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Here’s a piece I wrote about Kings Island’s new water park attractions. https://themeparksbydon.com/kings-islands-new-water-park-attractions-fun-but-fall-short/

The people who will be enjoying RiverRacers won't know or care who the OEM is. They'll simply have a ton of fun on it, because they're not jaded enthusiasts who can't let a new ride announcement happen without finding something to complain about.

This is correct. I still remember going to Vortex opening day 1987, and riding The Beast right after an amazing first ride on Vortex. My friends and I were surprised at the new waterless landscaping under The Beast. Then we looked over at the nearby Vortex lift hill and first turnaround, and figured that their construction must have required some land flattening and subsequent draining of the water under The Beast line and station. I’ve also read that The Beast water was a collector of trash and a breeding ground for mosquitoes, so the park may have been already looking for an excuse to drain it. The water did look very cool though. I’d like to see the mill wheel turned on again and have at least a small concrete pond underneath to restore some of the original theming.

@Captain Nemo Can we do a TRTR fans-only discord? lol

I think it's hilarious that the fans argue over things like this...makes for very lively conversations! River Racers isn't a a water coaster and Orion isn't a giga coaster.

In other words, if it was between Intamin and Zamperla, it was a choice between a company that is known to produce unreliable and sometimes dangerous and lethal rides versus one that produces reliable rides on a smaller scale. Seems like an easy choice to me, even considering the massive failure of getting the ride running this season.

I get that Cedar Fair is apparently on rocky terms with Intamin and with RMC but I do question the decision to give Zamperla arguably the most important contract of the year. I questioned it the day they announced they were going with Zamperla. I think Zamperla is a good company and has built some good rides but they had no experience in this area at the time. I don't know if intamin was considered but instead of giving a project to a problematic manufacturer they decided to give it to a novice essentially. I thought last year before the ride ever opened, if this works, Zamperla is going to become one of the high demand manufacturers and if this doesn't work, CP and Zamperla are both going to get screwed. I am still holding out hope that all the issues will be resolved and the ride will reopen (probably next year at this rate) and all of these issues will be just a memory of the past, however, I think the entire situation sucks for both parties and the guests who of course wanted to ride this and possibly bought passes with the thought of riding TT2 this year. Hopefully AlpenFury and Rapterra both open on time and prove to be much more reliable attractions than TT2

Yeesh, that service counter being that gross is despicable. How is keeping that counter at least somewhat tidy not drilled into employees from day 0?

That script has been used on the tower for as long as I can remember, and Ive been going since Taft.

I don't know if it's been discussed here or not, but I noticed that several rides now have a sign towards the exit that informs guests that if they've lost an item on the ride, they have a qr code that they can scan in order to report it to lost and found. It's good that the park is making this more clear for guests that might not know exactly how their items are going to be retrieved, but I can't help but feel disturbed knowing the context of why this was done.

I can't comment on the internal, but the park was annoyingly crowded. That didn't bother me so much, but the inefficient procedures did. Lazy Bear Lodge...slow to serve the food. Think Coney BBQ with both sides open and lines to Coney Treats. One cashier. One drink stand. Backlot Cafe...no drink stations, you had to get your drink before entering, so wait in that line, then wait in a long food line, your drink was gone, hot or watered down (if the park had ice) Blue Ice Cream...4 people in front of me. 3 workers. Still took 20 minutes to get a cone. And they said they were not allowed to put it into a cup. Ride ops were great on most coasters, almost rivaling KI. Friendly too. Park wasn't very clean. Finally, the park can't control this, but the crowds....no sense of personal space. Children literally pawing at me. Teens cutting right in front of you on International Street...worse than KI teens. And the spitting...oh the spitting... Despite the dirty state of the park, it was beautiful. Still has some hints of Taft.

As much as I love ProSlide attractions, Cedar Fair doesn’t work with them. They ripped out two slides at the Carowinds waterpark a few years ago just because they were ProSlide (supposedly). I guess CF sees them as the waterpark equivalent to Intamin .

Water coasters in their simplest forms are slides, in which a tube or some form of vehicle like a mat, is propelled up a hill with some form of propulsion in contrast to traditional water slides that rely strictly on gravity and do not have propulsion up hill. To nit pick what constitute a water coaster as bringing tubes to the station is simply put is flawed. I've been to several waterparks, I have been on several water coasters, I'm probably one of the few people who actually counts their water side credits. You can have Infinity Master Blasters, Master Blasters that end and you have to pick up your tube and you could also go the ProSlide route which has a station and lift like what you get at Holiday World's attractions. I didn't hear anyone pipe up about the fact that MASSIV, which was touted as the world's TALLEST water coaster, you had to carry your tubes up to the station, thus disqualifying it from being a water coaster. Extreme Water Slide | MASSIV Monster Blaster | Schlitterbahn Galveston . But wait, there's more! Even White Water West, the producer of this new water coaster and MASSIV, has MASSIV on their website as a water coaster, the Master Blaster Model. Master Blaster Water Slide - The World's First Uphill Water Coaster (whitewaterwest.com) . The langua franca of the water park scape is different than what you have in the parks. Just like how you have B&M's and Intamin, you have White Water West and ProSlide Technologies. If you're looking at this as "hey this is a new coaster credit" don't, it's not a roller coaster, which necessitates different parameters to be considered as an actual roller coaster. It's a slide, called a water coaster, it doesn't mean Aqua Trax, which is entirely different.

^First, the water coasters you see in water parks (not the ones made by Mack and Intamin that are actually roller coasters) are more akin to slides that just happen to have uphill sections. They're called coasters for advertising purposes. 2nd, if you're really getting pedantic about it being a coaster based on having to carry the vehicle up, most early coasters before chain lifts were common had to have the cars pushed up by hand or used pulleys.

I didn't know not carrying your tube was a prerequisite to one being a water coaster?

Kudos to KI for dealing with the dining pass tech glitch tonight in a guest positive way. Sometime around 5:30-6 they weren’t loading (at least at Enrique’s) so they were just manually tallying people who had them (and it you had the ap, asking if you could tap “pass add ons” just to verify) would’ve been easy to say “ you’ll need to pay until we can get our system back up. Also when I asked at G&G if they could check and see when or if the scans ever went in they said “you can just use it again-we aren’t checking time” again would’ve been easy to say “there’s no way we can verify if it’s been 4 hrs,so sorry” the park does a lot of dumb things, but this was the way to handle this. I’m sure if word got out, people abused it, but you sometimes take that risk with guest centered decisions.

September 2005:

Sounds like from a name/theming perspective they could be shifting focus away from the generic Soak City. I’d dig it. Looks like a great addition!

He did say that, although phrased differently: " end of its serviceable life..."