Frontier Developments are doubling down on their success in management sim games, following weak sales for recent Warhammer RTS Realms of Ruin and a lack of success in attempting to break into other genres.
]]>Nerves have been sufficiently jangled as of late, not least thanks to the slew of action packed games that have landed in recent months. I crave an altogether more sedate beginning to next year, and so my mind turns to games in which violence, reflex or any other kind of unblinking attentiveness takes a back seat.
]]>The last couple of years have been pretty good for management games, but only the select few have made the cut for our list of best management games you can play right now. If you're looking for something to sink into over the holidays, check out our picks below.
]]>Alright, listen. The 2018 Mortal Engines adaptation might've been largely forgettable, but it did a damn fine job of bringing the book series' ridiculous towns-turned-monster-trucks to life. Now, one Planet Coaster architect has crafted their own version of London-Upon-Wheels, wrapping their fantasy amusement park around a multi-tiered truck of a city. It's just a shame there's no way it'll ever move. Unfortunately, Planet Coaster just wasn't built for that.
]]>From our first years we know what it means to build. As babies we're given clacky wooden blocks and colourful Duplo bricks. We are architects long before we are capable eaters of raw carrot. If you're anything like the staff of RPS, you've not outgrown the habit of child-like town planning. Yes, building games often take a managerial approach (at least many on this list do), but a sense of play is always present. It's there when you draw out a road in Cities Skylines, just to watch it populate with toy-like traffic. When you brick up another hole in your mighty Stronghold to fend off enemy swordsmen. When you painstakingly dig a trench for water to flow in Timberborn, just like you did all those years ago on the beach, in an effort to stop the tide washing away your sandcastles. You'll find all these games and more on our list. So here you go: the best building games on PC.
]]>If there's something strange in you neighbourhood, who you gonna call? The local news, maybe you can get on the telly. An invisible man sleeping in your bed? There's a unique feature sure to draw attention when you Airbnb your flat! If you've had a dose of a freaky ghost baby? That can bootstrap a new career as an influencer. So if ghosts are haunting your theme park, hell, advertise it as a feature. Planet Coaster today launched its Ghostbusters expansion, adding a new story campaign with ghosts to bust, spooky new rides, and even Dan Akroyd reprising the role of Ray Stantz.
]]>They say you should never ask how the sausage is made, but in the case of Frontier's Planet Zoo, knowing how the game's creatures were created makes all the difference. Specifically, it's the difference between two kinds of game. On the one hand, a handsome, top-down management sim in which players breed and nurture pleasingly unruly animals for the delight and education of a rosy-cheeked NPC horde. And on the other, a wrenching Lynchian allegory for the ways in which animals are warped, faked, duplicated and optimised within systems of capital. All of which is quite a lot to swallow just before dinner time, I know. So let's start with something relatively easygoing: the humble hippo.
]]>My body betrayed me last month, trapping me in my bed when it wasn’t sending me rushing to my poor, overworked loo. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t work and so I turned to management games to take my mind off the virus squatting inside me. Juggling budgets, disasters and production chains might not sound particularly relaxing, but there’s also a swathe of low-pressure sims that serve as a brilliant panacea for stress.
]]>Ahhh management games. Aaahh building games. Ahhh roller coasters. Planet Coaster is easily one of my favourite games in which to waste about 300 hours at a time. I’m only slightly exaggerating. I was a bit late to the party with Planet Coaster, but once you finally buy your ticket, there’s no going back. It’s so easy to get lost in the worlds you can create, with the tools you’ve been kindly gifted by Frontier.
]]>Hello! Goodness me, it's good to have you with us. If you're reading this sentence on Steam, then I simply implore you to click through to the site to read what has been described by Simon Pulitzer as "the greatest games journalism the world has ever been blessed to receive."
]]>We've just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It's a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you'll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there.
2018 releases Jurassic World Evolution, Far Cry 5 Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer: Vermintide II are wearing some spectacular money-hats, for example, while the relatively lesser-known likes of Raft, Eco and Deep Rock Galactic have made themselves heard above the din of triple-A marketing budgets.
