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In light of the upcoming Steel Taipan at Dreamworld, thought sharing my recent experience on another thrill spinning coaster by Mack Rides could shed some insight. A few years ago, Plopsaland de Panne surprised many European fans when announcing The Ride to Happiness. The first Mack Xtreme Spinning Coaster on the Old Continent is also only the second model produced by Mack after Time Traveler. Plopsaland is usually visited by a crowd of familes and young children. To see the park invest in such a daring attraction, partnering with an "adult" IP (electronic music festival Tomorrowland) to boot it up, seems to indicate a desire to target teens and young adults this time. In short, I really enjoyed The Ride to Happiness. The spinning motion offers unique sensations, although I find it a bit too disorienting to re-ride. Let's describe the ride experience a little more in detail. The layout begins straight out of the station with a very funky curved barrel roll. I've never been a huge fan of such pre-launch slow inversions (Copperhead Strike's roll feels sluggish to me), but with Ride to Happiness I found the spinning dynamics help compensate for the lack of speed through the element. The train momentarily stops afterwards on the first launch section. You may notice magnet fins on the left side of the track. Those create extra spinning motion when each car traverse the launch track. Getting launched sideways and/or while your vehicle spins really compensates for the relatively tame acceleration of the Mack LSM boosters! The Top Hat offers great airtime, especially at the front and back seats. It is cut in the middle by an outerbank turn - another funky manoeuvre which takes advantage of the free spinning. Each ride can feel quite different from the other depending on how you spin. The cars could push you outwards through this element for an exhilarating effect. I find the Banana Roll to truly be a perfect inversion for this kind of ride. This inversion type first appeared on Takabisha, and its continuous curving shape gracefully matches with the spinning movement of the cars. This section of three consecutive inversions also delivers substantial G+. Unfortunately, I also consistently experienced vibrations through those elements. Having ridden a fair amount of thrill Mack coasters over the past 4 years, I found the German manufacturer has an uneven track record when it comes to smoothness. Some coasters feel perfectly fine to me (Icon, Helix, Star Trek) while others appear to feature a slight but noticeable rattle (Hyper Coaster at Land of Legends, Copperhead Strike, Lost Gravity). It's a nit pick though, and it says more about how much the standard for coaster smoothness has risen over the past decade. The twisted hill into the second launch delivers the only real dead spot through the ride. No airtime, no whip, similar to Alpina Blitz's first hill after the drop. Honestly given the sheer intensity of the coaster, I could happily use a respite. I suspect this s-hill purposely has an elevated height in the event of a rollback on the second launch. This way, the train can operate a backward then forward launch procedure if it ever gets stuck on the second LSM track section. Speaking of the second launch, it offers the lateral boost excitement of the first launch, and adds further speed and a surprising pop of airtime. Many coasters lose steam during the second half. The Ride to Happiness does the exact opposite. The second LSM section leads you right into a double inverting roll + dive loop combo. What a way to ramp up the intensity! The train twists and twists some more while you keep spinning. It is SO disorienting. With a little bit of luck, you may end up plunging down sideways while the track continues twisting (see car n°2 above). I've never experienced something like that on a coaster before, and I love it! The layout concludes with a strong airtime hops finale. The G- are arguably some of the strongest on a Mack coaster, and add welcome variety to a ride experience filled with disorienting inversions. The ride re-uses Silver Dollar City's Time Traveler trains. The Steampunk design fits well the Tomorrowland theme. Sadly the on-board audio did not work every time I rode the coaster, but when the music blasts, it very much adds to the insanity that RTH offers. After riding The Ride to Happiness 11 times, I would argue this attraction really push the boundaries of what roller coasters can do. I would compare it to the extreme experience of X² at Six Flags Magic Mountain, but with the rotation on a different axis. Most often, I find most inversions unexciting compared to airtime hills or snappy banking changes, but not on THRH! It appears Mack and Plopsaland decided not to restraint the spinning motion (as opposed to Time Traveler which moderates the spin with a magnet) for trial on opening year. The free spin creates very unique, breathtaking dynamics through each inversion. It also means the ride experience can be uneven depending on how your car spin - sometimes, the spinning movement work against the G-force profile of the layout. I found myself unable to re-ride Ride to Happiness in quick succession as I experienced motion sickness - something I rarely ever feel on coasters. While many enthusiasts present with me that day did not mind the intense spinning (quite the contrary in fact), some did find the free spin to be too much. The general public seem to enjoy the coaster though, as I heard no complaint going out the station, and the line remained consistently long enough for a 15 to 30 minute wait with 2 train operations. The Xtreme Spinning Coaster fill very nicely Mack Rides' attraction portfolio. It's not my favourite kind of sensations (I much prefer classic launchers or airtime-focused hypers) and at moments the intensity becomes too extreme for me to fully enjoy the ride. But the ride type certainly is very promising, and shows Mack Rides can deliver very, very forceful coasters! On-ride screenshots taken with a GoPro Hero 6, chest-mounted with the permission of the park.

