Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 | 
| From: Atari
List Price: $19.99
Buy New: $4.37
as of 11/22/2009 22:51 CST details
You Save: $15.62 (78%)
New (37) Used (16) from $2.99
Seller: Starlight Digital
Rating:  214 reviews
Sales Rank: 2034
Platforms: Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP
Genre: Strategy Games
ESRB: Everyone
Media: CD-ROM
Number Of Items: 1
Batteries Included: No
Age: 5 - 20 years
Operating System: Windows 2000
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.5 x 1.5
Legal Disclaimer: Warranty does not cover misuse of product.
MPN: 25655
Model: 25655
UPC: 742725256552
EAN: 0742725256552
ASIN: B00029QOQS
Release Date: October 26, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | Create and customize your own amusement park | | • | New 3-D graphics; complete camera control allows players to view their park from any angle | | • | The new CoasterCam lets you ride what you build | | • | Create your own family members and friends and add them to your park | | • | For 1 player |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Now Ride the Rides!
RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 is completely updated and redesigned to take the seriesto all-new heights. It includes stunning 3D graphics and the ability tosee the park from the eyes of a guest and ride all the rides with the newCoasterCam feature. The game features amazing crowd scenes with enhanced parkguests and characters, over 130 rides including new-to-the-franchise rollercoaster types, realistic day and night cycles with superb lighting effects,extensive still-picture and movie-making capability to allow players to sharethe fruits of their creativity, a Sandbox Mode and many other new features whichbuild upon the fun and addictive nature of the original games. From streetlevel to blimp, see your park pulse with fun and excitement like never before.
Open the gates to the amusement park of your dreams! Pack it with fantasticrides, cool concession stands, custom themes and roller coasters that youdesign.
3D Camera Controls
Fluid camera movement, unrestricted zoom controls and four camera controlpre-sets allow you to see your park from virtually any vantage point - from awide angle shot of your whole park to extreme close-up on the expression of thepeeps.
Ride The Rides - CoasterCam
With the new CoasterCam you can now ride any ride in your amusement park. Experience first hand the gut-wrenching white-knuckle spine-tinglingblackout-inducing g-forces of loops, spirals and towering drops; or a gentletrip through the park on a monorail or chairlift; or the dizzying delights ofthe carousel and ferris wheel.
All New Peeps
Peeps (RollerCoaster Tycoon park guests and employees) now come in many s
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 214
 Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 October 9, 2009
Phillip Pinkston (Newark, Ohio USA)
Definately worth buying. Lots of fun. I still think zoo tycoon is better. But the graphics have greatly improved. I think it would have been slightly better if they left the old carnival music playing in the background, like in the older versions of the games, but it has no effect on the game play. Hours & Hours of fun. If you have the time to play. Very addicting game.
 A Terrible User Interface August 11, 2009
Lenton K. Goforth (Springfield, OR)
The user interface for RCT3 is the worst user interface ever. It absolutely sucks! It is wrong in every way possible. It wastes lots of man hours due to a terrible design.
Items to place on your map are sorted by name. Names are Large this, medium this, small this, very large this. What a concept! To find a boulder, the user has to wade through statues, lolipop trees, diving suits, and everything between L and V to get to them. Instead of naming them Boulder large, Boulder medium, Boulder small, and Boulder very large which would group all the boulders together, the designers chose to make the user wade through everything according to size. That is just plain stupid! There is no corellation by size. Size is not the way you search for things. Searching for things to place in RCT3 wastes your time!
Wanna find a fountain to place? Names are not Fountain Woman, Fountain Frog, Fountain Pegasus, Fountain etc. They are Frog fountain, Pegasus fountain, etc. and this naming convention wastes time trying to find these items.
Every scenery item in every theme and every ride in every theme is sorted by name. Everything! You can use your own music, but that list isn't sorted at all! No sorting. None! Nada, Zero, Zip. Absolutely no sorting is applied to the list of music to attach to a ride or a loudspeaker. Finding music is very difficult, and wastes a lot of time.
In every software title that I have except for RCT3, I can overwrite text in a text box simply by double clicking that text box. You can't do this in RCT3, though this is an industry standard. Instead, you gotta get into that text box then press the delete or backspace key for every character in that text box. This is a waste of time! If you want to rename a ride or a worker or type in a cheat, you gotta use more time than necessary.
When you place a new worker in your park, there's a panel that pops up RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF YOUR SCREEN. It stays RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF YOUR SCREEN until you close it or move it. There is no hotkey to close it. And it's right in the most valuable place of your screen, dead center, where you are working. You can't edit a worker's territory with this most annoying screen in the way, nor can you tell the game where to put this screen the next time you use it. You gotta close it or move it, again and again and again This is most annoying and it wastes people's time!
Damn! You got all these extra clicks! You got all these extra key strokes! All these waste your time! But the designers figured out a way to help you. You DON'T have to click out in the scenery menu which remains open after you've selected an item to place. All you gotta do is wave your mouse over this window to inadvertantly pick up a different item. This is terribly inconvenient! TERRIBLY! If the designers demanded that you click to pick up an item, this would be far better, but as it is, you end up picking up a different item if you simply wave your mouse over this menu. No extra click required for this inconvenience! It seems that the designers WANT you to be inconvenienced. Yet if you close this window, there's an easy way to reopen it. Just click on the button of the placement window and that will reopen this window. The trouble is, it doesn't open it to the unit you were placing, and you have to wade though all those size sorted items again! This is stupid. It wastes my time more than anything in this game!
