That was fun. I just had an epic 4-hour sit through of Theme Park on the Amiga 500. I inserted a DVD+RW disc into the LG VHS/DVD player connected to the A520 TV modulator, naively thinking I could play Theme Park for half an hour. The reality is I spent four long hours or twelve hours of in-game years to build the best theme park of 2022.
Since I purchased a second-hand Amiga 500 on November 30, 2020, it has become a ritual to pick a game from my 100+ games collection to play for the first time in over twenty five years.
Theme Park Bank Loans
I accustomed myself once again to playing Theme Park on an Amiga 500 computer. The player details screen was relatively straightforward. However, I quickly discovered a small quirk with my 16-bit gaming experience when I was unable to enter a text string longer than 16 characters as my name.
I found that I automatically started with a $50,000 bank loan when I bought free land in the United Kingdom. Debt seems to be an unavoidable gameplay element of Theme Park.
After a few simulated Theme Park years my goal was to pay back the Theme Park bank loan. The Theme Park bank loan climbed from a $50,000 loan to a $100,000 loan. Each in-game year was an attempt to balance the books. I was slowly making enough money to pay the bank loan back.
Theme Park was a welcome surprise, in that there are a lot of elements that need to be kept on top of to ensure a successful game. For example, make sure to have enough food and beverage stock in the warehouse. I made a rookie mistake to not upgrade the warehouse size, which meant I had to purchase stock as soon as new stock had arrived, as the park visitors drank all my served up Cola within minutes.
You need to make sure that the Theme Park floors are clean. This requires the hire of a handyman to sweep floors and pick up rubbish. Security guards are needed to make sure park staff are not beaten up by park visitors. Mechanics are needed to barricade broken-down rides to fix them. If rides break down too often, then you will miss out on a cash reward at the end of the year.
Theme Park Yearly Awards
The overall charts at the end of each in-game year provide a chance to earn up to $100,000 dollars. There are five awards in total. The cash rewards equal $20,000 for a gold ribbon, and $10,000 for a silver ribbon.
Yearly Award Categories
- Safety Record
- Park Popularity
- Ride Technology
- People In Park’s Rating
- Ride Complement
Charts Leaderboard Categories
- Richest
- Exciting
- Amenities
- Satisfaction
- Biggest
- Pleasant
Depending on your yearly performance, you can earn a $20,000 reward for each of the five awards. If you manage to perform well over all five award categories, you will be able to receive a maximum $100,000 cash reward per year in Theme Park. Those cash rewards really count too.
Profits & Losses In Theme Park
In one hour of gameplay in Theme Park today, the maximum amount that I earned from all of my food and beverage shop sales combined was $4,000 per month. On the other hand, expenses for research and development averaged $2,000. Staff expenses were also a minimum of $2,000 per month.
On top of these standard expenses, stock needs to be periodically ordered. Stock purchases for 100 stock items of Coke for example will cost $5,000 a pop.
To me, Theme Park was more a crash course in accounting practices rather than a fun-filled adventure laden with mirth and rollercoasters. You really learn how to manage money with Theme Park.
The part where you get all of the people into your park to have fun and enjoy themselves takes a backseat to managing the books. That’s what I basically did for four hours playing Theme Park.
Towards the end, what I wanted to do was to show track progress at the end of every Theme Park year. I viewed my rank in the overall charts and made note of my position. Then I viewed my financial statistics by clicking on the finances button each month.
Sometimes I’d use the question mark icon to click on people in the park to view their overall happiness. Each individual object (person, ride, staff member) has its own statistics. See individual statistics on the mood and financial status of people in your park.
There is also a screen for overall park happiness metrics. This screen displays the number of happy, unhappy and undecided peeps in your park, as well as the number of people in your theme park, and the number of people on the next bus headed towards your theme park.
There is a metric related to peep thoughts too, which shows peep needs in the park. The most common needs are related to hunger, thirst, and happiness, so make sure to keep the supply of food and beverages readily available to keep your park peeps happy.
A Marathon Theme Park Gameplay Session
Theme Park is quite fun to play actually. I sat there for 4 hours seated on the floor – like a kid – because the Amiga 500 mouse cord didn’t stretch all the way to the couch. I drank Berocca with water and had one piece of Tim Tam chocolate to keep me company for those 4 hours.
After three hours of gameplay, I had the idea to continue for another hour, save my game session, and resume Theme Park another time to build up towards a 10-hour Game Tape of Theme Park to upload to YouTube. Alas, I stumbled on the save screen. I forgot to create a Theme Park save disk before I played Theme Park. Unfortunately, I was not able to save my progress in Theme Park. However, I did create a save disk for next time.
A Review Of Theme Park
Overall, I would give Theme Park 4 stars out of 5. Theme Park has good playability. If you continue to research new rides and technologies, you could unlock new rides, shops and park upgrades. You could also sell your park and move to another country with more favorable conditions. On an A500 machine with a 512k RAM memory expansion card however, the scrolling is choppy.
Occasionally, goods and wage negotiations occur at random times over the in-game years. These screens need time to load, played, and then load the park variables back up again. This could become unwanted stoppage over time.
Retro & Modern Gameplay Comparisons
Once I switched the Amiga 500 off, having spent four hours to play Theme Park, I reflected on my gaming experience. The Amiga 500 is a 16 bit machine with a 4,096 color palette able to display up to 32 colors on screen at the one time, or 64 colors in half-brite mode.
What else could you play in a modern day PC graphics and sound cards that display billions of colors, intense resolution and incredible gameplay these days? I suppose you could spend four hours to play some mind bending game like Halo for example. Meanwhile, I’ve come all the way back to 1994 to while away four hours in Theme Park on the Amiga 500. It was fun.
Diary Of A Mad Chaos is a daily diary written from March 1996 until today, of which individual books and book series have been created, namely “The Lost Years” an exploration of young, entwined love, the “Wubao In China (猎艳奇缘)” book series which provides an extensive comparative analysis of the cultural differences between Eastern and Western societies, and the book titled “Foreigner (华人)” an exploration of race relations in Australia.
