5 Rides which Deserve a bit More Attention

Over the past couple of years, there’s some rides I’ve done which are a ton of fun, but don’t really seem to get the attention they deserve. Mostly for reasons that they’re in parks that aren’t high up people’s lists, or there’s better rides at those parks. So I figured I’d just throw a little list out there.

This isn’t going to be a list of “under-hyped” rides; I’m not necessarily saying any of these are top-tier rides which everyone should ride. Rather, these are rides which are solid fun, but whenever I’ve mentioned them to people in the past, I get a people of a confused look as if to say, “Huh, what’s that?”. So without further ado, let’s cast a bit of limelight on them…

5. Gaz Express, Parc Bagatelle 

Situated about an hour from Calais, Bagatelle’s ease to get to doesn’t compensate for the fact the park is can be summed up with the one word review of ‘okay’. However, Gaz Express is a shining beacon of light.

Manufactured by the not-that-well-known French company Soquet in 1987, Gaz Express is a really fun family-thrill coaster which is situated largely over water. It’s not particularly high or fast, but features a couple of nice pops of airtime, some nice helices, whilst also diving in and out of buildings. And you get to go round twice too! To top it off, there’s loads of water features around the ride, as well as a really cool fire effect, making it a really nice-looking ride for spectators too.

To be fair, I probably could have put in any of Soquet’s ‘larger’ rides here too. They’re all surprisingly fun (watch this space for a post appreciating my favourite French manufacturer soon!)

Image from Bagatelle’s website

4. Discovery Club, Avonturenpark Hellendoorn

I make it no secret that I look shooting dark rides, and this one is really quirky. Sitting in outward-facing circular cars, the idea is that you’re basically exploring a house with loads of spooky stuff that could come alive. It’s a classic storyline which works, and with a fun soundtrack and sound effects, good theming and the unpredictable, and sometimes wild, spinning of the cars, it makes for a great experience.

The fact that this is tucked in the corner of the park, and you have no clue about what’s inside really adds to the feels of it too!

Hellendoorn itself is a decent park, a little under-rated in my opinion, but this 22 year old Mack dark ride is probably the crowning jewel of the park! And being in The Netherlands, they do seem to get overshadowed by the big parks like Efteling, Walibi and Toverland, and even the large visitor numbers that make their way to Duinrell. Hopefully it gets its time grab people’s attention soon!

Tucked away in the corner, the beautiful façade hides many secrets that await in the Discovery Club

3. Kyöpelinvuoren Hotelli, Linnanmäki

I had to look up the name of this, and copy it to make sure it’s spelt correctly. Even then, some people may not be sure what this is, or those who have visited might not recognise the name. But it is the park’s ghost train, which opened in 2013.

And frankly, it has no right being as good as it is. For a city park like Linnanmäki which doesn’t really *do* theming, it stands out really well. And inside, it’s just immaculately themed and styled – it’s creepy from the word go.

The ride itself is pretty fantastic. Good length, no dead spots, lots of turns and plenty of surprises and special effects. It just hits the nail on the head at every point. Along with the likes of the nearby Taiga, this shows that when the park sets itself a target, they hit it perfectly.

2. Popcorn Revenge, Walibi Belgium

Popcorn Revenge is genuinely brilliant; it is up there as one of my favourite dark rides. Earlier I said this list wasn’t necessarily going to be about top-tier rides; Popcorn Revenge is perhaps the exception here. For those who don’t know, this is a trackless, screen-based shooting dark ride, which takes around a movie theatre where pieces of popcorn have come alive and have taken over the film. You have to shoot the popcorn with different flavoured sauce guns to take back control. The ride is non-linear and where you go depends on what car you get in. 

The scenes on the screens are brilliant. The real theming is great as well. This all just comes together for an absolutely brilliant ride experience.

I truly hope I’m not over-stating this and setting anyone who has yet to ride it up for a disappointing, but this is genuinely one of my favourite rides and it’s a damn shame it’s not talked about more frankly.

