News / The List: LL Edition

Slime Meridian is one of the best parks ever.

Great update- this list so far is excellent

Thanks Cocoa. It's been a lot of fun (and work too) to make this list. It's not entirely arbitrary (I'll write about the methods after completing both lists), so I'm also surprised at the results myself. I think it's great to see that even way past the LL-peak, recent releases can still penetrate the top of the List, like Discovery Bay in the latest batch. LL lives.

 

To all the new to LL readers: I really recommend taking a look at these parks, and if you like a park in particular, check out the related parks mentioned. It's a great way to explore everything LL has to offer.

I’ve been trying to view as many parks as possible since I was drafted for h2h88. So cool to see all these parks. Makes me want to try a large park in LL!

Nice to see a new update! I only have one small remark (regarding the write-up for Atlantis: The Lost Empire): Van Gogh is not generally seen as an impressionist painter, rather, his most famous work is often regarded as a kind of proto-expressionism.

For the record, I think SWS is significantly overrated on this list at least in terms of quality, and probably in terms of influence.  It's a great brick in the pyramid of gee's achievements (he's the one who did all the good bits) and notable for being the first to do a couple of shoestring hacks, but doesn't hold a candle to the refined aesthetic of modern codex-era full-scales like Silver Valley, Disco Bay, or Luna.  I suppose if you frame it as a "pioneer of LL contest park realism" and direct influence for Wild Wild West, Jerusalem, Adelaar, Concrete Jungle, Copper Creek, etc. then it might merit something in the top twenty, but I'd put most of those above it.

I think SWS gets it spot on the list because the coaster is just so iconic, its probably the most iconic LL coaster ever.  When you speak about the park everyone instantly has the same image in their head of the ride, which for the time was pretty revolutionary I think.

 

The park as a whole, yes, probably doesn't deserve this slot, but a lot like Belmont and perhaps to a lesser extend Lenox, the coaster really sets it apart from all else.  I think you could make a very good argument the three headliner attractions in those parks are the best coasters in NE history, maybe meaning the maps as a whole get a little overrated as a result.

The flyer?  

It wasn't even the first flyer gee made in LL, much less the first ever.  He and jusmith just pasted it - and most of the entry area architecture - over from Monsoon.  IMO both the aquatrax (first in LL, shoestringed with no 0-car, superb compact layout) and the (mostly) working rhino rally were way more impressive.

Obviously wasn't the first yes, but at least for me, when I think of the best LL coasters this is the first thing that comes to my head.  

 

Might not be the "best" by today standards either but for the time and considering the framing of the map and ride it really just sticks out to me.

yeah agreed that SWS isn't a #4 all time for me, but I don't begrudge its place there. I actually often forget about it, its been years since I checked it out.

 

I know WOMB is always a bit of a controversial #1, and I'd probably place SWA, DFK, and a few others ahead of it, but damn it is still a truly fantastic park. That vibrant jungle area is like a fever dream for me. So incredible.

 

Not many people still play LL, maybe just enough to vote for an accolade these days. Which makes me sad a bit. But its sort of a bittersweet, those-were-the-days kind of feeling that warms me a little. RCT, and LL in particular, is maybe the most niche artistic medium in the world, with the tiniest audience and most limited appeal. I can barely explain the difference between a good and bad park to my friends. But it still feels so weird, and so heartwarming, to have lived through a tiny piece of the art history of the world that no one else will ever know about. With all its dramas, and innovation, and development of rules and composure and aesthetic in the very-overlooked medium of virtual theme park design. I'm not sure there will be coffee-table books about RCT in 60 years, but part of the beauty of the moment is the fleeting nature of it. I wouldn't take a drug whose high lasts forever! (well... maybe).

 

Not that I wouldn't mind getting a few of us together and writing something real about the subject of theme park design, from an artistic perspective...

 

LLLL

Interesting to note that half of the top 8 is H2H parks. I guess the quality does go up during contests but it's hard to beat the "epic" feel of a full-size park. I think the list is fairly agreeable - I wouldn't put Sea World Atlanta or Erwindale Forest in the top 10 (I'd probably do a direct swap of SWA and Silver Valley, criminally underrated at #19!) and maybe I'd swap in Slime Meridian or Battlefield RCT for Kitabasaki. But luckily, it's not about what I think. Thanks to the admins and everyone else who contributed to this list. Hopefully I can build something good enough to crack it eventually. 

 

Cocoa I do agree with what you say about building in LL being a very niche medium - there are a lot of times I think, "Why even bother? Who's going to look at my park and care?" Well, I guess that would be an issue, except I just have so much damn fun building in LL. And I take one look at the work done with custom objects in RCT2 (probably 80% of parks on NE) and I know I'll never have the patience or skill to build that way. So I'm happy to keep building in LL, at least while I'm stuck in quarantine. 

