A.J.

Mako is the exact opposite of "meh", and I've ridden it probably ten or fifteen times in the past year alone. I have a big smile on my face every time I get off. There's something to be said about a coaster as a visual magnet, and a big photogenic B&M certainly fits the bill for Hersheypark's new grand entrance area. What would you rather have had Hersheypark build?

Shock Wave and Mind Bender are literally three places away from each other on the combined poll. The preference is there, for sure, but don't be surprised if they switch places every few years.

More results! Top 10 Great Coasters International Coasters 1. Mystic Timbers - Kings Island 2. Jungle Dragon - Happy Valley Chongqing 3. Gold Striker - California's Great America 4. Troy - Toverland 5. Python in Bamboo Forest - Nanchang Wanda Park 6. Wood Coaster - Knight Valley 7. Renegade - Valleyfair *. GhostRider - Knott's Berry Farm 8. Wodan Timbur Coaster - Europa Park 9. Thunderbird - PowerLand 10. Kentucky Rumbler - Beech Bend Top 10 Custom Coasters International / Gravity Group / Gravitykraft / Martin & Vleminckx Coasters 1. Jungle Trailblazer - Oriental Heritage Wuhu 2. Jungle Trailblazer - Fantawild Dreamland Zhengzhou 3. Boulder Dash - Lake Compounce 4. Ravine Flyer II - Waldameer Water World 5. Voyage - Holiday World & Splashin' Safari 6. Dauling Dragon - Happy Valley Wuhan 7. Mine Blower - Fun Spot Kissimmee 8. Wooden Coaster Fireball - Happy Valley Shanghai 9. Fjord Flying Dragon - Happy Valley Tianjin 10. Jungle Trailblazer - Oriental Heritage Jinan Top 10 Schwarzkopf Coasters (incl. Zierer / BHS collaborations) 1. Bullet - Selva Magica 2. Mindbender - Galaxyland 3. Golden Loop - Gold Reef City (best Shuttle Loop) 4. Olympia Looping - traveling 5. Shock Wave - Six Flags Over Texas 6. Mind Bender - Six Flags Over Georgia 7. Quimera - La Feria Chapultepec Magico 8. Lisebergbanan - Liseberg 9. Teststrecke - traveling 10. Jetline - Grona Lund Top 10 Historic Coasters (1968 season or older) 1. Phoenix - Knoebels (1948) 2. Coaster - Playland (at the PNE) (1958) 3. Comet - Great Escape (1948) 4. Rutschebanen - Tivoli Gardens (1914) 5. Classic Coaster - Washington State Fair (1950) 6. Jack Rabbit - Kennywood (1920) 7. Thunderbolt - Kennywood (1968) 8. Giant Dipper - Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk (1924) 9. Grand National - Blackpool Pleasure Beach - (1939) 10. Cyclone - Luna Park (1927) Top 10 Classic Coasters (1988 season or older) 1. Phoenix - Knoebels (1948) 2. Bullet - Selva Magica (1982) 3. Mindbender - Galaxyland (1985) 4. Coaster - Playland (at the PNE) (1958) 5. Golden Loop - Gold Reef City (1977) 6. Comet - Great Escape (1948) 7. Shock Wave - Six Flags Over Texas (1978) 8. Mind Bender - Six Flags Over Georgia (1978) 9. Beast - Kings Island (1979) 10. Quimera - La Feria Chapultepec Magico (1984) Top 10 New Coasters (2014 season or newer) 1. Steel Vengeance - Cedar Point (2018) 2. Lightning Rod - Dollywood (2016) 3. Wildfire - Kolmarden (2016) 4. Twisted Timbers - Kings Dominion (2018) 5. Medusa Steel Coaster - Six Flags Mexico (2014) 6. Soaring With Dragon - Hefei Wanda Theme Park (2016) 7. Fury 325 - Carowinds (2015) 8. DC Rivals Hypercoaster - Warner Bros. Movie World (2017) 9. Helix - Liseberg (2014) 10. Twisted Colossus - Six Flags Magic Mountain (2015)

I suppose we'll find out soon enough, but... How the heck does that thing load and unload?