1. K2, Karls Erlebnis-Dorf Elstal

Karls is, primarily, a strawberry farm business. However, they have branched out over the years to have permanent farmer markets, which have also integrated Family Entertainment Centre / ‘amusement park’ style sections. The one in Elstal, just outside Berlin, is perhaps the most developed, and by far the crowning jewel is K2.

K2 is an abc tube coaster, featuring wooden cars. The ride is themed to potato farming, and features an underground dark ride section where you see potatoes being grown, amongst other surprises. The ride then goes up 80ft high – which feels a lot higher when you only have a seatbelt as your restraint in a wooden cart! – before going round twists, turns and mini airtime hills. The ride is killed a bit by a MCBR, but is still great fun, and a real surprise. 

The quality of the theming is amazing too, and wouldn’t look out of place at the likes of Phantasialand (indeed, the queue is of a similar style and standard to Maus au Chocolat). Just in general, this ride ticks every single box and it’s an absolute joy and treasure to experience. If you ever head to Berlin and want a quick theme park-like fix, this really is the place to go (certainly I enjoyed it more than the nearby ‘proper’ parks!).

K2, as viewed from the air (image from park’s website)

Are there rides which you think have flown under people’s radar? Or something which you think just doesn’t get as much praise as it should? I’d love to know!

Geeky Analysis of My Coaster Rankings

Last year, I found myself bored during one of the many Covid lockdowns. This led me to creating a somewhat complete ranking of all the coasters I’ve ridden (I say somewhat: I ignored very small family and kiddie creds). But then I asked myself: are there any trends here?

I went down a bit of a rabbit hole and ended up answering that question, and the answers (plus some scary maths) follow. Don’t worry, you can skip the scary maths bit though.

Before getting started, you can see my Top 10 here. And when I ranked all these coasters, I went for broadly the same logic of ‘Out of all these coasters, which one would I like to ride most?’. It gets a bit iffy mid-way through; for example, how do you compare a specific Vekoma looper, Maurer spinner and a woodie all from different countries (an some you haven’t ridden in years) and decide what you’d rather ride? The short answer is you basically just wing it and hope for the best..!

My Top and Bottom 30 (copied from my Excel spreadsheet, which is a bit messy)

I specifically wanted to look at 4 key ride stats from each coaster: length, height, speed, inversions. Fortunately I‘ve tracked all these things in the past, mostly using rcdb, unless I think it’s wrong…Untamed’s 270 Double Inverting Corner Stall is 2 inversions, not 1 thank you very much. So far so good.

*Now for some scary-ish maths…*

Now trying to come up with a correlation between several different things is…tricky. Fortunately during my PhD I had to self-teach myself how to use a statistical programming language, R (who says that a Maths PhD doesn’t have real world applications?!). Basically what this would let me do is put in all the data I had, and it would spit out all the possible correlation details I could want. The downside is that I needed complete data for each ride; so the length, height, speed and number of inversions. A fair few had incomplete data, meaning I’d be looking at 110 different coasters and their stats. That leaves a few gaps, but largely it’s okay.

So, putting all that data in and running some magic stats stuff that I don’t really understand properly, I got this lovely graphic:

Lots of interesting, but slightly scary, figures and numbers…

This shows individual correlation between Ranking and each stat, as well as between the stats themselves. The closer the number is to +1, the better the correlation. The closer the number is to -1, the better the “anti-correlation” (basically, the higher the value of the independent variable, the lower the dependent variable). It also gives plots against each variable. So on these individual cases, it seems:

-The longer the length of the cred, the less likely I am to rate it.
-The height of the cred doesn’t matter too much, but I seem to prefer slightly shorter creds
-Creds with higher speeds might detract from the experience for me.
-Number of inversions doesn’t matter too much, but some might help.

Interestingly, these vague interpretations don’t necessarily match up with my experiences. These are indeed just possible thoughts.

