Mark9

Lets just get a Mack mega coaster instead and be done with it. I've no idea why Merlin continually ignore Mack rides as a ride similar to Storm or Blue Fire would suit our parks so well.

Interesting. I noticed on Monday that Nemesis is starting to take the zero g roll quite awkwardly. I swear before it used to be a smooth continuous feeling but on Monday it felt like the train was jerking from side to side through the inversion, particularly on the front row. It's something that the newer inverters such as Inferno and Oz'Iris don't do so maybe its just an example of how a 19 year old inverter ages. That said, I'm actually really fond of the Swarm's zero g, especially when as you say it almost grinds to a halt at the top and you then see the fire coming out of the fire engine. Shame it doesn't happen on every cycle because the fire really helps that inversion become a memorable moment. I think what you say about the wing rider in general is true. As Swarm is one of the earlier models, it clearly hasn't been enhanced or the ride position taken advantage of yet. Look at Air's relatively simple layout compared to Tatsu and Starry Eyed Ripper. At some point, a park will really go for it and put the wing rider through its paces. Raptor came close.

Great idea for Thorpe to do this. Instead of trying to push people out the door, let them chill out with a meal and a drink. Good move by the park here.

Ah sorry. I can't believe you called Euro-Sat rough.

Can't believe you called Wodan rough.

Wasn't a lot of those pictures actually the staff doing it themselves and nothing to do with budget from Merlin?

Now the thing is... At this point only Oblivion and The Smiler are closed. Considering that over the last four days, Oblivion has been largely ignored by the public (We queued five minutes yesterday at 3pm whilst the Smiler was advertised at 3 hours), the only reason these people can be complaining is because of The Smiler. Does it not seem ludicrous to anyone that people are willing to wait in that long a queue outside guest services to have a moan. To have a moan when everything else is going, when there is beautiful sunshine all around them. The queues are displaced of course because of the Smiler valleying but even so it just seems beyond me that people travel across the country for the sole purpose of wanting to ride one attraction.

You'd get worked up if you were going and got spited by the Smiler because a train stalled. You'd understand but it is still frustrating for those that go up there. Just saying

My UK top ten. 1. Nemesis 2. Oblivion 3. Grand National 4. The Smiler 5. The Swarm 6. Speed: No Limits 7. Dragons Fury 8. Nemesis Inferno 9. Megafobia 10. Stealth

A guest yesterday said "They'll have to rename it as I'm certainly not smiling" I was surprised to find out it wasn't Marc actually :angel:

It was time for the final park of the trip, Fàrup Sommerland which featured delights such as Lynet and Falken. Unlike the rest of the parks on the trip, here you pay for entry as soon as you drive into the car park. Thank god we had money with us in the car. The front gates have no turnstiles so you just stroll into the park. Interesting system. Naturally our first target was Lynet, a Gerstlauer launching roller coaster featuring six seater cars, a cool launch and two inversions. Whilst this had the odd shoulder bashing moments this is a top ride. The launch for example is very good as is some of the ejector airtime featured throughout. The inversions are taken quite slowly meaning there is a good level of hand time at the top of the inversion and the ride is long enough to not make you feel disappointed. Love the green We then headed off for our next roller coaster, the fantastically named Flagermusen. A spinning reverchon which was closed due to someone seeing their dinner making a return. So instead we headed to the vekoma junior skater which was diabolically rubbish. Just so bad. We took a moment out to play on some climbing frames before decided to ride the log flume with the stupidly aggressive last drop which literally halts the boat in its tracks and sends everyone flying forward. Good ride though and suitably wet. It was time for Ice Age 4D, Danish style featuring an insane Danish woman who decided to spray us with misters at every opportunity. This version features seats that move with the film. This gets tiresome very quickly as everytime a larger character touches the floor, the seats move like they are on acid and they try and throw you off at every opportunity. It was becoming apparent that the rides are not the main appeal of Fårup. Instead its the large adventure areas which wouldn't get past Health and Safety in the UK such is the nature of the attraction. I do admit these aren't my kinds of things to do but nevertheless I joined the group in running through tunnels, using boats to cross streams and jumping over stepping stones. The final rollercoaster of the trip was Falken, an S&S wooden rollercoaster built by Gerstlauer. This had some excellent air time throughout but it was pretty rough and ready and felt like riding a milk van on steroids everytime it attempted to turn a corner. The others seemed to enjoyed its merriness in any respect so maybe it was just me. So with 6 new parks and nearly 30 new rollercoasters completed it was time to say goodbye to the Danish way of dreaming up rides. It is worth doing at least once in a coaster enthusiasts lifetime because some of the rides such as Piraten, Juvelen and Ruschtebanan are truly excellent quality. It's a land where Intamin and Gerstlauer rule the roost and this sometimes come up with some pretty crappy rides (Tornado, I'm looking at you). But for a country which is forward thinking and logical, I recommend a trip to Denmark full heatedly Danish top ten 1. Juvelen 2. Piraten 3. Ruschtebanen (Tivoli) 4. Ice Pilots 5. Dæmonen 6. Thors Hammer 7. Lynet 8. Polar X-Plorer 9.Laser Raiders 10. Svend Svingarm For those that have read any of my Danish endeavours, thanks for taking the time to read. This topic will self destruct in 5....4.....3...2....1 =@