Of course!

I bought my Six Flags Gold Season Pass at Six Flags Over Georgia during the Labor Day flash sale last year. I got admission and parking to all of the parks for a year, and it only cost me what I would have paid for... a single day's ticket at Six Flags Over Georgia plus parking.

It would appear that clearance guards have been fitted to the cars on Dragon Flier, and they look like they've been retrofitted as opposed to designed for the train. I wonder if it's for some sort of compliance thing? I know that the lift catwalk is normally shifted to the right to allow for adequate clearance around the first spiral, but you'd that that's all they would have needed to do...

Episode 4: Coasting for Kids at Legoland Florida or "Would you insects please stop trying to mate on the hood of my car?" I decided late in the game to fundraise for Coasting for Kids this year, and, thanks to some generous donations from Dustin here on the forums, my office's principal landscape architect (thanks Greg!) and some family members, I was able to raise my $100 in two weeks. So guess who decided to take a trip to Legoland? This trip was also my first time trying out some new camera equipment, so you'll see a mix of phone and camera photos. It's a clear, sunny day... for now! I arrived and was greeted by Give Kids The World's Steve Amos, a manager and [apparent] friend of Theme Park Review. I got my T-shirt, and mingled with the other participants until it was time to go in... Giving us the low-down before the day begins. Express park entry, stage left! Unlike the other events where exclusive ride time (ERT) is involved, this year's Legoland event just let all the participants loose in the park! Some participated in the scavenger hunt, but I decided to poke around at my own pace. The park's newest addition is The Lego Movie World! This land was originally themed to one of Lego's fantasy properties, Legends of Chima. However, it's now turned into a colorful explosion with meet and greets, a play structure, a family drop tower ride, and what is now the park's most popular attraction, Masters of Flight. Masters of Flight is a flying theater, similar to Soarin'. You sit in hang glider-like vehicles (in this case themed to a triple-decker couch) and watch a ride film as the vehicles move and bank around. It's pretty fun, but it's very aggressive for the kind of ride it is. It's also a trick ride system where you actually walk up to the upper floors of the building to board, much like Avatar Flight of Passage, and then the entire section of seats turns 180 degrees to begin the ride itself. It's pretty neat! However, the ride story moves very fast and if you're unfamiliar with the lore of the Lego movies (I've only seen the first one myself), it can be hard to follow. Elsewhere in the Lego Movie World you have a meet and greet with the characters, some themed dining (Taco Tuesday every day!), the Battle of Bricksburg splash battle (left over from the Legends of Chima world), and Unikitty's Disco Drop, my favorite attraction in the park in terms of looks and presentation. Let's take a loop around the park! Close by The Lego Movie World is the Dragon. Legoland Florida was originally Cypress Gardens, an amusement park and botanical garden that changed ownership frequently in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. The park's owner before Legoland invested heavily in rides and coasters in 2004 and 2005, and one of them was a Vekoma junior coaster called Okeechobee Rampage. While the other Legoland parks have custom-built Zierer family coasters, Florida's Dragon is that same Vekoma junior coaster, but extended with a dark ride section. The Lego Movie World's "personal space bubble" proximity to the Dragon makes taking a good photo of the layout somewhat challenging. Moving into the Land of Adventure, we find Coastersaurus, my favorite coaster in the park. It's a "junior" wooden coaster similar to the Ghoster Coasters and the Waldameer Comet. When it was built it was basically in a wide open field, but 15 years later, it's bathed in a gorgeous canopy of trees. It's relatively smooth, and while there isn't a whole lot of airtime, it's certainly not boring! It's also the only coaster so far with Great Coasters' Mini-lennium Flyer trains, which are designed with children in mind. You just can't hate the cushy seats of a Great Coasters train! A quick skip away from Coastersaurus is Project X Test Track, now known as The Great Lego Race. But wait, this coaster wasn't at Cypress Gardens! You're correct, but it wasn't a brand-new installation - it used to be Legoland Windsor's Jungle Racer, with an odd vehicle design where the riders were completely enclosed inside! Thankfully, it's just a regular wild mouse now. The ride was re-themed to The Great Lego Race during the great virtual reality race of 2017 and 2018, in conjunction with the addition of VR goggles. Today, the VR goggles seem to be nowhere to be found. It's really just a slightly tamer wild mouse, but the large first drop makes it a bit more exciting. Quick overview of the rest of the Technic land. Finally, all the way in the back of the park, near to the entrance to the water park, lies Flying School. This is firmly "old Vekoma". The layout is great but the ride is awful. I feel spoiled that the only suspended looping coaster I'm familiar with is the one good one, Great Nor'Easter. Seriously? How do you get head-banging at 15 miles per hour? How is that even possible? Have I made a grave mistake by committing to subject myself to Walibi Holland's Condor? So there we have the coasters! Enjoy some other photos from my day at the park... The beautiful Cypress Gardens. I could spend days there. Future Florida drivers. Have mercy on their souls. Mia's Riding Adventure, a Disk'O ride themed to horse-riding. Appropriate. And finally, the park's great-looking double-decker carousel. Not as good as the triple-decker couch, unfortunately. Thanks for reading! Thanks also to Give Kids the World for putting the event on - those kids deserve every sent that the organization raises.

