OpenRCT2
OpenRCT2

OpenRCT2 – RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 Recreaton

OpenRCT2
OpenRCT2

Great news for those of us who love good games! RollerCoaster Tycoon used to be one of the most fun and creative games out there, which is why it’s surprising that Atari didn’t keep up the production of the game. The last solid stable PC release of the game was way back in 2004!

Amazingly, late last year Atari announced that they were working on RollerCoaster Tycoon World, which is the next release in the series due out sometime in 2015 – Can’t wait!

The good new is, in the mean time you can relive the the RCT2 experience with OpenRCT2!

OpenRCT2 “is an attempt to recreate RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 into opensource code.” Kind of like what they did with the old Transport Tycoon game, which was also created by the RCT creator, Chris Sawyer, Called OpenTTD. Which is a great deal.

Launching OpenRCT2
Launching OpenRCT2

This is great because RCT2 was released back in 2002 and it doesn’t work the best with modern computers and resolutions. It doesn’t support wide screen ,or nearly any resolutions of the monitors out today, so you have to play in a weird unscaled black box border mode, which isn’t very enjoyable. It also doesn’t natively support windowed mode. There is a hack you can get to enabled windowed mode, but it’s very buggy, and for me it always snaps the window to the edge of the screen.

OpenRCT2 adds native resolution support, and also it also adds Windowed mode, so you can do other things while your park runs itself.

OpenRCT2 Rides Cheat
OpenRCT2 Rides Cheat Menu. Open it by pressing CTRL+ALT+C

OpenRCT2 also ads other features, such as a built in cheat system, which means you no longer need a trainer. I always used 8cars Trainer to renew my rides so they wouldn’t break down every second as they aged.

OpenRCT2 Game Speed
OpenRCT2 Game Speed

Now with OpenRct2, you can also control the time speed of the game, so you don’t have to wait forever for a new park to fill up, just put the speed on super fast!

Saved RCT2 Games
Saved RCT2 Games

Another great thing is you can load your old RCT 2 games, along with custom coasters, Scenery, and even user created rides! No conversion needed, it all just simply works.

The code isn’t very buggy, It rarely crashes on me, but even if it does, its not much of an issue due to the AutoSave feature they added to OpenRCT2. It doesn’t auto save over your saved game, instead it creates a save called AUTOSAVE. If the game ever does randomly crash, you should have the auto saved game to recover from.

Boom! Guest blows up!
Boom! Guest blows up!

I’ve only experienced crashes when blowing all my guests up (a feature you can find in the Cheat Menu, Push CTRL + ALT + C to bring it up).

With all the features that OpenRCT2 adds, they still haven’t increased the amount of rides you can have in the game, you’re still limited to 128 objects (rides, scenery, stalls) which to me was always the most disappointing thing about RCT2. Hopefully they can increase this in the future.

Also I don’t think that you can have larger maps/parks at the current time.

Hopefully in time they’ll add these features, and also improve the AI of the guests and staff, which has always been slightly buggy in the RCT games, especially 1 and 2. The code will be OpenSource, so its only limited by the lack of the coders imagination, and the engine I suppose. I expect alot of fun features to be added to the game once the code is fully recreated.

There are many more features that I haven’t discovered yet, and I’m sure they’ll add more as the get deeper into the code recreation.

Due to the code not being fully recreated yet, you still need to have an installed copy of RCT2, which you can get the game including the expansion packs from Steam and GOG.com for only $10, or from G2A which is currently only $6. I’m using the GOG.com version.

You can get the most updated version of the OpenRCT2 code from the GITHUB and compile it yourself, but if you don’t want to go through that headache, you can easily download the compiled version directly from their website, which seems to be updated daily, if not hourly. Once you download the compiled version, you simply install it, select your RCT2 installation folder, and wallah. I’m using the portable version of the compiled game because I don’t see the point in the installer version due to how often the code is updated. I just download the update, unzip, and load the game.

OpenRC2 automatically copies all your saved games from the RCT2 installation to a folder it created in your My Documents called OpenRCT2, so you never have to worry about updating the code, or moving files around or anything like that.

If you’re a fan of RCT, and RCT2, and wan’t to play with modern resolution support, and more features, I suggest getting OpenRCT2. It’s very playable in its current state, I’d say even more playable than RCT2 is on modern machines.

OpenRCT2 should keep you busy until RCT World is released, or even longer, especially if you’re like me and prefer the older games over the newer RCT3.

https://openrct2.com/

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