It was up and at them onto the fire academy thing where Holly and I got bored of trying to save the Lego men and decided to let them burn instead. Then onto Laser Raiders which is far better then the UK version. The Billund one is more like an omnimover then ours and features a Terror Tomb tribute as its finale. Everyone loves Egyptian rock music. Next was the Mack wild mouse which was pretty rubbish. Legoland seem obsessed with trimming these rides down to ridiculous levels which is fine if the ride didn't start with a fantastic first drop. If you don't want speed why add that in the first place. I don't have any photos of some of these rides because.. I didn't We made our way onto the Mack Powered dragon coaster. Good ride this although it really needs a second train as the queue spirals pretty quickly. I do think this is one ride where the UK equivalent is better. More rides were undertaken such as the rapids with its huge drop, a Pirate cruise ride which was pretty standard dark fare and we saw a show where one of the characters was referred to as Danish Mark9. I disagree. As the day wore on, we had a look through their version of Atlantis which had some cool props in the tanks which did things at the push of a button, had a ganger at model world, watched a terrible show featuring idiotic animals being powered up by cheese and then had a few goes on Polar X-Polar, Dragen, Laser Raiders and Ice Pilots before descending on the shops and home. This is a great park really and puts ours to shame. Even though it felt busy, the queue-times were minimal. Considering some rides were on lower capacity.. this was welcomed.

Had my first go on The Smiler today, we queued for about two hours and twenty minutes including a twenty minute breakdown whilst we were in the station. It certainly is a very impressive ride and completely dominates X-Sector. The roaring of the trains is particularly loud and really catches your attention, particularly when two of the trains travel around together. A few noteworthy points - This ride is a massive hit with the public. Everyone was getting off completely blown away by the ride itself. I know it seems rather much of a contrivance, but the smiles were so big it almost was like people were being marmalised by the attraction. The last time I saw general public photoing a ride like this was Stealth back in 2006. It seems the GP have been rather taken by it. - The queueline effects are okay but not to important to the ride. A nice distraction from queuing if nothing else. - Despite the ride having 14 loops, it's the air time hills that are the most fun element of the ride. Particularly the second one which really makes you fly out of your seat. - The first half of the ride is the smoother and the sequence of inversions made me quite dizzy. The brief stop with the vertical lift hill is a welcome restbite from the craziness. There would be a lot more sick if the ride carried on with the last set of inversions. - The second half is far more gruelling in terms of roughness. There's a particularly point in the middle of the batwing that really jolted the car. That one jolt is worse then Saw's awful beyond vertical drop. I worry how bad that things gonna be in several months time. As it stands its not very welcome after four full days of operation. - The reliability doesn't seem to be anywhere near where it needs to be. We witnessed at least four lengthy breakdowns and the final one, with two trains stuck at the bottom of the second lift hill caused a queueline evacuation and free tickets to be given out. - Unfortunately the marmaliser spider doesn't add much to the ride due to the fact the cars travel just too fast past it all. I only noticed the water sprayers, the other arms didn't even seem apparent which is a shame. Despite this, it's an excellent visual element to the ride and absolutely towers over the area. - The music is fantastic, even after listening to it after nearly four collective hours. It's a worthy addition to the Towers and really adds something unique to the park. You can say what you like about all of Towers main roller coasters, but you can't deny they all have their roles to play in the park and each offer something totally different. My personal towers list goes Nemesis, Oblivion, The Smiler, Air, Thirteen and Rita.