Goliath was #17, Behemoth was #21.

All right! Manufacturer top tens! They will all be extracted from the combined poll results. We will not be recalculating every single poll to generate these results. If you really think that we should recalculate the poll for each one, then, I don't know, email Dan? Isn't that what we used to tell people to do with their ridiculous requests back in ye olden days? Let's get the six big ones out of the way right now! Top 10 B&M coasters 1. Fury 325 - Carowinds 2. Flying Dinosaur - Universal Studios Japan 3. Shambhala - PortAventura Park 4. Nemesis - Alton Towers 5. Katun - Mirabilandia 6. Montu - Busch Gardens Tampa 7. Nitro - Six Flags Great Adventure 8. Pyrenees - Parque Espana Shima Spain Village 9. Kumba - Busch Gardens Tampa 10. Diamondback - Kings Island Top 10 Gerstlauer coasters 1. Schwur des Kärnan - Hansa Park 2. Heiße Fahrt / Klotti Coaster - Wild- und Freizeitpark Klotten 3. Gold Rush - Attractiepark Slagharen 4. Junker - PowerLand 5. Monster - Adventureland (Iowa) 6. Fluch von Novgorod - Hansa Park 7. HangTime - Knott's Berry Farm 8. Madagascar Mad Pursuit - Motiongate 9. Smiler - Alton Towers 10. Karacho - Erlebnispark Tripsdrill Top 10 Intamin coasters 1. El Toro - Six Flags Great Adventure 2. Maverick - Cedar Point 3. T Express - Everland 4. Intimidator 305 - Kings Dominion 5. Expedition GeForce - Holiday Park 6. Soaring With Dragon - Hefei Wanda Theme Park 7. Skyrush - Hersheypark 8. Millennium Force - Cedar Point 9. Superman The Ride - Six Flags New England 10. Taron - Phantasialand Top 10 Mack coasters 1. DC Rivals Hypercoaster - Warner Bros. Movie World 2. Helix - Liseberg 3. Icon - Blackpool Pleasure Beach 4. Time Traveler - Silver Dollar City 5. Flash - Lewa Adventure 6. Lost Gravity - Walibi Holland 7. Velociraptor - IMG Worlds of Adventure (best "Blue Fire" layout) 8. Alpina Blitz - Nigloland 9. Star Trek Operation Enterprise - Movie Park Germany 10. Capitol Bullet Train - Motiongate Top 10 Rocky Mountain Construction coasters 1. Steel Vengeance - Cedar Point 2. Lightning Rod - Dollywood 3. Wildfire - Kolmarden 4. Outlaw Run - Silver Dollar City 5. Twisted Timbers - Kings Dominion 6. Medusa Steel Coaster - Six Flags Mexico 7. Twisted Colossus - Six Flags Magic Mountain 8. Twisted Cyclone - Six Flags Over Georgia 9. Storm Chaser - Kentucky Kingdom 10. Iron Rattler - Six Flags Fiesta Texas Top 10 Vekoma coasters 1. Gravity Max - Lihpao Land 2. Lech Coaster - Legendia 3. Tron Lightcycle Power Run - Shanghai Disneyland 4. Big Grizzly Mountain Runaway Mine Cars - Hong Kong Disneyland 5. Formula - Energylandia 6. Expedition Everest - Disney's Animal Kingdom 7. Big Thunder Mountain - Disneyland Paris 8. Rock 'n' Roller Coaster - Disney's Hollywood Studios (best of the two layouts) 9. Battlestar Galactica Cylon - Universal Studios Singapore 10. Seven Dwarfs Mine Train - Shanghai Disneyland (best of the two layouts)

