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StevenX

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  1. I'm looking at visiting Six Flags Great America from the UK in early June next year (as a combined trip with Cedar Point). Is the park open every day of the week in June? And how are the crowds likely to be?
  2. I'm looking at visiting Cedar Point from the UK in early June next year. Is the park open every day of the week in June? And how are the crowds likely to be? Also, any recommendations for places we could stop in at on the drive from Chicago to Sandusky would be much appreciated (any scenic places where we could take a break from driving, etc.)!
  3. I'm heading to Japan with my partner next week for a three week trip. This will be our fourth trip to Japan, but we've always been for short visits of 3 or 4 nights. This time, we're travelling to a whole bunch of cities and seeing more of the country than we have before. During our trip, we're going to FujiQ (Wed 15 Feb), Nagashima Spaland (Mon 20 Feb) and Universal Osaka (Wed 22 Feb from 3pm onwards, then Thu 23 Feb). I'm hoping everywhere will be reasonably quiet as we've picked weekdays - and we managed to do DisneySea a couple years back on a fairly busy day without having too many issues. We have 1.5-day passes for Universal so should be able to deal with that even if it's a little busier than expected. Does anyone have any tips on how to tackle any of these three parks? In particular, I'm a little anxious about FujiQ due to the apparently horrendous operations combined with fairly short opening hours (and with Dodonpa being down for now crowds might be heavier elsewhere). Any advice on how to make the most of our days at these parks and fit everything in would be well received!
  4. So I just got back from my trip to Shanghai and Disneyland. I was really impressed with the park; it's easily the best "new" park Disney has done in a long time, and feels remarkably fleshed-out and full-featured. The whole park really feels well thought-out and like a lot of money has been spent on it. TRON is really fun and very well done; it's the first ride I've been on in a long time that offers a really genuinely new experience and you find yourself grinning the whole time. The attention to detail is great, and some of the individual moments are really impactful (the pre-show room with the frosted glazing turning clear for example). Pirates is also pretty great, and the technology used is really impressive. The omnimover-type boat system works very well, and the huge screens blended in with physical scenery is incredibly well done. Small details like the shifting of the perspective of movie loops on individual screens to match the boat's position are really well done. If anything, the final scene could have been a bit more explosive and had some actual fire effects though. Otherwise, everything else was nicely done - although I've never liked any of the Soaring attractions and still don't like the version here. I've never understood the appeal, but the Chinese seem to be going crazy for it. Unfortunately the Rapids were closed for maintenance, as was Voyage to the Crystal Grotto although it claims to be open online. We managed 3 x Pirates and 5 x TRON, as well as most of the other main attractions. Oh, and the deal with English Vs. Chinese FastPasses is - if you just scan your ticket in the machine, you get a Chinese language FastPass. If you press English on screen first to get the instructions in English then scan your ticket, the FastPass is also printed in English. As an aside, we went to Happy Valley Shanghai as well which was a strange experience. The park was extremely quiet and we often had to sit on a 'coaster train for some time until it filled up to be dispatched. There's a nice clone of SheiKra there, as well as a fairly good wooden rollercoaster, a decent Intamin Mega-Lite and a B&M family inverted rollercoaster, which is actually surprisingly snappy and forceful for a kids' ride. One quirk of the park is that you're made to do stretches/exercises to music before getting on a couple of the rollercoasters! Aside from the main rides, they also have a truly dreadful rip-off of Soaring (you can see all edges of the screen, the movie is warped/not corrected for the screen curvature and some scenes are out of focus) and a horrendously bad attempt at a Spiderman-style dark ride themed to something to do with storms, which has to be experienced to be believed.
  5. Bit disappointing that 2 of the (relatively few) attractions are closed as I'm flying out 2 weeks today!
  6. I'm going to Shanghai over Christmas and really want to take a trip to Disneyland, mainly for Pirates and TRON. What sort of lines are to be expected on weekdays now? Is it still pretty manic, or is it fairly manageable within a day? Also, anyone been to Happy Valley Shanghai? Is that worth spending a day on?..
  7. I think I have definitely lucked out with SFMM - and SFGAdv and SFOG as well to be honest. Every time I've been to a Six Flags, the longest I've waited in line is maybe 20-30 minutes. I've always been on vacation from the UK though and able to pick a weekday to go, which probably helps. The only thing is I've never managed to get a ride on X/X2 as every one of the 3 times I've been to SFMM it's been down for some reason or another, which is really frustrating as I'd love to get on that. I also don't think SFDK needs hypers or anything over 150'; like you say, Joker and Superman are both excellent and Medusa is perfectly fine too. The Joker's my first RMC so nothing to compare that against. I did really love it and it's probably somewhere in my top 20-30, but probably no higher than that. It is definitely the stand-out attraction at SFDK of course.