Legoland Billund With the other parks, you expected some oddities. Here all bets were off and it was time for the Danes to really show us Brits how it's done. Our first surprise was seeing that the car parking charge is cheaper here then it was at Bon Bon land and Bakken. (Djurs doesn't count, it was free to park there ). One up for the Merlin heads then. Secondly, as this was the first Legoland park, it's quite clear that love and passion go into the whole park as a whole. The park looks fresh and painted and everything has a sparkle to it. But then the sun was out. Polar X-Plorer Our first stop was inevitably going to be this and as you would expect some comparisons with Thirteen are going to be in abundance. The two ride types are so similar and yet so differently. I have a clear favourite which should make itself apparent. The first thing that makes itself apparent is theme. Thirteen is dark and mysterious whilst it sits there in the Staffordshire sun whilst Polar is nice and frosty as it sits in the Billund sun. I prefer Polars on the basis that it suits my fun and comical tastes more then another dark and depression ride at Towers does. The trains on both rides are pretty similar, both feature a simple lap bar and both dispatch very quickly and without fuss. Thirteen may have the edge with its three train operation but then we did only see one train on Polar. Polar starts immediately with some fantastic speed, gliding smoothly over a hill, around the icy mountain, through the mountain and some very forceful pockets of force on its first part of the circuit. Thirteen on the meantime is tripping over itself on the very first drop, being trimmed to high heaven and awkardly taking hills at silly angles like it was designed by an alcoholic. So far, Polar is running away with it. But Thirteen has an ace up its sleeve. Polar loses steam the moment it enters the drop mechanism area. Unfortunately the screen above the train wasn't working so all we got was some sound effects of ice cracking. On our first ride we sat at the back and it all becomes way too obvious what is going to happen. Every part of the drop mechanism can be seen and there is no door closing off the sunlight so you are drenched in light. You know exactly what's going to happen the moment you enter. It doesn't help that once the small vertical drop has been achieved, it takes some time for the two tracks to line up to get you on your way again. For all of Thirteens faults, Intamin got the sudden drop in the dark absolutely perfectly as did Alton with the Wraith theming. The speed of Thirteens drop mechanism works incredibly well and is far more effective, particularly with the backwards section in the dark. Thirteens second half then is very good quality and the launch too the station is beautiful. Polar gets it wrong completely ambling stupidly too the station, heads between its knees, almost embarrassed that it used all its tricks on the first half of the ride and lacking anything else of substance. Viewing the penguins helps but not by much. What we have here is two decent family rollercoasters that if were fused together would be the ultimate ride for every member of the family too ride. The sharp and speedy and excellent start to Polar X-Plorer, mixed with Thirteens drop in the dark and backwards segment would have tongues wagging. Shame that one half lies in England and the other half lies in Denmark. Ice Pilots I think a lot of enthusiasts in their own heads would like to design their own ride cycles, to have the freedom to control riders through an attraction. Here you control your own destiny on a ride that is essentially the Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey arms in a circle. For those that haven't ridden you sit in your seats which is attached to an arm and the arm takes you through the ride. At the start of the queue you are given a card where you choose the type of ride you wish to go up against. These go from one to five, one being kind and five being crazy. Holly and I chose four for our first go. Using a computer screen you choose several steps for the ride to take. These can range from going back and fourth sideways or going down before heading for the roof upside down and spinning. The amount of different sequences gives this ride an added sense of rerideability and it helps that you along with your other eleven riders feel like you're part of an experiment, of who can tackle the most fearsome and awesome settings. It's a laugh a minute attraction and well worth queuing for. And finally for 'Ice world'.. PENGUINS!

