Fans of Roller Coaster Tycoon would do well to consider entertaining themselves by playing OpenTTD, a community reverse-engineering / rewriting / extension effort based off Transport Tycoon (Deluxe), which was in turn the predecessor of Roller Coaster Tycoon. (RCT was originally going to be Transport Tycoon 2, but when Chris Sawyer tried out the new track-layout features the idea of roller coasters became obvious, and the game was history.)<p>Of course, this unusual legacy has some interesting side-effects and it can be a little weird to get into the game (e.g. there's two completely different models of doing signaling, and there's a complete rewrite of the passenger-traffic distribution algorithm that makes things a lot more challenging and fun but is buried in some sub-sub-submenu in the settings' Advanced Mode...)<p>Think of something a little like Roller Coaster Tycoon, but you get to do more network-design work and make tradeoffs between the expense of building a system right the first time or doing something more scalable for the future, and then seeing it blow up in your face when you try to run too much traffic down a congested line :D
I think most people know this already but the original RCT was written almost entirely in assembly by Chris Sawyer[1].<p>It was almost 15 years ago but still not the norm for the time and quite an impressive feat.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.chrissawyergames.com/faq3.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.chrissawyergames.com/faq3.htm</a>
A really interesting thing about this is the length of the development cycle. It was released in March 1999, so that's 2.5 years from start to release...I think I would go stir crazy if I worked on a dev project that long without a release. But glad they did, because RCT brought me hundreds hours of enjoyment back in the day.
I loved that version RCT2, when RCT3 went out I got disappointed, the control feeling was lost...<p>Looking through those alternatives makes me believe that maybe I'll can enjoy one more time that game...<p>Parkitect is the real evolution of RCT2, like Gangsters 2 the latest version Omerta has great textures and graphics and the original game style, I hope that Parkitect can reach their goal on time as a Kickstarter project