 

As an offshoot of the List, why not rank the best LL H2H parks? My top 3 would be 1) Siege for Jerusalem, 2) Battlefield RCT 3) Sea World Sydney. 

I think SWS at #4 is indeed a bit much. But on a technical level it feels like a major milestone, perhaps the biggest leap forward for LL since the H2H before it, and until pierrot. The coaster is definitely memorable, but to me, the aquatrax and the working wave swinger are truly what I remember the park for. This park did so much stuff that I didn't even know was possible...
 
Related note, I also did a little writeup for SWS that I lost for a bit but then found again after ][ntamin wrote his. Can't hurt to include it here:

In the second round of H2H5, Sea World Sydney appeared out of nowhere. Headed by geewhzz, who suddenly played LL, and with ][ntamin22 and jusmith providing plenty of skillful support, Sea World Sydney revolutionized the game once again in an era that wasn't overly exciting for LL players. The park has peeps that do not get lost, working custom flat rides, new ideas on archy and technical details on rides, as well as coaster layouts and theming that would not look out of place in any classic spotlight park. ~ Liampie

 

On WOMB being #1: definitely a surprising pick. When you ask people for their favourite parkmakers, mantis is usually behind several other names like nate, RRP, x-coaster and Fatha. WOMB always seems to be in the discussion for best park though, I can see it get ahead of the others by it's surprisingly wide appeal. It helps that LL has a wide top tier for parks, whereas in RCT2 I think the top is a bit more narrow, but that's also a personal view.

 

We'll see where it ends up in the next version of the list if we alter the methodology (a write-up on that will be posted simultaneously with the final RCT2 parks)

If I remember the formula for this list correctly, WOMB being #1 on the original list helped it get that position here.  

 

Probably where I'd put it honestly though, for the greatness of RRP and Nate, something about Womb is just so iconic and classic in my head.  Maybe its just the uniqueness or style, themes and influence, but I've always loved looking at it.  Provides a bit of a different user experience I guess, than your classic themepark chain park of this era.

This brings back some awesome memories. This is my own top 10:

 

9. Luna Park

THE LIST = cool, it looks like a suspense movie hehe, I liked it.
gee! a lot of cool park to enjoy, it will help me to distract my head in this quarantine and be able to see incredible things that were done with the imagination of these players on another level.
Good work I liked the organization.

[1 of 3]

Busch Gardens San Simeon is Fatha's Magnum Opus and a park that is enshrined in NE legend.  In many ways it offers the most intensely concentrated form of his parkmaking style and is representative of the dying evolutionary gasps of “NE Style” LL  - a summative masterwork at the end of an era, before the site had fully shifted to RCT2 as the primary content and a new crop of pioneering builders picked up Codex-era LL.  One of the reasons BGSS is so pivotal to the historical development of LL building is that pre-codex construction.  Fatha makes unprecedented heavy use of stacked scenery and manipulated objects in ways that would later become closely associated with Codex’s hex-editing capabilities, particularly in the striking yellow and gold architecture of the El Dorado area. The golden rule for Fatha, and for what was called the “NE Style” at large, was to develop an area aesthetic - a visual toolkit of trackitecture, land texture, path, and scenery elements - and then to remix and compose that theme scenically into an area.  San Simeon’s strict adherence to this parkmaking approach is immediately recognizable from the overview, with each themed area blocking neatly out into uniform and distinct colors and shapes. 

El Dorado, the City of God, and the rest of the park’s locales all advanced the time-tested formula by finding new and incredibly inventive ways to build those aesthetic themes and variations.  I believe Fatha had only the Beast and Dragons trainers to work with during BGSS’s construction, but he had mastered the land type controls in Beast’s “Special Build Mode” to stack scenery in a time and labor-intensive process.  Although the scenery-stacking was a novelty itself, to me personally the most impressive aspect of BGSS is that Fatha had the clarity of vision and purpose to mentally catalog and pre-visualize patterns like the Machu Picchu temple or the City of God barilla out of the library of LL’s placeable elements.  Speaking from experience, the flexibility Codex now offers us is only useful so long as you have an intention of how to apply it - working without the ability to clone or fine-tune the raising/lowering of rides and scenery means you have to have an even better idea up-front about what your end product is going to look like.  Fatha wasn’t fussed with the effort or the practicality of the technique - he just wanted to express his vision for the area.  We can see this clearly as parts of BGSS strain against the visual limits of LL; the areas Fatha has most stretched the game and labored the most on hacking techniques are the most controversial, the most overwhelmingly punchy.  City of God and El Dorado are almost illegible seas of monotone ride stations, track, and manipulated objects.  It’s clearly an endgame constraint for Fatha’s building style; any more fine-grain detail or mold-breaking development of further-abstracted, ride-reliant new area style swatches would either be impossible to hack with the available trainers or impossible to appreciate through the trackitecture pileup.  Any step back from the increasingly elaborate single-minded area construction wouldn’t be Grinch-worthy.  Pinching it all is that building this way is an all-or-nothing endeavour; every tile is a showcase.  There’s no “backstage” here, because according to this doctrine of visual-appeal semi-realism, you only build it if it’s good-looking.

