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Sim Theme Park is the sequel to Bullfrog’s original amusement park building game, Theme Park. While the game is targeted for children and teenagers, it is great fun for adults as well. The game mixes the best features of Theme Park and blends them with new concepts to create a more original game. SimTheme Park is also known in Europe and other countries under the name of Theme Park World.The aim of the game is rather simple: build different and profitable amusement parks for children. The game contains four different themes from which you choose to create your park. They include the Lost Kingdom, Halloween World, Wonder Land, and Space Zone. Success in one theme will help unlock later, more difficult parks. The four different themes contain the same attractions but they are all differently created to suite the chosen theme. The wheel ride found in the Halloween theme will be made up of a spider and its web, while the ride in the Lost Kingdom theme will replace the spider with a South American sun statue. Included in the game is an advisor that will give you indirect clues like “I bet if you add …”, thus pushing you to upgrade your services and your rides. This might sound like an odd way of working, but the advisor actually keeps you on track. So instead of just trying to gain more money, you learn to develop your park. The advisor not only helps you upgrade your park but is also the intermediate person between you and your customers. He will point out good rides and features but also will voice the customer’s general opinion about your rides and your ticket prices. He constantly draws your attention to new options and also guides you throughout your management. His advice also gives you great information, for example, informing you that you don’t have enough security personnel or the janitors aren’t cleaning the rest rooms. He'll even criticize the food you sell if you're not careful. You begin the game with two Themes (Halloween and Lost World) and you can add two more (Wonderland and Space) by gaining golden keys, which in turn can be gained by getting golden tickets. You don’t get any money from the rides, but rather from the main entrance and shops. In order to obtain a golden ticket you need to build shops at strategic points in your park, mainly at entrances and exits of your rides. In order to get more customers to your park you can lower the prices, but if you lower the prices of your entrance, you may need to raise prices at the shops to main a certain balance and to remain profitable. This is a great example of how certain decisions in SimTheme park entail many others. Since this is a management game you will have a range of different options in order to properly organise your rides and shops. For shops you will have control over the value for money, quality, the ingredients and even up to the amount of salt on your fries. After you've set the quality and price levels for one shop, you can easily set the same levels for all shops of that type. Unfortunately, you can't standardize your preferences, so each new shop is built with the computer's default settings. Rides do play an important part in attracting customers to your park, and new rides let you charge higher prices at the gate.
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