THERE IS NO HOTKEY FOR CLOSING THE PLACEMENT WINDOW. None! You gotta close it with a mouse click. And where is the close button? In the most unusual, most inconvenient place possible. It is in the lower left corner of your sceen. I mean the absolutley most lower, most left, corner of the screen where most people never work with any other software title. AND you gotta close it with an item attached to your mouse curser which make this even more awkward. Now, if you close the placement window before you close the menu window, then wave your mouse over the menu window again (which is quite easy to do), you pick up another item to place. You then have to close the placement window again! This is stupid. It wastes my time. It wastes everybody's time!
For every hour you spend making a park, at least 20 minutes of that time is wasted. Approximately 30% of the time is wasted searching for this or that, shaking something off your curser, or renaming a ride, or getting something off of your cursor, or a window out of your way. If 1 million users spend three hours making a park, that amounts to 1 million wasted man-hours! One would think that the designers would correct this ONCE, no matter how much time it took them to correct it so that people would not be inconvenienced by these non-standard, inconvenient and super time wasting design flaws. The designers did not consider this. They won't change it, and never considered the number of hours that their users have to waste, and were not and are not concerned about making their game more enjoyable. Their unwillingness to change this since version 1 of this game shows a complete lack of concern for their users. This is either arrogant or just plain stupid. It is most likely BOTH!
I'm done with this game already. I can't bear to waste another hour at this fighting the user interface, and it really gets my goat to think that the designers don't care how many hours that their customers waste. For about 80 nman hours of the development team's time to change these problems, millions of man hours could be saved and this game would be far better than it is now. FAR better! But since they were unwilling to remedy this problem and are not willing to change this now or ever in the future, I have only one thing that I can do to help my friends who like to play computer games -- Tell every new potential buyer how stupid and how lame that all important user interface is and how it has been overlooked by this design team, and tell them to NOT SPEND THEIR MONEY on this piece of poor software engineering.
Yes, what this game can do is most awesome, but getting it done is terribly difficult and frustrating and this flaw has killed this game. This isn't software at it's best by a long shot. It is quite easily software at it's worst! No matter what software can do, it's not good unless you can get it done efficiently and easily, and the user interface is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING in any software title. RCT3 has the worst user interface ever. Period.
Those wasted hours are a health risk! Sitting at your computer for hours is not good for you. Sitting at your computer wasting your time is even worse! You could, conceivabley, make a park in 6 hours. Instead, it takes 9!
Game? Not if you can barely play it! And it is not fun to waste time. No fun at all. Games are suppose to be entertaining. Ease of use makes them entertaining. You do not play RCT3, you work at it, and most of the work is unnecessary.
You can lose your job and still find another. You can lose all your money, and find some more. You can lose your spouse and find another. The one thing in this world that you cannot replace is time, and sadly, the design team of RCT3 doesn't understand that concept. They insist on wasting yours, to save them theirs, and literally millions of man hours are wasted in front of this game.
Don't buy this piece of junk. You'll waste your time with it, and wish you hadn't wasted your money.
 Buyer beware: software issues with latest versions (read for details) May 6, 2009
Raphael See (Dallas, TX United States)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Having never played any games within the Roller Coaster Tycoon series before, I have to say that this game is a lot of fun - and addicting. You can building your own park from the ground up and control every little aspect from the colors on the rides, background music (you can use your own MP3s or WMAs), how much ketchup to put on the hamburgers, prices, etc. - a real treat for the obsessively-inclined. It is very rewarding to zoom way in and watch the little parkgoers meander, ride, buy your souveneirs, and have fun. Being able to "ride" your own rides is a nice touch.
A caveat emptor for anyone who is considering purchasing this game at this point: if you play this game and enjoy it, then you will almost certainly be interested in purchasing the expansion packs (Soaked! and Wild!) as well, which add large amounts of added content and also fix numerous bugs and interface issues that were present in the original release. HOWEVER -- the original releases of RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 (RCT3) were released with copy protection, requiring a CD key for initial installation and the actual CD to play. Recent printings of this game DO NOT have this same copy protection (so you don't need the CD in the computer to play) and are shipped with no printed manual or CD key; however, the expansion packs ARE NOT compatible with these newer versions and will even render the original title unplayable if installed (the computer will perpetually ask to "insert RCT3 CD" on attempting to play and will not recognize the newer RCT3 CD as a legitimate copy). This is a known software issue for which Atari does not offer a solution. This also applies to software patches for RCT3 which apply the bug-fixes and interface tweaks without adding extra content - recent printings of RCT3 (including direct-download versions) are not compatable with patches.
If you know you will never be interested in the expansion content and/or the bug and interface fixes, then the plain-vanilla RCT3 will work just find for you. If there is any possibility that you will be interested in patched content or expansion content (which is considerable and greatly adds to the original game), then a better purchase would be Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 Platinum, which seamlessly integrates both of the expansion packs and all of the software patches, error-free.
great game but the fun doesn't last January 6, 2009
W. Kohorst (Silver Spring, MD USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
bought this for my daughter and it worked for one week and then it stopped downloading. Found out that this is a major problem with RCT3. Huge disappointment. She loved it for one week.
 I'll give Disney a run for his money! My park, My way! December 28, 2008
William P. Romjue (Arizona Territory)
This game is AWSOME! If you've ever wanted to build your own amusement park, this is the game! You can design and build YOUR own Roller Coaster rides! You have full control of park operations, YOU DA MAN! You can play the game with senarios that challenge you or you can play in the Sandbox Mode. The sandbox allows you to go nuts without challenges, Carte Blanche to build the Ultimate Theme Park YOUR WAY! The rides are very accurate and detailed. The graphice are not real in detail up close, however the movements and reactions are very realistic. GREAT GAME and we are addicted! FIVE ***** ALL THE WAY!
Showing reviews 1-5 of 214
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