Got these photos sent to me today!

Nah they can only have those events if they are judging footballs

If they don't sell a "Big Dipper Pretzel" promo food item there is something wrong.

^

@Noxegon make a website where the user is presented with a random theme park and must move the slider between theme park and amusement park or anywhere in between. We then put the parks on a scatter plot and write a dissertation on the results.

Any questions? No, let's move on.😂 Currently Parkz has everything listed as a theme park which is not correct. It would be good if Parkz had more categories and it was the Parkz members who decided what went where.

Look one thing I'll say in defense of current management is they were handed a poisoned chalice. Like the park was an absolute mess in 2019 and the last few years have been an inevitable clear out. There's no money in demolishing old crap but it has to be done. The rides that they've closed also were legit end of life and it was pretty predictable that it was going to be contraction before any growth was possible. On that hand, I get it. On the other hand, blind Freddy could see all the rides that have closed in the past few years were going to close and the line up was going to be thread bare by now. So they deserve critisim for not replacing Wipeout with another flat ride when the opportunity was there, or not spending a few million on getting another decade out of the Log Ride. Everything they've done suggests the vision is for a smaller, worse park. The difference between that and say SW, is you get the feeling that they had a vision for SW that it's exclusively for families with small kids. Their vision wasn't to shrink it or make it worse, or cut it back, but just to have it appeal to a narrower group of people. I'd argue passionately that nearly every decision they made in the past decade did make it worse, but it did seem to have a vision to it. Even Liviathan supports that thinking. DW from the outside the vision look like it's just straight up 'Make the place physically smaller, have fewer rides, put a hotel in'. It's just a question of if that's a permanent vision. Rerouting the train suggests to me it is, and I think that's a shame. Part of the reason DW is in the state it's in is 20 years of small thinking.

Or don't build a ride you can't afford. Dreamworld's biggest issue since 1997 is that attractions get built with little to no consideration to what's around it. It's how we ended up with a zombie ride next to a Flowrider next to a V8 simulator next to a car exhibit in an area called Ocean Parade. They shouldn't get a pass because it's "too hard/costly" - they're a theme park - built environments is their whole thing, and failing on the fundamentals shouldn't continue to be a thing. If you can't do that, take your rides to the Ekka frankly. And agreed that these costs all add up - we also know that you can be frugal and prudent without completely compromising your product. Wipeout was an example of this. Bermuda was another. Superman Escape is a modern day example. That ride doesn't need wasteful add-ons like onboard audio to make the experience better, it needs integration into the park to make it feels like it belongs.

What’s easy for an able body to do (say a few minute walk in the opposite direction after realising you went the wrong way) is ten times harder for a family with young kids, or someone with accessibility needs. When you have a park that’s closed as many attractions has it has (not to mention having cut off other paths and temporarily closed others) it could be very easily becoming a frustrating customer journey to intuitively figure out what’s on offer and how to get to it without feeling fatigued. I also think spaghetti junction is pretty obvious and simple, and yet thousands of guests continue to get lost in that setup. This is all scratching the surface of human design, and not putting a pathway through is a dumb move.