Coaster reviews
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Location Comfort
With the VR firmly in the bin where it belongs, this landmark of a ride remains is hugely enjoyable. In a park full of monster coasters, it naturally looks rather tame these days. Nontheless it's in a good location, uses the trees and hills to good effect, and saves the big trick to the end. It also serves a very important role of being a bridge between kiddie coasters and todays 200 foot tall scream machines. Hugely historically important and deserves looking after for a long time to come.
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Inversions Intensity Headbanging
Dragon Khan has unfortunately, seen better days. It is exhibiting signs of high mileage, rattles, bangs and, by B&M standards the trains are not tracking nearly as well as they could be. It's intensity is high, as with most of the early B&M's, and still a good ride, but in present condition not the excellent one that it could and should be. Would be an easy 5 star if better looked after.
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Inversions Smoothness
Scream! In any other park or location this ride would rate so much better. Decently intense for a post Y2K B&M, and actually, the unassuming "it's just a ride come and play" mentality is fun. At SFMM, it's job is to be a capacity sink, a job which it does very well. We didn't even have to get off the back row on our last visit! Anything sat next to Twisted Colossus was always going to have a tough time of it in the rankings. A bit of planting up wouldn't go amiss to dress it up a bit and give something other than the bare-concrete to look at? it is quite literally the car-park coaster. The rise of lapbar-only coasters is perhaps also starting to make B&M's older restraint designs look a little obsolescent; you never know we may see something to compete in time.
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Inversions Launch Headbanging
Had the privilege to ride the Hulk in both it's original and retracked form. Both were best from the back seat, by a country mile. Both are headbangy, but smoother in the back seat, and both demand the ride be ridden not ragdolled. I dare say I thought the retracked variant may be rougher than the original! That said, the triple whammy out of the station and quick-fire inversion sequence are hard to beat. Second half utterly forgettable after the mid-course brakes - but then keeping up the pace of the first half would be a near impossible task. One of the better coasters in Florida, even in spite of the roughness. Go on Universal, I dare you, figure out a way to put the B&M Hyper restrains onto the Hulk... Somehow...?!
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Location Harness
Oh, I want to like Cheetah Hunt more than I do. As a concept, it is kind of clever but unless you are listening to the nerdy explanation in the cattle-pen queue line you'll miss that. Multiple high powered launches are always a good thing, and Intamin are never shy of putting force into their coasters. The awful restraints and vibration spoil unfortunately detract from the rest of the circuit.
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Theming Intensity Smoothness
Wodan was a real surprise for me. I'm not exactly what you call a conventional enthusiast with regards wooden coasters, but GCI are consistently an exception. We had the luxury of staying at Europa Park a couple of days, and had plenty of time to take in it's nuances. The hard-to-remember layout, much airtime and laterals handled well all contribute to it being a blast. Night riding with Fenrir roaring into the sky highly recommended (and impressive).
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Comfort Hangtime Too short
An excellent ride, and of different style to everything else at SFMM, not an easy achievement given the variety they have. I can think of nothing bad about Full Throttle really; but it's not a coaster you'd travel a long way to visit by itself.
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Comfort Dead spots Layout
Icon is a bit of a first for Blackpool. Almost all of their coasters to date had their origins in pre-CAD design; whereas Icon is very obviously a finely tuned laser-cut precision machine. Unfortunately, it is also well known that the park's owner is not much of a big coaster fan (oh, the irony!) which might have biased some of the decisions on layout. The launches on Icon are functional but insipid. The trains are like other Mack Megas excellent hardware; and the inversions effective, but not earth shattering. The ride is better once it's warmed up it has to be said. A punchier launch up to a slightly higher speed might still be possible; and would improve matters greatly. The main downside is that there is an awful lot of pointless left-to-right swaying - might have been better to sacrifice a bit of length to fit in an inversion or two extra instead. The ride has done it's job of putting Blackpool on the map; and is hopefully a good sign for future investments.
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Location Fun Smoothness
Best coaster in Seaworld, well paced and makes good use of the flying coaster tech. The pretzel loop is forceful and memorable, but this ride more than just a G-machine. I really like how Seaworld don't big their rides up as terror machines, rather, instead, dress it up as "come fly with us" - much more fun and inviting to a wider audience. My only dislike comes from the mid course brakes, which are largely unnecessary for anything other than 2-train-on-track simultaneous operation, which I have never seen occur!