What is Theme Park World (aka Sim Theme Park)?

Ever since Aspyr released The Sims last summer, simulation titles have attained a new level of respect in the MacAddict offices. While the latest addition to the sim family of games is not nearly the time- and productivity-sucking staff diversion The Sims was, it’s still a pretty fun game that will have you telling yourself (or your loved one or your boss) “just five more minutes” for quite a few hours.

In SimTheme Park you are responsible for building and running your own amusement park. Your objective is to make money and keep your patrons and staff happy. This means you need to build rides to draw crowds; construct shops, eateries, and side shows to make money; hire janitors, mechanics, and other staff to keep the joint running; and install bathrooms for the obvious reasons (and no, you don’t get to see your Sims characters pee this time). It's also important to hire a solid team of researchers to develop new rides, shops, and attractions so your park can keep growing.

The best part about the game is planning where to situate all of your rides and attractions to optimize your business, as well as watching for new inventions developed by your research team. For instance, when you start the game, you’re limited to placing preconstructed rides like simple rollercoasters and spinning rides. Eventually, you’ll work toward building heart-stoppers, such as advanced roller coasters or log flumes you can customize to incorporate loops, spirals, and near-vertical drops of your own creation.

SimTheme Park has four parks in total — two are accessible immediately, but you must earn keys to gain access to the others (you win keys by running a park successfully). Although the game sounds complex to learn, it’s actually not — you’ll get the hang of it pretty quickly. Once you learn the secret to making tons of money, the game actually starts to feel repetitive. Even when you earn enough keys to open up a new park, the experience is redundant — the rides and shops look different on the outside, but they are essentially the same...

Another problem with the game is that using the controls sometimes feels fussier than feeding a baby strained peas. For instance, trying to place your roller coaster track can prove extremely frustrating — the controls sometimes won’t let you complete the track you’re building. However, the controls are the golden child compared to the game itself, which had problems running on our G3 333MHz PowerBook with 128MB RAM and virtual memory turned on. Even when consuming more than 100,000K of memory and feasting on its very own set of extensions, the game kept crashing and crashing and crashing — very much unlike the Energizer bunny.

Problems aside, the game is still fundamentally clever and fun. You even get to ride your rides once you build them (although this sounds cooler than it is). Considering that the one-day price of admission to Disneyland is up to $43 these days, the pleasure you derive from playing SimTheme Park (and the absence of smelly kids trying to cut in front of you in line), more than justifies the $35 price tag.

Lu, Cathy. (April 2001). SimTheme Park. MacAddict. (pg. 56).

Download Theme Park World (aka Sim Theme Park) for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 8.5 up to Mac OS 10.5

Compatibility notes

Architecture: PPC (266mhz or faster) (carbonized for OSX)

At least 64MB of RAM

Mac OS 8.5 - Mac OS 9.2.2 - Mac OS X 10.5.8

A 3D graphics card with at least 6MB of VRAM