  8. I've been to Magic Mountain, Great Adventure and Georgia, all of which are obviously a lot larger and have way more capacity to soak people up when things go wrong than SFDK does. I'd say the staff are nicer and seem to generally care more at SFDK than at SFMM but there isn't much difference in the operations other than that (other than Tatsu, which can be excruciating). If anything, it feels more tolerable at SFMM because the crowds have tended to be spread so thin on days I've been there and there's so much to do there compared to SFDK where it just gets really tiresome really quickly when their one or two major attractions are down at once. I guess it probably is kind of a fun park for locals to go to, but it's sorely lacking anything to keep out-of-towners happy I think. Maybe I was expecting a little too much, but then again I've been to some fantastic local parks recently too (Liseberg in Gothenburg for example) which have maybe spoiled me - but they prove how great small, local parks can be. The bottom line for me was that SFDK wasn't a great Six Flags park compared to some of the larger ones, nor is it a good local/regional park compared to other parks like Liseberg or Tivoli Gardens (or some of the UK Merlin parks even) which are similar in size and status in my opinion. I'd be hesitant to go very far out of my way in future to go to a Six Flags which wasn't one of the headliner parks.
  9. I visited the park last Friday, July 1st during my vacation to San Francisco, mainly to ride The Joker - my first RMC! I have to say I was hugely disappointed by the park. I've been to a number of Six Flags parks and this by far was the worst. The animal exhibits were small and dirty, the operations were slow and just all round bad, and there really isn't a great deal to do - particularly when pretty much all the major rides seem to be down at the same time. V2 was down (obviously, it has been for some time), Kong was down until ~2pm, Joker didn't open until ~2pm (and subsequently broke down again for a bit later on), Medusa broke down twice in the span of a couple of hours (seems unusual for a B&M of this age and model). Even some Point Of Sale terminals broke down and left long lines of customers waiting for food and beverage as hordes of staff behind the counter stood around achieving nothing. In the end, we only got on Medusa x 1, Superman x 2, Kong x 1 and Joker x 3 despite the park being pretty empty because we had to leave around 6pm to return to San Francisco. Honestly, I wouldn't spend the money to go back there even if I were to be in the area again, it was such a frustrating and disappointing experience. On to the coasters though... The Joker is really good fun and the definite standout of the park. It was running 2 trains from when it eventually opened, and throughput wasn't terrible although the nagging about the airgates and seatbelts is irritating. The first drop is great, particularly in the back, and the inversions are fun. Some of the twists and turns are really nice; particularly the after the second (I think) inversion which banks left before going right. There are a number of really good airtime moments also, and the restraints gave a really nice feeling of upper body movement. I do think perhaps it and RMC might be done a bit of a disservice by some of the praise/hype online though - it is really great after a few rides, but I couldn't help but feel slightly deflated having read the hype and having waited all day for it to open. I actually really enjoyed Superman, which was a bit of a surprise. I'd never been on a Premier Sky Rocket and wasn't expecting anything particularly thrilling, but it's actually super fun and re-rideable with some good forces. The throughput wasn't the worst either, despite the tiny train - although I'd hate to see it on a busy day. Kong was... an SLC, although actually a little bit less rough than the other one I've been on (at Canada's Wonderland). It was still pretty rough and not exactly what I'd call enjoyable, but you're at least able to somewhat enjoy parts of the experience and know what's happening unlike Flight Deck which is incredibly painful and which you hope to just survive. Medusa was OK. I weirdly don't like this or the other Six Flags floorless B&Ms I've been on despite really liking some of the non-Six Flags ones I've been on. I find them all to be a little bland and forceless and this was kind of similar. It was also pretty rattly for a B&M. Unfortunately only got one ride due to downtime. So all in all it was kind of a disappointing day; sort of wish we hadn't gone in the end and spent so much money on it when we could have spent another day in San Francisco instead.
  10. No all day band - all the rides are owned by different people, so it's pay per ride. The cost varies, but for most of the thrill rides it's 5-8 Euros or so. There's one day where it's a bit cheaper (the first Monday I think, which is "family day"). Generally when I've been (three years running, as it's such an amazingly fun time!), I've found that I had to budget 100 Euros a day for beer, food and rides. Beer price varies a little but it's 10-11 Euros per litre so 40-50 Euros is will do beer for the day. Then 20-30 Euros for food (meals, plus a bunch of snacks) and 20-30 Euros for a couple rides.
  11. Hey all, I'm visiting San Francisco later this month and was thinking of taking a trip to SFDK to try out The Joker. I wasn't aware it was having problems until reading this, so I'll keep an eye on things to make sure V2 and The Joker are both open before committing, as I feel it's not worth the travel to the park if The Joker isn't open. So it seems to be a stupidly long journey from SF to SFDK due to terrible public transport options and timings (can you tell I'm European and not used to that?..), and it'll take ~2 hours each way to travel the ~30 miles to/from the park (ferry then boat). Looks like we can only really go Friday July 1st from 10:30 (opening) and would then have to leave by 18:00 to have a reasonable journey home. Question is, is that enough time on park for a Friday and give us enough time to do all the major thrill rides, and a couple re-rides on e.g. The Joker, assuming it's open by then? Also, any tips on how to tackle the park and maximise our time there, i.e. which rides to start with before crowds build up, etc.?
  12. StevenX