]]>Back in January, zombie publisher Atari suffered the legal ire of its past-life contractor Frontier Developments over unpaid royalties for 2004's theme park sim RollerCoaster Tycoon 3.
There's been no word as yet of how that particular dust - alleged by gossip site TMZ to be worth some $2.2m - settled, but I suspect many of us would raise an eyebrow or six if someone told us that RT3's sudden removal from Steam and GOG yesterday was merely a coincidence. But, well, it might be.
]]>Many of the most impressive player creations in Planet Coaster are based on movies, as Rich McCormick noted in his recent revisit, and they'll get to be even more impressive now the latest DLC has added a touch of Hollywood. Released today, the 'Studios Pack' draws inspiration from movie parks like Universal Studios. It'll help players build movie sets, backlot tours, and glitzy rides with plenty of special effects, stunts, explosions, sounds effects, and other features that could really jazz up a park.
The paid DLC is accompanied by a free update adding new features for all players, including hotels and path tunnelling.
]]>Update Night is a fortnightly column in which Rich McCormick revisits games to find out whether they've been changed for better or worse.
“Your love is like a rollercoaster baby, baby I wanna ride,” the Red Hot Chili Peppers famously sang on their awful song Love Rollercoaster. Unlike the Red Hot Chili Peppers, though, I don’t want to make a Rollercoaster of Love.
I want to make a Rollercoaster of Hate. I want to make something so fast, so rickety, and so nauseating that its riders feel as uneasy as I do when I think about the Red Hot Chili Peppers song Love Rollercoaster. Planet Coaster is largely accommodating of these dark urges. Frontier’s game — the spiritual successor to the glorious Rollercoaster Tycoon series — lets players construct their own coasters, noodling on every twist, turn, and terrifying drop to squeeze the most vomit out of its riders.
]]>As you may already have spotted, Theme Hospital joins the legions of 90s PC games being blessed with 21st century spiritual sequels. The Sega-published Two Point Hospital is the first game from Two Point Studios, the new endeavour from Bullfrog and Lionhead alumni Gary Carr and Mark Webley, Their plan, ultimately, is to follow-up Hospital with a clutch of other theme/sim/management games set in the same world - picking up, perhaps, where the Peter Molyneux-founded Bullfrog left off when EA closed them down.
I chatted to Carr, Webley and Two Point technical director Ben Hymers (himself an ex-Lionheader) about why they're returning to Theme Hospital, why now, the importance of humour to it, what's the same and what's different, how the audience has changed since 1997, how they've been inspired by Prison Architect, Planet Coaster and Twin Peaks, and their plans for that world of sim games.
]]>Another year over, a new one just begun, which means, impossibly, even more games. But what about last year? Which were the games that most people were buying and, more importantly, playing? As is now something of a tradition, Valve have let slip a big ol' breakdown of the most successful titles released on Steam over the past twelve months.
Below is the full, hundred-strong roster, complete with links to our coverage if you want to find out more about any of the games, or simply to marvel at how much seemed to happen in the space of 52 short weeks.
]]>To celebrate the one year anniversary of Planet Coaster’s launch, Frontier have put together a massive anniversary update that introduces autumn themes, new rides and coasters, new management features, an extra scenario and a fancy scenario editor. It’s a pretty comprehensive update -- expansion-worthy, even -- but it’s entirely free.
]]>The first licensed rides have arrived in theme park-builder Planet Coaster [official site], and they're certainly not what I'd expected. The Munsters, Back to the Future, and Knight Rider have arrived with packs offering themed scenery pieces, special effects, and go-karts for £2 apiece. Heck yes I want people racing in ＤＲＡＧ－Ｕ－ＬＡ, a hot rod Dracula built around a coffin.
New stuff has arrived for free too. Alongside the DLC launches last week, Frontier Developments whopped out a patch whacking in a new ride and coasters for everyone.
]]>Apparently it’s summer -- it’s always hard to tell up here in Scotland -- which means that it’s time for Planet Coaster’s [official site] third free seasonal expansion. It’s a big one, fattening up the the game with new rides, customisable panels, terrain options and scenery. It’s available now, and you can watch the trailer below.
