Rollercoaster Tycoon/YMMV

• Anticlimax Boss: The final levels in RCT 3 and RCT 3 Soaked, (the levels that appear after completing all others) are a bit... dull. And not all that difficult either. The penultimate level of Soaked is pretty tough and RCT 3's penultimate level 'The Money Pit' is an enormous abandoned park that needs a massive overhaul, whereas the last level is just a large mountain island that can be levelled off with the landscape tool to create a relatively easy scenario.
• Best Level Ever: Oh so many. Where to begin?
  • Arid Heights gave you infinite money, letting you exercise the custom roller coaster designer to its fullest and generally build an enormous park with no financial worries.
    • Although, that level does have a caveat where if your park rating falls low enough and you can't raise back up, your park gets closed down. Something like that, anyway.
  • Vertigo Views introduces the "Make X amount of ride income" scenario, by giving you a bunch of land and a huge Hypercoaster.
  • Mega Park. Two words, "Have fun!"
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: If the player can design a relatively cheap, compact, high excitement roller coaster it is very tempting to build it in every scenario where the coaster type is available. The steel corkscrew, stand-up and wild mouse coasters are especially good for this, as is the 'shuttle-loop' type design mentioned on the main page.
  • Until you hit some of the more restrictive scenarios like Rainbow Valley, or unusual objectives like "achieve a monthly profit of £n from food & drink sales", which force you to think out of the box a bit.
• Contested Sequel: Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, for some people, mostly because the coaster designing is still stiff and restricted even after the transition to 3D.
• Game Breaker: You can charge your guests obscene amounts of money proportional to the excitement rating of the ride for rides if the entrance fee was free.
  • Demolishing a fountain by replacing it with a coaster segment will give you more than the fountain cost.
• Memetic Mutation: The ride never ends...
• Nausea Fuel: In-game, if you build a coaster with too many curves and loops, they'll vomit all over your park.
• Nightmare Fuel, combined with Player Punch:
  • If you aren't interested in killing your guests, the first crash on any given ride can be this for you. Imagine, you're just minding your own business, perhaps figuring out where to set another restroom or adjusting the park entrance fee and suddenly BOOM! The window for one of your rides suddenly pops up on screen, showing an explosion has just happened. Jarring enough...and then you read the announcements on the bottom of the screen saying [X] people have died on [name of ride]. Yeah, your harmless little simulation game just got a bit less innocent there, didn't it?
  • Even more jarring when the game blocks out any other sounds and just blares the sound of the explosion from your speakers instead.
• Porting Disaster: The Xbox port. It's the same game, only with bad controls. Not as bad as other Disasters, but somewhat notable.
• "Stop Having Fun!" Guys: Chris Sawyer, creator of the Roller Coaster Tycoon games, has gone on the record as saying that the "entire point" of Roller Coaster Tycoon is the scenarios, is only the scenarios, and that the casual sandbox-players (that is, those who just wanted to build a simulated theme park and who didn't really care about playing the scenarios) are "doing it wrong, and need to get serious and do it right", especially when they used a fan-produced "key" program to open the game up for sandbox play. He disliked sandbox play so much that when he wrote Roller Coaster Tycoon 2, he included code that would wreck the game if the player attempted to use any sort of "sandbox key". Sales of the game plummeted appropriately. Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 was not only produced without input by Chris Sawyer, it included an open sandbox option.
  • To a lesser extent, Chris Sawyer calls you out in a subtle manner whenever you automatically demolish something in the second game. A program code causes scenery objects demolished manually (i.e. right-click) to cost much less than it would if it was automatically demolished (e.g. building a Spiral Slide on it). However, this feature doesn't always work properly and will reduce the cost of rides that are built into scenery objects that give you back some money when right-clicking on them. This leads to the greatest Game Breaker in the entire game: By building ride tracks into fountains, you will get money for doing so, allowing one to amass a sizable fortune from ride construction. Hoist by His Own Petard much?
• That One Level / That One Achievement: The 'La La Land' level in RCT 3 involves having to impress the VIPs by building fireworks displays and then to get the Gold level two separate themed zones (Adventure and Sci-Fi) to "impress" them. Although the scenaro dumps lots of money into the park account this is a quite difficult and monotonous trial and error task if done the conventional way, ie; creating large zones of open space, researching themed rides and scenery. Even after building what looks to be an acceptable themed area the VIPs are stupidly difficult to impress. Needless to say a quick Google search shows up threads of screenshots showing how to build a themed area that will work: Simply drop down one of the themed rides on it's own, isolated from the rest of the park and surround it with a themed path and a thick forest of themed trees. Then drop the VIP into the isolated area and let them ride the themed ride over and over in a loop and they will be 100% impressed. When they are impressed, pick them up and put them back in the rest of the park.
  • Harmonic Hills gives you a tree covered area with restrictions on landscaping, scenery removal and building above tree height. Your ride selection is abysmal. Have fun fitting 1,300 guests in there.
  • Octagon Park hammers in the reality that some open ended scenarios are open ended for a reason. Doesn't help that amassing the funds for a qualifying roller coaster is frustrating, let alone 10.