[2 of 3]

In all of that - the end-of-an-era timing and persona, the incredible purity of vision, the abstraction and game-aesthetic-breaking search for new visual expressions of that vision, the insane commitment to maximizing the potential of cumbersome tools and techniques - Busch Gardens San Simeon is a direct parallel to the only other LL park to challenge it’s legendary status, Natelox’s unfinished project Ouest.  These are maps that gel all the formative ideas of what good NE parkmaking is into fascinating, overworked, intricate sculptures that almost have to be gently picked apart to appreciate; swiss watches that only someone who’s spent hours tinkering in trainer menus fully understands the ingenuity of.  These last-masterpiece parks are  gothic - or even gaudi-esque rollercoaster cathedrals where the mysteries of the design and construction are almost more fantastic than the rides inside.

Almost - because the rides of BGSS are truly fantastic.  Fatha Grinch’s earlier solos largely carried their layouts as close to “realistic” as anyone of the time before Dirty Americanism cared to, and with the Busch chain name attached he took extra care to present tracks identified by manufacturer and suited to the right model tropes.  This choice by a high-profile parkmaker to present a real-life chain with real-life rides was yet another weight on the balance tipping NE steadily towards realism, but the coasters maintain a sort of semi-realist magic despite their insistence on having been shipped into LL on flatbeds from Utah, Baden-Wurttemberg, and Switzerland.  The coasters even seem particularly well-suited to their themed areas, not names pasted on “realistic” models as an afterthought - out of the sensible coaster makes and models out there for this time period, the fit-for-purpose is smooth.   A rusted, rattling Arrow multi-looper to beat you up as a slum gangster, a questionably sane and in-over-his-head Vigilante played by an RCCA megawooden, a primitive but curiously powerful Arrow Suspended mechanism driving the mysterious N A Z C A.  There’s a curious note here that even when the rides themselves are massive - Vigilante is believably Son-of-Beast scaled - they are terrain coasters.  There’s not a single layout in the park that doesn’t hug the ground, or rather have the ground rising to meet it.  Fatha used the entire height map to achieve the park’s tucked-in, immersive feeling.  Vigilante has a mud-dirt mountain pulled up alongside the lift that’s capped at max land height in LL, but the park isn’t a “center mountain” style.  The swooping drop of bacillus is set against a similar cliff using the entire 0-max height range of LL, with the bottom couple height spaces suitable flooded with low-lying amazonia swampland.  The whole park is a riotous up and down that results in a disorienting, seamless, surprising viewing experience.

[3 of 3]
 

In a quirk of Fatha’s late-LL style, the rides are essentially the end of the realism elements of the park.  Fatha did give the park an entrance of sorts, but like Disney’s Movie Magic before, he seemingly didn't put any significant effort into planning the map as an operating theme park, choosing instead to focus on developing the individual themed areas as self-contained visual and ride design studies.  This is, simply put - a half-dozen theming concepts, each concentrated into a single visual meme, and then arranged artfully around a coaster.  In some ways that continues to be what NE considers the “ideal” LL park to be; dutifully gray tarmac and fastidious transfer tracks and functioning fast food drivethrus are considered the domain of RCT2; idealized, abstracted “aesthetic” building is what you do with the abstracted, limited LL sandbox.  It’s of course up for debate if that’s true or even a widely-held idea, but if so then part of the “why” is Fatha and BGSS.  That lack of park-ness may have secretly been just as influential as the overpowering area design - although dozens have bounced off of City of God as an ugly, unintelligible mess of track, the builders who latch onto the potential of that post-hex-editing LL scaffolding look at the same slums and think “this could be cleaner and cooler and maybe more like a real park.”  That attitude of adopting what was ironically late-stage, overwrought LL as the classical ideal and presenting neo-classical, more-codex-is-more-clean, parks-that-are-parks is what has given us the pillars of contemporary LL; Silver Valley, Luna Park, Wild Wild West, Escapist Experience, Giari Palms, The Good Earth.  In that twisted way, it’s as though we have collectively decided that what BGSS truly achieved was to push LL to the maximum extent of NE Style parkmaking and plant a flag there.  The true legacy has been that noone has yet reached that summit and continued on forward; instead we’ve been forced to find other challenges to surmount.  That towering achievement and the shadow it casts on anyone who picks up LL at NE is why BGSS is #1 on my list.

when people say wild wild west- do you really mean fatha's danimation spot? or is meant to be my h2h park "the wild west" ? just curious coz i never know. i wouldn't call either of those parks pillars of contemporary LL lol