]]>When I played Theme Park with my brother, he'd ask me to hire dozens of mascots so he could watch thugs roll in to beat up the pogoing teddy bears. It's the small things in life, y'know. Planet Coaster [official site] today celebrates the joys of crimes with the addition of pickpockets and vandals, and security guards to thwart them. Also arriving in today's Spring Update are Go-Karts and other new rides and coasters, along with exciting options for 'Duelling' coasters which launch in sync. Here, have a peek in this trailer marking the update's launch:
]]>Right now, the worst thing that can happen to the population of Planet Coaster [official site] is an upset tummy, or a lack of cash on-hand to pay for overpriced pop and burgers. Of course, combine the upset tummy and the overpriced food, and you end up with puddles of vomit, so perhaps the worst thing that can happen to the population of Planet Coaster is the involuntary, forceful expulsion of undigested, overpriced nosh through their noses and mouths.
That'll all change on April 11th, when a free update brings pickpockets and vandals to your parks, along with a stack of new rides.
]]>Great Odin's beard, it's only the weekly Steam charts! That is to say, the ten games which sold best on Steam last week.
This week: new entries, old favourites, and a very dirty house indeed.
]]>Goodness me, this new Death Star ride someone has made in Planet Coaster [official site] is jolly impressive. Or, as Star Warriors would say, "Oie boie! Disa dowopee isa bombad, all-n youse!" We've looked at Star Wars rides before, amongst other neat-o constructions, but this is certainly the fanciest I've seen. It hits warp factor 10, weaves through a battle, dives inside the starguts, and jogs down that infamous gutter. Watch a video below and hey, you can download the coaster to ride it round in own park too.
]]>Heavens to Murgatroyd, it's only the weekly Steam charts! That is to say, the ten games which sold best on Steam last week.
After a string of backwards-looking weeks, it's beginning to look a lot like 2017 at last.
]]>Cor blimey, it's only the weekly Steam Charts! As always, these are based on the accumulated sales on Steam over the previous week, not what's doing best for itself at this exact moment in time.
A nice number one this week, but a rather old-fashioned top ten otherwise - with one unexpected aberration.
N.B. there is NO VENGABUS this week. Repeat NO VENGA BUS. It'll return when it is most needed.
]]>It's the weekly Steam charts! These are the games which sold best on Steam last week. This week, it's the first true chart of 2017, as the last one covered the arse-end of 2016. All change, all change.
I'm even going to do this one upside-down. New year, new rules! And I don't want to spoil the surprise right away.
]]>Out with the old, in with the new. By which I mean 'and our weekly Steam Charts, showing the ten games which sold best over the previous week, returns - replete with most of the same names as last year.'
SHOULD AULD ACQUAINTANCE BE FORGOT AND NEVER BROUGHT TO MIND?
Welcome back.
]]>It's the most wonderful time of the year. It's THE mosssssssst wonderful tiiiiiiiiiiiime ahaahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah I wish I had a machinegun ho ho ho ahahaha, get stuffed 2016.
]]>It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas in Planet Coaster [official site], thanks to a big update launched last night. The Winter Update has added a snowy new biome, Christmassy new decor like gingerbread buildings, new shops, and new rides including a sleigh ride, bumper cars, and something that does a lot of spinning. Yes, you can now create Elfland and take guests through the seven layers of the candy cane forest, through the sea of twirly, swirly gumdrops, then through the Lincoln Tunnel. On a more practical level, the patch has introduced a few handy new management features too.
]]>Following a recent visit to Planet Coaster [official site], RPS funsters Adam, Alice and Pip sat down in a seaside cafe, exchanged bawdy postcards, and then got down to the business of discussing Frontier's theme park management game. From the infuriating lack of a tutorial, and the depth of the simulation and creation tools, to Banksy and the fear of animatronics, their findings are all here.
]]>Alec is away this week, following the Vengaboys around on tour. Or, if they're not currently touring, just visiting places they've been, taking photos and placing them inside his scrapbook alongside some brief reflections. That means it falls to me to tell you which ten games were the best selling on Steam in the past week, and there are some pleasant games inside.