And that’s almost the point: there’s issues with this, of course. Most of the creds in this list are in very short range of height (about 80-120ft), and speed (around 40-50mph). This makes it hard to get a good view of any correlations. Equally, number of inversions is a difficult one given its discrete data (0, 1, 2, etc) rather than continuous, and a huge proportion of these creds have no inversions.

But what about combining all these together? Well, R is able to calculate that (though I don’t *really* know how..), and gives a few different measures.

-The first is an adjusted R-squared number (like an R-squared number, but for multiple variables). The closer to 1, the better all the model explain the ranking. This was churned out to be 0.2266, which is low (but in these situations, ie – ones which are less scientific, lower numbers are to be expected).

-We then get a F-statistic value, and a p-value, which are related. The F-statistic’s ‘goodness’ is only seen when compared to another number which comes from the number of pieces of data you have, and the p-value effectively indicates the probability that the F-statistic’s value is wrong. Effectively you want a large F-statistic and a low p-value. The F-statistic is 8.984, which given the size of the data is good, and the p-value is 2.799*10^(-6), which is good.
(NB: I know very little about all this, so I could very much have been talking out my backside during this..)

*End of most of the scary maths stuff*

So basically, what this means is that the model I have (which can be put into an equation; see below) isn’t particularly good at predicting where I’d rank a coaster. But there exists something, perhaps a much more complicated formula, which might be good at such predictions! None of that is too surprising – I’m more likely to like a coaster with good stats after all. But obviously things like theming, location, manufacturer, restraints, etc all come into play too.

So, without further ado, the current formula I have…

Rank = 131.777733 – 0.010833*L + 0.254006*H – 1.607595*S + 4.531214*I
where: L = length in feet, H = height in feet, S = speed in mph, I = inversions
Side note: the stuff which is also churned out from the programming suggest that the current formula puts too much of an incorrect emphasis on height, and that number of inversions is problematic for the formula.

As a random example, using two rides from Cedar Point to show this, this would suggest something like:
Maverick (L=4450, H=105, S=70, I=2) could be my 6th favourite ride, but..
Steel Vengeance (L=5740, H=205, S=74, I=4) might only just squeeze into my Top 20.
Hmmm, maybe not…

Fun fact as well: this formula suggest that a “no-cred” (ie something with no length, height, speed or inversions) would be more fun than my bottom 3 coasters. Those are Ukko (Linnanmaki), as well as MP Express (Movie Park Germany) and Condor (Walibi Holland). Hard to disagree there..!

It’ll be interesting to revisit this after riding some new creds, and maybe redoing this whole thing after getting a lot more creds under my belt, to see if I get something which is perhaps better! And also it’d be great to add more into it to try and make it a bit more accurate (possibly)!

Do you rank your coasters ridden? Do you go for a Top 10? 25? ‘Top 10%”? Or keep track of any geeky extra things? I’d love to know!

Top 10 Creds (2020 Edition)

It’s almost expected of people who love theme parks to be able to rattle of a list of 10-or-so of their favourite rides. For some it’s easy, for others it’s an impossible task.

I know some people like to give a score for their rides, but I hate doing that. My idea for determining my Top 10 is as follows.. I ask: ‘If I had the choice and ability to go on one ride I’ve been on, right now, what would I choose?’. That’s my favourite. Then, ‘Once I’ve done that, what would I choose next?’. And so on. It’s not perfect as your mood can change, but it works.

Anyway, without further ado, here’s my Top 10 creds…

1. Taron (Phantasialand)
Taron is such a complete experience of a ride. Long ride experience, with great moments of airtime and intensity, along with a really good flow to the ride and an amazing surrounding area to go with it. And, most importantly, it’s just a ton of fun. Some rides can be good, but not always leave me with a smile on my face. Taron always leaves me grinning from start until well after I’ve gotten off.

My least favourite section of Taron, yet it’s still rather speedy!

2. Taiga (Linnanmaki)
Simply put: Taiga is phenomenal. The second half of the ride is literally full of experiences that are better than the ‘highlight’ moments on a solid 95% of coasters out there. The first half is perhaps a little too on the tame side, but it’s totally necessary to build you up into the craziness of the second half. I slightly prefer Taron, but the fact I can’t really explain why other than “just ‘cos” shows how close it is between these two.

