Park / The Ragnarök
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24-June 06
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The Seige at Castle Grijs
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I thought strangelove would run away with this. there was no contest in my eyes.
But as always im sure several people voted RCT2 as they dont have LL.
you know who you are
Anyway a good contest to kick off the season with
congrats to everyone. Good parks and a good voting turn out
Think I can imagine how you feel...
The Siege at castle Grijs is a really very good park, I voted for it, but maybe also because I was not very impressed by Ragnarok, like many people obviously were....(so for me it was not a difficult choice)
Today another very good LL-park, with a hell of a good coaster, won over an RCT2 park.
And though the C. harbour also is a really very good park, no doubt the votes were influenced by the fact that the (RCT2-) park of the competitors for many people was far less attractive than the Ragnarok was in your round..........
So, of course it is not just and only the quality of the park that a team sends in which decides if it will win, but also the quality of the park of your competitors which decides that.... (same goes for Ferocious Tigers against Tycoon Bandits in this first round)
If Castle Grijs had been voted against The Edge, I am sure it would have won with a real great difference.....
And that must give a bit of a "sour feeling" I think......bad luck....bad luck...
Wishing you more "good luck" in the next rounds, and thanks for your very nice park...
(BTW: is "Grijs" really the Russian word for "Grey/Gray"?. Never knew that, though I do know for sure that "Grijs" absolutely is the Dutch word for grey/gray
Emergo
Xcoaster Offline
I also feel that to be able to vote, you have to show that you have both games. It makes it more fair imo.
I'm not biased towards LL like I used to be. But seriously, what the hell.
Ragnarok:
a few nice gimmicks/portrayals of catastrophe, otherwise like the most soulless park i've ever seen
nice architecture (nice quarter tile work) but it can't decide if it's a city or not
one of the most disappointing coasters I've ever seen for its height and about 20 seconds of coaster action in the whole park
Castle Grijs:
way better coaster, even if not perfect
good architecture, about as good as Ragnarok's (hard to compare) but a hell of a lot more consistent
way better atmosphere, not dead and soulless like ragnarok
the only thing I would have done differently was more landscaping
some people pick at things like how the siege was only like 2 explosions, 1. as far as i know medieval sieges on castles don't exactly consist of 50 explosions within the first 10 seconds, they go on for hours/days/weeks probably at about the intensity suggested here/a bit faster, maybe i'm wrong, 2. in ragnarok, which if anything required more visual effects because of the subject matter, said effects were even more diminutive.
I don't think there's any reason to be confused about which park was better.
Yes, Strangelove got shafted.
Edited by Panic, 26 July 2006 - 05:58 PM.
As for the architecture, that was clearly the best part of Ragnarok. I really don't see how you can say the architecture is better in Castle Grijs. On a sliding scale I suppose it's above average LL architecture in the way that Ragnarok's is above average RCT2 architecture, but the standard is so so so much higher for RCT2 architecture that it isn't really fair to compare them in that way IMO.
Atmosphere...well, that's always been difficult to describe. I would agree that Castle Grijs seems to do a better job of nailing down it's theme. Mostly becuase nothing happens in Ragnarok and there's a bit too much open space (well, in this case water). But then Castle Grijs is basically just a castle whereas Ragnarok is a city. Obviously it's more 'consistent'. The trebuchet towers are definately well done and add a lot to the whole seige theme, but then if this castle is really under seige, where are the armies? Where's the boiling oil? Where are the ladders? A lot more could have been done to liven up that theme too. I wouldn't go so far as to call it "soul-less" -- those kinds of details are very difficult to pull off besides -- but in many ways it was a missed opportunity just like Ragnarok was.
As for the explosions, yeah there are only two towers. 50 explosions would seem silly, I agree. That was only a minor gripe anyway, not something that would make me vote against it. I didn't have anything against the park as is, I just thought that it's only so-so as a park due to the lack of variety, fairly routine rides, and very little actually going on. Ragnarok was only so-so as well.
I felt guilty about having voted against Castle Grijs at first, but I don't think it's as totally obvious that it got shafted as people make it out to be. There's some kind of 'cult of LL', maybe it's just traditionalism, which makes any decent piece of LL work seem much greater than it is. It's not really that difficult to raise land and put in ghost train windows. Certainly not nearly as difficult as RCT2 architecture can be. Looking back at Erwindale Forest, I even thought at the time that the architecture part of it wasn't that good. Now that we have so much RCT2 work to compare it to, it looks even worse. Yeah it does take a lot of skill and know-how to make sculptures of this high quality, but I've never voted for a park on the basis of cool sculptures before and I don't think I ever will
Basically I think the standard is constantly changing, the bar is constantly being set higher, and you shouldn't get cut any slack by using an older game and shooting for an earlier standard. Look at some of OLE's ideas in the RCT discussion forum. Those are new, innovative ideas for LL. It's still possible. If you choose to work in LL, your level of achievment should be compared not just to the best LL parks but to the best parks period. Architecture-wise it's going to be very hard to match what people can do in RCT2 so you need to make up the difference in other ways. The rides and the theme really need to be great. They were good here, but not great. And that made this a close match for me. I'm still about 50-50 on which is the better park. I like Castle Grijs, but I'm a little annoyed that it keeps getting portrayed as this grave injustice that it lost.
