Casual Reviews: Rollercoaster Creator

Not everyone likes rollercoasters, but who doesn’t like games that let you build them? There’s something about building an insane track and watching tiny virtual people whip around the screen that I just enjoy — perhaps I should seek help. In the old days, there was Rollercoaster Tycoon, but now, there’s Rollercoaster Creator.

The game — which is appropriately named “Crazy Rollercoaster” in Chinese — was developed by game.com.cn, which is home to thousands of browser games. It’s a clever, casual mix of Rollercoaster Tycoon and a much simpler puzzle game, and I’ll admit it got me pretty hooked in the short time I had to play it.

In the 2D world of Rollercoaster Creator, your goal is to get the folks in the cars from Point A to Point B by drawing a rollercoaster path. You’ve got a free drawing tool that allows you to place regular track anywhere, and access to more limited tools like up and down ramps, a loop-de-loop, etc. It would be a very easy game, except that in each level, stars are placed around the screen between the start and endpoints, and you need to pass the rollercoaster by all of them to move on to the next level. Since your use of all the special tools like ramps is limited, you’ve got to plan pretty carefully in the later levels to be able to grab all the stars and get your passengers to the finish line in one piece.

Also complicating things is that this rollercoaster system seems to have been designed by a crazy person who has given everything a little extra juice. Often, you’ll find the cars fly off the tracks for a moment as they crest a summit, and if you don’t design gently, things can end very badly. This gives the game more of a crazy vibe, and makes things more fun. It’s also nice that the finish line is pretty forgiving. As long as the coaster cars make it to the right side of the screen, you’re pretty much in the clear, even if your coaster is constructed so that they are flung over the finish line and into a void before plummeting to their offscreen doom. Fun!

Incidentally, I came across Rollercoaster Creator by way of Baidu’s Box Computing search feature. I had totally forgotten about it, but when I searched for “games” on Baidu, a window of free-to-play browser games opened right there in the search results, easily searchable and browsable by category. I was also pleased to see that Baidu doesn’t seem to be playing favorites. There were some Baidu games in the results, of course, but they didn’t seem to be being given preferential placement, and there was nothing pushing me towards them. In fact, the few I tried wanted me to log in — none of the other games in the results required this — so I tended to avoid them.

I hope that Google learns from this — and it seems like it’s in the cards — because it was really convenient, and I’ll probably do the same thing the next time I’m looking for games.

Casual Reviews is a new series in which I review casual Chinese browser games.