won't win Gold Ticket awards but for high throughput, reliable attractions they work well. Next stop was the notorious it's a Small World. I liked it. I don't know why I like the idea behind the ride when everyone else despises it with a passion, but it just works for me. It looks like its had a clean up too as the majority of animatronics were working, it looked tidy with no dust anywhere and things looked repainted. For a high capacity boat ride, it ticks all the boxes.. even if it never seems to be able to get a queue. Finally with the rain now fully upon us, we found a nice hidden away area with one of my personal favourites from the trip, Casey Junior. I adored this ride and I can't figure it out why. It just seems so novel and under-stated

Having been given a breakfast slot for 9:45, we decided to skip a bit of continental and headed into the park around 9:00 instead. Seeing a main street so empty is an experience you'll rarely get so we took the opportunity to get some photos and get some coffee from one of the various outlets along Main Street. I'll never get tired of the Castle/Main Street view. LOOK AT THE THEME! We also approve of buying food and getting tickets for free coffee later in the day. One thing I really noticed about the parks here is how much more relaxed you can be. With Florida you get caught in a whirlwind of rushing about from ride to ride, reservation at restaurant to show or parade and never take proper time to appreciate where you are. Throughout our time in Paris, we did a lot of sitting around, relaxing and soaking in the atmosphere. Playing a part in that is that there is less to do here then in Florida but I can only put that as a benefit to Paris. Our first stop during Magic Hours was Space Mountain: Mission 2. From outside, it is a frankly stunning piece of design, that giant cannon is a piece of theming genius and fits in perfectly with the rest of Discoveryland. I'm rather fond of this area as it is. I can understand why they diverted away from Tomorrowland as that area dates faster then they can build/update it. As for Space Mountain. I do like the ride on a thematic level. The idea of being launched into space via a giant cannon is based on Jules Verne's novel 'From the Earth to the Moon' and I love it. I just wish the theming worked such as the recoil of the cannon or the misters as you are blasted into the building. The ride itself is rather atypical of Vekoma. Enjoyable but you really struggle to find a position in which you don't bang your head on the side of the stupid restraints. That being said it is very well paced inside, the ride keeping its speed up to the last moment. It does feel a bit like you are descending into a vortex as the trains spirals around the building, every now and then taking in an inversion surprisingly. We rode several times through the trip and it was either outstanding, unbearable or average. So I find it hard to really rate it. Our next ride was Buzz Lightyears Laser Blast, A ride I despised in Florida but here it was actually a decent ride. The props all seemed to make sense and weren't all cardboard cut outs with targets on them. I even liked the finale which I won't spoil here. I don't understand the points system but then again, it is only a throw away ride. With no interest in Orbitron or Autopia we decided to head back to the central hub and wait for the rest of the park to open. More views of the wonderful Sleeping Beauty castle awaited us. With 10 o clock upon us it was time to venture into Frontierland. We grabbed a fastpass for Big Thunder Mountain whilst everyone else descended into its main queueline. We instead thought we'd try out Phantom Manor. It's American equivalent, Haunted Mansion, is one of my favourite dark rides and I'd heard many great things about the Paris version. I wasn't disappointed as such. The subtlety of the storytelling (ie, there was no narration) meant that we had to really pay attention to the scenes throughout. Something to do with a bride whose family dies (or she murdered them) and so she gets buried as the ride descends from amazingly themed Mansion to an odd underground Western film. Very odd. The shoe-horning of Phantom Manor into Frontierland didn't work for me although there is no way the attraction itself could fit into the other three lands of the park. A triumph though and just shows that when it comes to dark rides, Disney are (mainly) on top. Our next stop was the Molly Brown boat ride around Big Thunder Mountain. We never found the time to do this in Florida so it was a welcome find to get on it and just relax for twenty minutes. It's a shame that aside from Big Thunder Mountain there is nothing to really look at. I hear that some kind of fountain show used to occur at the end but no longer works. Next time will focus on Big Thunder Mountain, Fantasyland and yet again we get to Pirates of the Caribbean to find it broken.