This is my second attempt at this part of the trip report. I thought I'd let you know Thors Hammer An excellent ride this, Gerstlauer did wonders with the wild mouse concept for their own designs. This is more flexible and fun then your Mack/Maurer equivalent due to the different things it can do. No such thing as a helix on Rattlesnake, that's okay as your Gerstlauer ride can do tight helixes, hairpin turns, large and small dips, tightly banked corners with no trouble at all. Thors Hammer is a clone of G'Sengte Sau which itself is an excellent ride. It's no wonder G'Sengte Sau was an immediate success for the company. Skattøen A Mack water coaster, but better then its longer brothers at Europa Park and Seaworld Orlando. One of the main reasons is that on Skattøen there is no faffing about with the boat sailing to the next part of the ride. Skattøen gets on with the ride and on its way is smooth and wetter then others. This ride takes the coaster section and double dip finale of Poseidon, fuses them and somehow creates a better ride. Probably for the best as it was only running two boats on our trip. Weird bird topple tower I have always wanted to ride one of these, even though this particular ride created a huge legal battle between Dollywood and Huss. Clearly Huss thought this was the next generation of thrill ride following their successful attractions during the 80's and 90's. It doesn't quite work because the over-large restraint removes and fear of you falling to your doom from the tower. Whilst on it and moving around you feel like you are on the crest of a wave. It just isn't enough when newer rides are doing so much more with less. We had goes on other rides around the park including the better then normal rapids ride, the kiddy coaster and even had a play around in the parks fun areas. Particularly highlight was the trampolines and the giant bouncy cushion. Our final surprise was the Jungle Cruise rip off. At first its all very predictable with cute animatronic cats and gorillas attacking explorers. But out of nowhere King Kong appears and it gets a bit scary. To conclude on Djurs Sommerland, it is an excellent park with some proper good attractions. Juvelen is an obvious highlight but with rides like Piraten, Thors Hammer and Skattøen to try it is well worth a visit. I leave you with an adorable dog.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YOiG1zlXZoQ/Uaf3NWmOVZI/AAAAAAAAbuI/BvU4IGj8NNE/s1600/Screen+shot+2013-05-30+at+9.04.30+PM. All aboard the hype train. Dark green B&M supports at the plant in Ohio. Could it be Heide's rumoured B&M or is it travelling somewhere else??!

Sweet Jesus. Thanks Chessington for raping more of my theme park childhood memories. Much love, Mark9

I'm not sure whats worse, the people who haven't ridden it and calling it rubbish or the people who are dismissing it because its a Gerstlauer. Enthusiasts, for people who are supposed to love theme parks and rides are the most fickle and narrow minded people of the lot sometimes.

The first people to ride it calling it better then Nemesis?! Never saw it coming, literally never.

In an ideal world, Fury and Vampire would be support roller coasters to a larger coaster in the same way that Inferno and Colossus support Swarm, Saw and Stealth. Never going to happen at Chessington though (although I would love to be proven wrong)

Batten down the hatches guys, the next 24 hours could either see happy towers enthusiasts or the evil, angry side. I'm ready

If you're staying at one of the hotels, get the fastrack package. Queuing in Spain isn't really queuing, it's more like wondering when the queue-jumping school kids ends and the ride begins.

