RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 has the Best Difficulty Curve (and RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 doesn't)

Chris Sawyer's genius knows no bounds. He actually made the difficulty curve of RCT2 look like a roller coaster.

This really makes me feel like they expected you to finish RCT1 before even starting RCT2.

Great content as always. It's worth noting Claustrophobia has underground and "confined" sections, while Agoraphobia is in a big open space over the water. Probably obvious, but it wouldn't surprise me if that got past some people.

Something else I think helps rct1's difficulty curve (especially for impulsive kids - speaking from experience) is the locking of more difficult courses until enough earlier ones are completed. While a bit annoying for new installs where they'd need to be beaten again, they keep new players from just jumping straight in the deep end of something like rainbow valley and losing interest.

Pleasant difficulty curve versus ALPHABET

I only had RCT2 as a kid and you're totally right. The high difficulty of the early scenarios made me ignore scenario play entirely as a kid. I basically only played sandbox mode

For those of you who didn't know (Marcel Vos included), the scenario order in RCT2 was alphabetical in every language., Which made (in my own language for example) Factory Capers the first RCT2 scenario, followed by Crazy Castle then Electric Fields. Sadly, Amity Airfield still was next...

The RCT2 levels feel more like an expansion pack to RCT1, assuming that the player already completed all the scenarios from the first game

The difficulty curve in RCT2 also appears to be heavily dependent on the localization. Growing up playing the game in Dutch, all the parks have Dutch translations which makes the order completely different. While it was still not optimal, it was a lot more logical for me than the English order. For example, Amity Airfield is called "Vredig Vliegveld" in Dutch, making it the second to last park in the advanced category, only to be followed by Gravity Gardens ("Zwaartekracht Tuinen"). Until recently I never really understood why people thought Amity Airfield was so difficult, sure it has a hard goal, but for me it was always the second to last one in the advanced category. I recently started replaying the scenario's in OpenRCT2 which keeps the English order of the park, and I now completely understand how messed up the curve is. Similarly, In Dutch you start of with Electic Fields, and the last park in the beginner category is Crazy Castle which is also more logical. I guess most people that have played this game have played it in English, but I wonder if there are other "better" scenario orders in other languages as well.

Also don't forget Ivory Towers, which shows the bad effect disgusting paths can have on your park.. And Crumbly Woods, which lets you deal with very old rides! I think the good thing about the RCT1 scenarios is that most of them are centered around one aspect/gimmick of the game, which is often a good way of designing levels in any game.

My favourite scenarios in RCT1 were the expansion pack scenarios where you'd complete the partially built coasters and get a certain excitement rating

As a kid, I remember I really enjoyed Leafy Lake—just something about the forest scenery and the big lake really ignited my imagination. The difficulty level was great too; just hard enough to feel a bit constrained, but easy enough that I could build a fun park with a variety of rides as a 10 year old :P I must have built parks on Leafy Lake a dozen times but never really spent much time on other scenarios.

I remember when I was a kid, I didn't like playing on any level but Forest Frontiers. I would also start the game through the tutorial button, and then fight the tutorial as it tried to place a merry go round.

I never thought about it, but yeah, RCT1 was incredible in its pacing for my childhood brain. I can still remember some (for me) incredible revelations about the game for just about every scenario: Playing Forest Frontiers waaay past its goal until I bought enough land and researched enough to create a boat hire in the woods; that "whoops" moment in Dusty Dunes when I first found the landscaping tools, clicked and dragged and ended up with a giant, expensive, pyramid-shaped mountain of sand; seeing the sprinklers in Evergreen Gardens and thinking back to a trip to actual, real life Disney Land where they had those too... sooo many memories, now literal decades old, and I still feel like sitting in my dad's office chair playing this game on a Gateway with 266 MHz. Makes me feel old, but in the good way, y'know :)

I have memories of Crazy Castle, the first few ones is getting mad at all the guests getting lost and painstakingly moving them to the exit of the park Then learning to just delete the 7 pieces of path that connect the central footpath to the one that goes around the whole park. I agree, Crazy Castle is a terrible first level

I guess this explains why when I was a little kid I loved playing RCT1, then when I got RCT2 in a cereal box a few years later I randomly tried a few scenarios and quickly rage quit and returned to RCT1.

The hardest scenarios for me are the ones that say “don’t let your park rating go below _ at any time!”

I loved the scenarios in RCT1. Whenever you unlocked a new one it was exciting to see what it was about. I only played RCT2 many years later and got bored with it pretty quickly. It really seems as if for the RCT1 scenarios, the thought process was "how can we make the gameplay different and interesting for every scenario", whereas for RCT2 it was just "what are interesting locations to build a park on".

I also didn’t like how in RCT2 had every scene too unlocked whereas in the first instalment, you had to beat other ones to get them activated , gives more of an ambition.

The biggest offense of the larger RCT2 scenarios is that they don't provide enough unique ride types to reach the guest goals. Amity Airfield would be much more interesting if I didn't have to build 4 inverted hairpin coasters and 4 bobsled coasters to win