]]>Had a week off. (No, not a holiday, no such thing when there's a three-year-old in the house). Bit of a break from writing about games. Though I'd rebuild and resupply a little, come back fighting fit, ready for anything GAMESWORLD might throw at me next.
Anything but this.
]]>Planet Coaster [official site] is, by many accounts, the greatest theme park sim ever. But if you don't have the architectural vision of Gaudi (who never actually designed a theme park, but really should've), or if - like me - you tell yourself that you could build the next Disney World but just don't have the time, then Planet Coaster can feel a bit intimidating. I get creative paralysis when I have nothing but a plain green field to 'Build Something Beautiful' on, and develop an inferiority complex when in the campaign I see how great the pre-built bits of park look next to my comparatively bland creations.
So I've left it to the lively Planet Coaster creators' community to get on with the creative malarkey, while I sit in my cigar-stenched park office - summer sun trickling between the venetian blinds, the sound of kids' laughter muffled by the triple-glazed windows - and search for the creations that'll pull the punters in through the gates of my park. Here's a bunch of my favourite community-made rides, rollercoasters, and other tidbits that I found while perusing the Steam Workshop.
]]>New blueprints and a harder challenge mode are just a few of the ingredients in rollercoaster park-builder Planet Coaster's [official site] first patch. Update 1.0.1 also contains traditional fare like bug fixes and optimisations but I'm enjoying the patch notes for phrases like "Tacos icons now appear in Guest Inventories correctly" and "Guests re-equip balloons when leaving rides".
]]>Well, this really isn't the chart I'd expected to see at this point of the year. We're in peak Silly Season, and yet last week's 10 best-selling games on Steam form a broadly unexpected bunch.
Which is exactly what I like to see.
]]>During tumultuous times, there’s comfort to be found in games that peddle nostalgia or task you with making people happy and keeping them entertained. Frontier’s theme park management game, Planet Coaster [official site], does both, letting you create theme parks where the worst thing that can happen is lots of people vomiting.
It is also a game that inspired me to spend an entire hour constructing a toilet, which inexplicably left me very satisfied.
]]>The creature wearing the skin of Atari has announced astonishing plans to launch RollerCoaster Tycoon World [official site] next Wednesday, November 16th. It's been on Steam early Access for seven months. The surprising part is: Frontier's theme park sim Planet Coaster comes out the very next day, Thursday the 17th. Given that Planet Coaster looks the better game by far, it's a bit silly. Perhaps the eyeholes on the creature's skinsuit have slipped and it's stumbling blind, groping in the dark, accidentally typing up announcements. We've all been there.
]]>Planet Coaster's [official site] announcement barely caught my attention at all. There was a time when a new theme park management game might have tickled my fancy, but the subgenre hadn't been attractive for a while and I didn't expect Frontier's game to revive my interest. To do so, it'd have to be a proper simulation that paid as much attention to visitors as to rollercoasters, and it'd need to care about every aspect of its parks rather than focusing on some kind of first-person ride gimmick.
As the developer diaries started to appear, I realised that Planet Coaster was the game to revive my interest in park management, and that it was doing all of the things I'd hoped for and more.
]]>Planet Coaster [official site], our next great hope for building and managing theme parks, now has a release date. It's been in (expensive) paid alpha for a while but it'll be declared finished and properly released on November 17th. I've not touched the alpha at all but I am quite keen to start building the park of my dreams with that fine-looking editor. I have big plans for a park of pond-pocked forest.
]]>Frontier Developments launched their new theme park sim Planet Coaster [official site] into early paid alpha in March but, while it was fun, it lacked some of the features that made the game look so exciting. The much-vaunted terrain sculpting and fancy coaster-building tools, for example. Those have now arrived with the launch of alpha 2, so players could - I don't know - make a vast statue of themselves with a rollercoaster winding through their guts. Just throwing an idea out there.