At the same time though, your last paragraph touches on a mentality in the community that I think deserves some consideration: whether LL should be judged with higher expectations of quality, refinement and innovation because more impressive and/or detailed things can be pulled off with more work in RCT2. Personally I think Castle Grijs got killed by expectations such as that - that it should have been nearly without flaw, that it should have been more innovative, etc. You do have to remember that although LL has been around for much longer, and thus it's perhaps fair to expect more from the game, the parkmakers currently playing LL, with a few exceptions such as Fatha' and yourself, are generally the same age as the parkmakers taking up RCT2. I wouldn't call it a "cult," but a new wave of LL parkmakers has slowly arrived and did some time ago, and I can list off probably over a dozen. I don't know if it's thus fair to expect more from those parkmakers than RCT2 parkmakers of the same amount of experience.
Even though the tools available in LL remain limited, improvement was always a step-by-step process of parkmakers constantly one-upping each other and pushing the notion of what can and cannot be done further. And even though a lot is possible in RCT2 which isn't possible in LL, parkmakers can still use ideas pulled off in RCT2 to motivate their work. Like OLE's black tiles in LL. That was always possible before, but no one tried it. Why not? Because there wasn't a reason to. cBass comes out with his space station and Blitz and Janus come out with Ghost Cell Crisis and now there's a reason. Or using rapids track and ghost train stations to make buildings with more than one texture per wall. Or the invisible track hack. Those ideas are out there now mostly because of RCT2.
I don't know if it was unrealistic expectations that killed this park for me though. Maybe that's true of some people. And I figure the comparitive minority of members here that can still view LL parks always handicaps LL parks to a certain extent. But the biggest issue for me is always the idea. And I think I mentioned this before, but it's a lot harder to impress someone with the idea part of a park when you start off with a theme that's been done so many times before. A totally unique theme gets you way out there in new idea territory. A traditional theme means you've got to work twice as hard to come up with new ideas. Taking what other people have done and doing it better is only moderately impressive to me. Coming up with something completely unique and doing a decent (though probably improvable) job of it impresses me more.
So I guess what I'm saying is that it may be unrealistic to expect LL to compete with what the best parkmakers can do with RCT2 right now, but it would be unfair to expect anything less in this competition. And you're still on an equal playing field as regards coming up with ideas, so it isn't like LL doesn't have any chance. We saw that already with Slime Meridian. A flawless LL park would probably still lose to a very good RCT2 park. But I guess that's why I say that the whole voting/competition part of the game is really secondary to your own personal accomplishment. Everyone wants to win, but sometimes it can be a personal win for you even if it ends up in a loss for your team.
Fatha' Offline
But I still believe that you give me LL and my partner and I will beat any combination of RCT2 parkmakers on this site....but maybe thats just me being confident.
And GCC-Cajamarca was pretty much the ultimate test of what was mentioned above.
Edited by Panic, 27 July 2006 - 12:18 AM.
edit, well, it's not really like i did anything, anyway. so yeah, i suppose you're right.
well, no. you're still wrong. because it was the two of them against one, kind of. well. i don't know. i need to stop arguing with myself.
Edited by tracidEdge, 27 July 2006 - 12:26 AM.
But there's really no way to test the theory unless someone has a good way of comparing skill in LL to skill in RCT2. And the whole idea of a "flawless" park will probably remain a myth besides. But if hypothetically you hit the jackpot, great idea, phenomenal ride with some new hack in it, perfect theming without any problems -- I suppose in that case it would be tough to see a park losing.
Fatha' Offline
Take this matchup for example:
Give me & Ed, me & kiri, kiri & ed, etc RCT LL, throw one of the pairs against Phatage & Mala (or any other pair u think is best) going in RCT2, i would bet money on any of the LL pairings.
Also, the Cajamarca vs GCC, no its not the ultimate test....its a good one, but not the ultimate.
Battlefield RCT or Erwindale Forest would likely do better against a GCC, because those two are better parks. And I would give Battlefield RCT a victory over GCC.