Developer: Electronic Arts
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Genre: Simulation
Rating: E for Everyone
Number of Players: 1
Platform: Nintendo DS 
Theme Park Gallery

One of my favorite PC games growing up was Theme Park. It was an extremely fun game that had plenty of replay value. The concept was wonderful and very practical, just create your own theme park, get a lot of people to show up and have fun managing it. Luckily, EA took that fantastic concept and replayed it on the Nintendo DS.

If you recall the Roller Coaster Tycoon series that has been insanely popular, it debuted after Theme Park. It would not surprise me if that idea came from this particular game. Nevertheless, the original PC version is an exact replica, let’s begin!

Choosing from several different manager characters, you are the new owner of a Theme Park. Select your park name first (I called mine Aussieland), then choose a fitting manager to help you be successful on your journey. You need to choose from Mr. Bell the wise and experienced old man, Crystal the smart and sexy business woman, and Lee the confident and energetic young man.

Once you’ve selected your person, you’re ready to start building your theme park. You can choose from three different levels of difficulty:

Sandbox – The easiest mode of play, this will give you new rides periodically as it is seen fit by the amount of traffic you generate to the park.

Sim Play – This gets a bit more intense. You get to control a research and development portion of the game, which will help you get more rides, attractions, food shops and scenery items to place around your park. With this, you pay into a fund every month, and then you are given more things to play with in your park.

Full Mode – The hardest setting will allow you control stocks and futures of your theme park and its assets. Manage carefully, your funds lay in the balance.

Once you’ve chosen the route you’d like to play, now comes the easy part, building your theme park. Choose from a selection of Ghost Houses, Bouncy Castles, and Roller Coasters (of course) and several exciting rides that you construct and maintain. Set paths, queues for your guests, as well as plan and organize several shops and games for your customers to play.

You can also hire some staff to hang around your park and do your dirty deeds or entertain guests. Hire handymen to clean up all the vomit that gets piled up from crazy rides, mechanics to fix your broken rides, security guards to beat up thugs who enter the premises, or assorted clowns who will walk around an cheer up guests.

The real fun part of this game is filling up your entire map with different rides. There are over 20 to choose from, plus restaurants like Hamburger shops in the shape of actual Hamburgers, London Ice Tea shop and several more options to pick from. Not only are you setting up these amenities you can also adjust prices to accommodate your crowd and please your bankroll. There is a fine line between what customers will spend at your park vs. your prices, so that is something that needs to be constantly managed.

As you complete (or attempt to complete) each round of maintaining the business of bringing in sacks of money, you have to expand beyond your small selection of rides and shops by using your funds for research and development. You have several different spending options that will allow you to take your revenue and filter it back in for more exciting rides, cooler shop, more popular games and the overall beauty of your park. There is a fine balance between your new features and something as putting more research into more efficient employees or transportation. Putting more money into your transportation account for example will create larger buses that bring in more guests. However, you can bring in more guests, but who will want to stay in your park with terrible rides? Balance is everything, constantly expanding to new rides which are topographically different, plus having to maximize each square inch of your property.

Every item that you build has a particular satisfaction rating and those ratings in turn reflect the price of the unit. Cheap rides and attractions are typically not satisfying and will frequently break down or not have anyone use it.

This game does hold plenty of replay value since every park experience will give you new rides to work with. You can also go as far as building tracks to some of your rides like rollercoasters, go-karts, water rides and so on. Since tracks are based off of your available funds, you can expect different kinds of rides throughout every map that’ll make each park fun and unique.

The game has a couple flaws, but being on the DS, doesn’t leave a ton to your imagination, since the game is not very complex. The sound is quite annoying, so I turn it down; it adds no real excitement to the game. The game also at times can get frustrating as there are some bugs that no matter how many bathrooms you build or how many adjustments you make to certain rides, your guests still throw up, which looks pretty gross. Other than that, the game does a great job at keeping your attention, for any city (or theme park) building fan, I would recommend this.



+ Who wouldn’t want to build their own Theme Park?
+ Custom build roller coasters
+ Quite in-depth for such a small game



- Sound is very annoying
- Some parts of the game have glitches
- Ride & snack selection narrows if you plan to play this for a while