]]>I probably would pay to visit an unfinished theme park, but mostly because I can't imagine a better death than roaring through a loop de loop into a six-twist corkscrew then launching up a ramp to... nowhere, nothing, unfinished track, screaming through the air then landing in the crushing jaws of a still-skinless animatronic dinosaur. I'd be up for that. Let's start smaller, shall we? You can now pay to create and visit virtual theme parks of your own in an unfinished version of Planet Coaster [official site], as Frontier Developments have started selling alpha access. It's pricey, mind - more than twice as much as the game will cost when it's done.
]]>Back in 1994, I was five years old and I had a PC in my room. The PC had just two games on it, DOOM and Theme Park, both installed by a family friend who made me promise not to let anyone see me playing DOOM. This meant that while most kids wanted to be an astronaut or a policeman, I wanted to build theme parks. Eventually, world weary cynicism took that away from me: theme park architect probably isn’t a real job, I thought, and it certainly won’t pay the bills. I gave up on my dream.
Seeing the alpha build for Frontier’s forthcoming Planet Coaster last week, I gave up on giving up on my dream. I’m going to be a rollercoaster tycoon (sorry) again.
]]>RPS have written extensively about theme-park sim Planet Coaster [official site] but Frontier keep announcing juicy features with every new dev diary and livestream. Unfortunately, the interesting news is spread over more than an hour of footage of two men talking in front of a green screen. Not a particularly exciting or intense ride, if you ask me. And possibly nausea-inducing.
So here are the highlights: the game will be highly modular, your creations will easily be shareable online with other players, and, not to be outdone by RollerCoaster Tycoon World, they too have promised mod support, but only after the full release, which is scheduled for a very vague 2016. Oh, and perhaps the most important bit of news: a paid playable alpha should be coming before the end of the month.
]]>Planet Coaster [official site] has had a few developer diaries so far, but each one shows a little bit more of the game in action and gets me a little bit more interested in playing it. There are more shots here of track being laid, twisted and looped, alongside discussion of how you can create and share buildings and props within the game.
]]>The second developer diary for Frontier's Planet Coaster [official site] has arrived. It covers the creation tools that will let you modify everything from rollercoasters to individual buildings and rocks. I had zero expectations about the theme park management game but this video, along with the crowd tech in the last diary, is very exciting indeed. It's almost as if there has been a big SimPark failure that I didn't spot and this is the Skylines-esque response.
]]>Of all the things I expected to be writing this Friday, "you should definitely check out this Planet coaster [official site] dev diary" was fairly low on the list. And yet, here we are.
You should definitely check out this Planet Coaster dev diary because not only does it convey the scale of the theme parks Frontier want to build (crowds of thousands), it also shows some of the tools they're using to simulate those crowds. There are two interconnected goals - to treat every visitor as an individual and to convincingly portray large crowds moving realistically from one attraction to the next.
]]>There have been two big theme parks in gaming news recently. First, there's Frontier's Planet Coaster which doesn't contain any dinosaurs at all, and then there's Jurassic World, which contains all of the dinosaurs. I don't think Parkitect [official site] has any dinosaurs but it does have gorgeous isometric rollercoasters and looks like the closest thing to Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 since Rollercoaster Tycoon 2. Kickstarted last year, it's due to release in August and I want it now.
]]>"Can I play as the dinosaur?" I ask a slightly jetlagged David Braben as we discuss the just-announced Planet Coaster [official site] after the PC Gaming Show at E3.
"Mmmm. Not at the moment but it's a nice idea."
He pauses then adds, "You do realise it's not actually a dinosaur? It's a bloke in a suit."
"We're done here."
]]>Before Frontier Developments became famous for Elite again, they mostly made rollercoaster and zoo tycoon games like RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 and Kinectimals. They haven't stopped making those, and at E3 have announced... something other than a PC release of Xbox exclusive murdercoaster sim Screamride. That's what I would've liked to hear: that I'd soon be building coasters intended to thrill and/or murder every rider. Oh well!
Still, I'll make do with what they actually announced. Planet Coaster [official site] is a rollercoaster-building theme park management sim (no, nothing to do with pubs [jokes]) coming in 2016.
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