Steel Coaster Poll
This is your last day to submit a ballot for Mitch Hawker's 2006 Steel Coaster Poll. The results from the Wooden Coaster Poll are up already. I like Mitch's polls because he has you rank every coaster you've ridden (he doesn't show kiddie coasters, and off-the-shelf coasters and clones are listed together) and not just submit a list of favorites. It's a little more complicated than just clicking a button for your favorite, but it works pretty well. Still, not enough people acknowledge X at Magic Mountain as the best steel coaster... what is wrong with people?
While I'm on the subject, let me put in a good word for the Rollercoaster Database, which is complete as anything I've seen (it even shows defunct coasters and parks), and also one for Greg's Coaster Shrine, which is a good way of keeping track of how many different coasters you've ridden. I'm at 72 coasters, 13 wood, 59 steel.
posted by Adam Villani @ 1/13/2007 03:33:00 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
I've never been to Fuji-Q Highland, but the Eejanaika coaster (probably not named after the Imamura movie) is supposed to be an improvement on X.
The Thunder Dolphin at Korakuen is nice. One of the tallest in the world, and the first big plunge is directly adjacent to a busy downtown Tokyo street.
Yeah, X is an amazing ride, but there's a reason why it took so long for someone to build another 4th-dimension coaster. X's reliability is poor, poor, poor. It's been closed for a couple of months now and won't be open again for a few more weeks. Even when it is open, you're likely to spend a couple hours in line, half of that waiting for technical difficulties.
That said, it's the only ride that's worth all the hassle. That first drop is an absolute killer, as it rotates your seat so you drop face down.
Still, not enough people acknowledge X at Magic Mountain as the best steel coaster... what is wrong with people?
I'll tell you what -- probably not many people get to ride it. The line has been 2-3 hours the two times I've been there since X went in, and I go on low-season weekdays. I'm not going to spend half my day there waiting in line for one ride.
Supposedly the way poll works, a ride's ranking shouldn't really depend on how many people vote on a ride, since it's all based on ride-to-ride comparisons, not total number of positive votes or anything like that.
It's not perfect, though; new coasters routinely debut toward the top and then settle down into the pack after a few years.
The merits of various ranking systems can be debated endlessly; a quick scan of the ballots should show that a great number of voters rank X at #1, and then others have it farther down the pack. I think you'll find that of those who put X in their top 10, a great many put it at #1. So maybe it's not a love-it-or-hate-it ride, but for those of us who do like it, it's pretty much a killer rush.
Or maybe people are just figuring the wait in the queue into their enjoyment of the ride.
If there were a way at MM to buy a one-ride pass, I would pay $10 to go and spend half a day riding X one time. But until the line gets shorter or they do something like that (and of course, since it has consistently long lines, they're totally NOT going to do something like that) I'm probably never going to ride it.
This pisses me off. I really think it's a failure on the part of MM crowd-flow engineering to have a ride that is so crowded even on low-peak weekdays. There's no excuse for it.
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