After riding Twisted Cyclone I'm definitely a fan of Rocky Mountain's coasters, but seeing Walibi Belgium and Parc Asterix's new Intamin coaster concepts makes me feel like won't see a "no frills, no craziness, just awesome" ride like Superman, Expedition GeForce, or Goliath, for a long while, if ever again. That being said, Untamed keeps looking better and I can't wait to experience it. Current speculation is that it's another heartline roll, I believe.

I personally don't think that the junior wooden coasters are "bad" - I think they just sort of end up low on peoples' lists because they've ridden so many better coasters.

I read on Looopings that apparently the park's confetti explosions tripped some sensors?

On the top right, click your name and go to "account settings", and set your rankings to "public".

See above. Fourth time!

Disney played it very smart with the way they set things up. The fact that you had to have your entire party in the reservation, AND that the guest names can't change, really discourages scalping.

Parts donors! Good news considering Philadelphia Toboggan Coasters doesn't sell trains with buzz bars anymore.

This is now the third time I've addressed this! The poll is working as designed. It's based on preferences, or, whether you prefer coaster A over coaster B. When you eliminate a subset of coasters for the wooden-only and steel-only polls, a lot of coasters that would have been preferred over other coasters are now gone from the poll. We remove the coasters, and THEN recalculate the results based on the new set. This means that certain coasters may have large jumps and / or falls in the rankings. For example, Boulder Dash is higher than Voyage in the combined rankings, but Voyage is higher than Boulder Dash on the wooden-only rankings. It's not as straightforward as "take the coasters off of the combined results and re-number them" - we're basically calculating results for three coaster polls at once. The wooden-only and steel-only polls are calculated as if the other type of roller coaster never existed in the first place.

^ I will match your donation to your page.

Now taking requests! What "top 10" lists do you want to see? I'm talking best B&Ms, best coasters themed to animals, best coasters in a specific region, etc...

I already answered this. The way the wood / steel polls work is that the other steel / wood coasters are completely removed from the poll as if they don't qualify, and THEN the results are re-calculated. This means that a wooden coaster which, in the combined poll, lost because people preferred many steel coasters over it, will suddenly jump in rank now that those steel coasters "don't count" anymore. Voyage jumped 63 (!) places because of this.

But remember, if you rode 200 coasters this year, and ranked Steel Vengeance #3, it still was preferred over 197 other coasters. Multiply that by however many people took the poll, and the preference percentage winds up at 99.999999... percent, which in our system rounds up to 100.

Yes, more on that later.

Not only that, but Steel Vengeance got a preference rating of (ALMOST!!!) 100 percent. That means that of everyone who filled out a ballot with Steel Vengeance on it, there were only a single-digit number of people that DIDN'T put it as their #1.

I've been waiting for this question to come up. The poll results are generated based on head-to-head comparisons, or, whether you prefer coaster A over coaster B. The wooden-only and steel-only polls are generated by stripping away all of the other coasters and THEN recalculating the results. This means that coasters' percentages of "wins" can be drastically different based on the fact that suddenly they aren't "competing" with as many other coasters. This is happening with the wooden-only poll too. Voyage is the #6 wooden coaster BUT it's the #69 overall coaster. Boulder Dash is the #8 wooden coaster BUT it's the #33 overall coaster. Voyage is ranked higher on the wooden-only poll, but Boulder Dash is ranked higher on the overall poll!