The second launch, leading to an insane sequence of elements

3. Untamed (Walibi Holland)
Untamed is quintessential Walibi Holland. A should-be intimidating wooden/steel multi-inverting ride given a monster name, yet features calming theming such as illuminated ‘LOVE’ signs, and an oddly relaxing epidemic lounge playlist. It shouldn’t work, yet it does. The ride itself is an airtime machine, particularly in the second half where you spend more time being flung out of your seat than sitting in it. And the ‘270º double inverting corner stall’ inversion, whilst ridiculously named, is ridiculously fun.

Even the logo of Untamed is pretty neat

4. Helix (Liseberg)
To me, Helix redefined the launch coaster. When I thought of launches before this, they were seen as a way to get a train to go fast quickly, replacing the need for a lift hill. Helix instead just uses its launches to give the ride a boost of speed, to complement the natural surroundings which help the ride build up speed. It’s so cleverly executed, and the ride really just left me stunned.

5. Oz’Iris (Parc Asterix)
The newest edition to my Top 10. Oz’iris is probably the first in my list that I would describe as having a sense of ‘elegance’ to it too. Unlike the creds above it, this isn’t a particularly “relentless” ride, but instead is designed to flow and have every element complement every other element. And it does that perfectly.

6. Balder (Liseberg)
A Woodie with lots of airtime. Classic really, despite Balder not even being 20 years old. I’ll admit that whilst this has stood the test of time and skirted around the bottom half of my Top 10 since I rode it in 2017, my memory of it has become hazy. I look forward to re-riding it one day, but until then, this is in danger of tumbling down the rankings.

7. Lost Gravity (Walibi Holland)
Lost Gravity is another ride which encapsulates the heart of Walibi Holland. Aesthetically, the ride looks great, especially with the non-standard yellow/black track design. The ‘reserved gravity’ theming, from the likes of shipping containers to upside down helicopters, sounds a bit tacky on paper, and can even look it in photos, but it just..works? And then the ride itself – it’s a little short, it could be better, but the first drop and couple of airtime hills more than makes up for any other shortcomings in my book!

Lost Gravity has been a grower for me, but the colour scheme – and the first drop – were always high up on my list!

8. Nemesis (Alton Towers)
Nemesis is a masterful feat of engineering. In many ways, Taron was the new age version of Nemesis in my opinion, with Nemesis featuring a near-new ride concept and fantastic style and concepts to match. I find it a bit too intense for my liking at points, which has seen it slowly slip down from my #1 spot over the years. But there’s no denying that this is a fantastic ride.

It’s not easy summing up Nemesis in one photo, but this does a good job

9. Joris en de Draak (Efteling)
Perhaps a controversial choice, and even more controversial in that I’m lumping both sides of this racing coaster into one ranking. But I’m going with the technicality that this list is my Top 10 coaster attractions, not just Top 10 coasters. Each individual cred is a decent little layout, but the experience is heightened greatly by the racing element for me. And most importantly, just leaves me with that great big smile on my face at the end of each ride.

10. Troy (Toverland)
And rounding off the Top 10 is another Dutch cred, and another Woodie. Troy is unlike the other woodies here in that I find it’s more of an intense Woodie, rather than a more airtime based one. But it still features that ‘out-of-control’ness that all my favourite woodies have, and leaves you wanting to cling on for dear life in the best possible way.

The new-in-2018 entrance to Toverland means you get some wonderful views of Troy!

And so there we have it! I don’t like heaping expectations on rides I may ride in the future and saying ‘This could be a Top 10 ride for me’. And even if I did, I don’t think I would have thought the likes of Untamed, Lost Gravity or Joris would be where they are. But with fingers crossed that I’ll be able to go to Belgium this year and try out the likes of Kondaa and The Ride to Happiness, it will be interesting to see if this changes in a year’s time!