    FujiQ advice

    Yeah, I was working it out to be like £100+ (UK) return before park tickets. And it'd be another hour or so on top of that each way as we're staying in Minato Mirai (right opposite Yokohama Cosmoworld and Vanish coaster, which we rode on last time we stayed there). I think we're probably gonna leave it this time, and maybe just pop in to LaQua to have a spin on Thunder Dolphin, or nip into Joypolis for a quick coaster fix this time round.
  13. StevenX

    FujiQ advice

    We're only in the country for 3 days (my partner works for an airline), so I think Nagashima is too far to go with one of the two full days.
  14. StevenX

    FujiQ advice

    I've now - after much wrangling with various Japanese websites - found a bus which arrives at 9:14 which might not be so bad. Still 50/50 as to whether it's a great use of one of our two days though, or whether it might be better to spend the time exploring more areas of Tokyo, or some surrounding areas.
  15. StevenX

    FujiQ advice

    Thanks; I found the second one, but not the first one late last night after some searching. I'm starting to question whether going at all is a great idea, really. We'll be going from Yokohama instead of Tokyo and the buses don't get there until around 10am, an hour after the park opens. As we'll be going around December 30th, I think it'll be super busy and prone to wine and rain too, so not sure if it's worth sitting on a bus 2 hours each way if the park's as horrible as everyone says it is. I particularly wanted to visit for Eejanaika as every single time I've been to SFMM X2 has been out of operation, but it doesn't sound like the most fun experience... Nobody seems to have anything positive to say about the place!
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