Djors Sommerland - Day 6 And now my friends is a story about how an enthusiast can be wrong. We've all been there such as the sheer will power that refused to believe Swarm would go backwards. And here is my humility moment. It's no secret that I don't enjoy Intamin rides as much as most. For me they are the most over-rated company in existence either directly copying their competitors with cheap knocks off like Tornado in Spain or creating abominable rides that shame the company like Tornado in Denmark and Furius Baco. Their rides see the most after construction changes (Colossus, Maverick, Intimidator 205) and some just want to downright kill or maim their riders (The mega's, the Supersplash rides, the launch coasters) Well my friends.. I have found the park where for once all the planets align and the perfect Intamin attractions were born. No I'm not talking about coasters that launch you 400 feet into the air and barrel roll into the sun and I'm certainly not talking about the over-rated Expedition Ge Force. I'm talking about Juvelen (hastily renamed Joyvelen), a family launch rollercoaster. This ride is absolutely fantastic and such pure unadulterated bliss to ride that I have no choice in renaming it the ride of the trip. At first the signs looked bad. The ride had not opened in time with the park and we had to wait a little while to ride. We found out this was due to flooding in the queue line from the torrential rain we had driven through the previous day. The queueline is similar to Wodan's actually, intricately themed with lots of darkness and spot lighting. The ride was only running one train but it didn't need its second. We headed for the back of the train on our first goes. At first it would seem to suffer from a long Intamin problem, the lack of leg space. For taller riders this may be a problem but for all of us this wasn't too bad. The cars themselves are a nice bright red and themed to motorbikes. The position itself lends itself to you pretending to be a motorbike driver but it does something else. When holding onto the handlebars you make yourself more prone to the elements of the attraction. I'll explain this further later on but suffice to say, the ride truly benefits from not having a conventional lap-bar or over the shoulder restraint. Ride loaded, the doors open and you are wheeled out into a pre show room. I've no idea what was being said because of it all being in Danish but I'd bet its some kind of curse and you've disturbed the ancient ruins and you shall now face the curse. Being on motorbikes we can escape I presume. I prefer the launch on this kind of attraction to one on say Stealth or iSpeed. The problem with the INSTANT launch is that you can never feel the momentum build. Joyvelen builds up the speed at a steady pace so you feel the full speed. Like Rita, you are thrown into a corner but here it is just so much fun. The ride heads into an air time hill which is felt at full force in the back. You head around another corner, back around another corner through a tree and then into the rides second launch. Now, I've been down this road before with Cheetah Hunt. There it was a means to an end in a ride that was clearly just treading water. Here the second launch is the part two of the story, the Return of the King to the rides Two Towers. And what a joy it is. The acceleration this time feels faster and more sustained as the ride sends near miss waterfalls (that truly feel like near misses), proper forceful corners, turnarounds, straight pieces of track, turns over water and small air time hills at you. When writing this I've come to realise that this and Cheetan Hunt are similar rides in who they are trying to attract to the ride. There the inversion, the restraints, the endless launches kill what could have been an excellent ride. On Joyvelen, it's like Intamin have taken the small things that work on Cheetah Hunt, magnified them and bought them to a ride that really does excel at everything it does. Some say that they don't care for family attractions and prefer the blow your brains out of larger, taller, more inverting rides. It's rollercoasters like Joyvelen, Dragons Fury and Tonnerre de Zeus that continue to thrive and bring in the new generation of coaster enthusiasts. JOYVELEN! - 10/10 The next roller coaster is the well known in the Mitch Hawker poll but relatively un-talked about in coaster circles, Piraten. Known as a mega-lite, it topples out at just over 105 feet and does its thing in a relatively small plot of land. Now the first thing I really need to get off my chest is that there is no way this and it's three brothers are better then Nemesis and Katun. It's a good enough, even excellent attraction but for sheer force of imagination, Nemesis wins everytime. Secondly the amount of faffing around on Piraten with seatbelts and restraints and its over to the top lift-hill really take the biscuit. A week before I'd been on Silver Star where you barely have the chance to sit down before the ride is off on its merry way. Here everything is checked to the nth-degree and I get bored when I know that it doesn't have to be this way. Secondly the amount of lee weight on the seatbelt is way too small. All of us are thin people but even we struggled to get the damn thing done up. So with the ride finally off the lift hill is over and done with quickly and you drop into a very tight turn which caused us all to grey out momentarily. It provides a nice contrast to the B&M equivalents which nearly always send you into a massive camelback. Piraten throws you into a stengel turn and then narrowly into a shed (the only thing that differentiates this from its Chinese brothers) before turning back on itself and chucking you and your fellow riders into several small air time hills that are full to the brim with ejector air time. The aggressiveness of the air time is quite unexpected particularly when you see how small these hills are. Another Stengel turn follows and the ride heads into its finale of small camel back hills. The key to enjoying Piraten is to ride it first thing and then return to it later on in the day. The ride morphs from what is a decent if disappointing ride, too a true tour de force of Intamin ejector air time goodness. Turns that in the morning were lacking, are now chucking you off your seat at every available opportunity. You get a lot of bang for your buck with an Intamin mega-lite and I definitely wouldn't say no to a version (albeit, a more original layout) appearing at a Surrey theme park near you. Piraten - 9/10

