Why, oh why, would I buy a game that's now five years old, again? Well, for ten bucks at Best Buy I have a backup copy and it includes the expansion packs, the second of which I never bought. Frankly this is one of the best games ever made, and I really like the idea of having it hang around.

Alex and I were chatting the other day about this. It runs great on the Intel Macs under Parallels, and it still stands up as one of the most fun games to play. We were actually reminiscing about how we both got it from Target before the release date, even though the registers said they weren't supposed to sell it. The anxiety leading up to the game was a phenomenon.

Most interesting too is that it being a coaster game really had very little to do with its success. It was just a generally fun game all around that people loved to play. And it's staggering that it was the work of one developer. I doubt any game in history has had the production cost to revenue ratio that RCT had.

Of course, this is partly the fall nostalgia kicking in too. I'd really like to spend a couple of hours here and there creating something. It was so much fun.

I still kind of wish I had the pinball machine. Wanna sell the one you won in the contest, Gonch?

It's strange how RCT3 was a total bomb in terms of game quality. Chris Sawyer, who developed the originals, had an amazingly great and well tweaked set of rules that made it fun. Aside from bringing it into the 3D world, Frontier had little else to do. But they did change the game play, and endlessly tweaked it, but never got it right. What a shame that was. Add to that the hopelessly inadequate 3D engine, and it was a disaster. RCT fans felt a great loss.

I also suddenly remembered that I have the CoasterBuzz Games site still up, and it's not going to be compatible with the new CB when I manage to actually deliver it. I'm not sure if that matters or not. The site has had zero uploads in nine months until this week. I'm a little torn.

Gaming just isn't as fun as it used to be. I really think that the constraints of older computers and consoles forced developers and designers to think a lot harder about what made a game fun. You don't see as much of that anymore.