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| | Genre: Simulation | | Min OS X: 10.5  CPU: Intel @ 1800 MHz RAM: 512 MB Hard Disk: 1500 MB DVD-ROM Graphics: 800x600 @ 32-bit, 128 MB VRAM |
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In combination With the two expansion packs installed together, Platinum turns RCT3 into an even more rounded game than it was before, but without compromising its familiar interface. The new resources are highlighted by the use of icons to tell you which expansion pack provides them, but the new features are otherwise integrated seamlessly into the existing game structure. In other words, there's not all that much that's new for existing players to learn, and that's a good thing: the interface is slightly refined and extended, but remains essentially the same as it was before.The beauty of having the Platinum pack, of course, is the compatibility it gives you with the resources that are available online. Once you go hunting for downloadable items, there's a lot to find, including some really hugely detailed and complex parks (I particularly enjoyed the Dunderburg Spiral Railway); but a good proportion of what's available these days requires at least one, and often both, of the two expansions. Get RTC3 Platinum, and the door is open to all of that content to add further life to this highly open-ended game. Third party content I'd like to draw attention to a couple of discoveries I made about third party parks while working on this review.The first is that, unfortunately, not everything works. I'd expect that everything should work, given that there's feature parity between the Mac and PC versions of RCT3 Platinum. However, a small subset of the third party parks that I downloaded simply caused RCT3 to crash or hang. This was a disappointment, but perhaps there may be a patch to fix bugs in due course. The large majority of downloads that I tried did work correctly. More usefully, I discovered the solution to a problem. Whether this constitutes a bug or is simply an unavoidable consequence of platform differences, it turns out that there can be problems in accessing external graphical resources. Having downloaded a recreation of Blackpool's Pleasure Beach, I was pleased to find that it includes a whole load of JPEGs that appear on signs in the recreated park for added realism. RCT3 creates a folder called RCT3 within your Pictures folder, and this is supposed to house graphics created or used by the game. However, after placing the supplied JPEGs in that folder, they failed to appear in the Blackpool park recreation. A bit of investigation revealed that Windows PC-specific paths to these graphics files are embedded in this particular park file. Although it's the only one I've tested so far that supplies billboard graphics in this way, I imagine it's fairly likely that other third party parks designed on Windows PCs will behave similarly. Anyway, the way to fix it and enable the Mac game to access the external graphics files is to create a folder called My Pictures (the Windows-platform pictures folder) within the Mac's Pictures folder, and then create another folder called RCT3 inside that. In other words, the new folder for external graphics should have the following path name within your home folder (as denoted by ~): ~/Pictures/My Pictures/RCT3 For the Blackpool park, and presumably others like it, putting the graphics in that folder will allow them to appear in the game.
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