I wish I could say that the rest of the parks offerings were going to impress me. It took a lot of effort but there are some positive things. Mine Train Ulven This is the same ride type as Thirteen at Towers and the difference between the two is staggering. Ulven has a fantastic first drop which just seems to get steeper and steeper. Throughout the ride are little pops of air time, the helixes throughout are pretty forceful, enough to give me a bit of black out and the ride cars themselves are comfy. It also is pretty well themed for Bakken, with rock work hiding the ride away from the parks pathways. Intamin prove here that they can build good roller coasters which are comfortable to ride and full of variation so why is it when they try and break the mould, it all ends in disaster. Credit to them, they try and do things differently but it is too hit and miss to work. We made our way onto our next roller coaster, a simple one carried ride called Racing. I genuinely thought this attraction could have been the nail in the coffin. It looks cheap, it looked rough and it looks uncomfortable. It was anything but and was officially my favourite rollercoaster at Bakken. What works is that the ride builds up the ride well, starting slowly with little turns and then running into long drawn out, forceful helixes. We all decided to ride by ourselves but I wonder how the extra weight of another person in the car would affect the ride experience. Our next stop was VILDE MAUS. This was no Rattlesnake I can tell you. With a layout almost exactly the same but built by Mack this should have been standard fair. Nothing remarkable but fun all the same. It wasn't. For some peculiar reason, at the top of every incline the car almost shunted its wheels along the track giving a very uncomfortable feeling throughout. It was fine on the bends at the top of the ride but once it got going it was torture. It makes no sense when so many other wild mouses such as Matterhorn Blitz and Rattlesnake get it right. It was for this reason that Vile Mouse got no rerides that day. I must have been full of ride related rage as I have no other pictures from the day. So I'll leave it to Benin to visually show you what else was there to 'experience'. From me though, there was the funhouse which was fun until you got too the second level and realised nothing worked. There was the spinning dodgem cars which was fun when you just spun around in a circle but not really a dodgem ride. There was the S&S shot tower which was shorter then most and full of air time (and actually good). There was the staples such as the tea cup rides, themed to Africa no doubt. And there was an odd shoot em up hall where your seat moves like you're on a horse whilst you shoot a giant screen. The park opened at 2 and closed at 11pm. We stayed till 5:30. Enough said.

I'd rather the park decided to bring out the second train whilst its busy and then take it off when it quietens down rather then just to keep people waiting in a half an hour queue all day. Then again, the Merlin parks take so long to do anything when it comes to adding/removing trains that keeping the half an hour queue is the quicker option.