bought this for my daughter and it worked for one week and then it stopped downloading. Found out that this is a major problem with RCT3. Huge disappointment. She loved it for one week.

This game is AWSOME! If you've ever wanted to build your own amusement park, this is the game! You can design and build YOUR own Roller Coaster rides! You have full control of park operations, YOU DA MAN! You can play the game with senarios that challenge you or you can play in the Sandbox Mode. The sandbox allows you to go nuts without challenges, Carte Blanche to build the Ultimate Theme Park YOUR WAY! The rides are very accurate and detailed. The graphice are not real in detail up close, however the movements and reactions are very realistic. GREAT GAME and we are addicted! FIVE ***** ALL THE WAY!

If you are a fan of RCT2 or 1, don't bother with number 3.
To somebody new to the series, maybe RCT3 will feel great. But if you've played 1 or 2, you'll notice that with all the new features, that the game lacks a few things. Things like cuteness. In the originals, "Guests" were guests, and they were small and round and cute. They cheered and laughed like little kids- they were even cute when they threw up. This time around, not so much. Your cute soft little "Guests" have turned into angular, jagged, and obnoxious "Peeps". If having 3D graphics means elminiating
every last piece of cute roundness on the characters and turning them into something that looks like it came out of "Yu-Gi-Oh", then keep them 2D. I didn't have any problem with the graphics.
Another thing missing is the creativity. In RCT3, every ride and stall is either themed "Basic", "Sci-Fi", "Scary","Wild West" or "Adventure". Now, in RCT1 & 2, the rides were all rides, and if I wanted it to be a certain way I would use certain scenery. If I wanted my
ride to be scary, I would use scary scenery. If I wanted it kid friendly, I'd surround it with giant candy canes. Here, they're just handing you a ride. If the theme doesn't match with your park, too bad that's the only way to get it.

Not to mention the Park Advisor guy. Basically, his job is to tell you what you already know from the message bar and by using your brain. One of the things I liked about RCT and RCT2 was that when there was a problem, like, I don't have enough guests, you think, "Hmm... what am I missing?". When you find out and Guests start pouring in by the hundreds, you feel proud of your achievement. Now it's the Park Advisor, saying "Nobody is coming to your park because there aren't enough plants." You add plants, and Guests come in, but you don't feel like you've accomplished anything.

But at least the makers of the game managed to do one thing. In the game, you can customize the sandwhiches sold in your shops.

That's right folks. While the team at Atari could have spent time improving the graphics, or fixing bugs, or making the gameplay more fun, they made sure that you could decide how many pickles go on your hamburgers. What the heck? I don't care about the number of stupid ice cubes in the diet cola! I care about how my park looks, and how fun the game is, and whether or not I can even look at the faces of my "Peeps" without cringing.

So if you're looking for the game "SimSandwhich", this is the right game for you. If not, then play RCT2! Find a copy online, or maybe you already own it, I don't care! Just don't waste your money funding Atari to make more simple sequels to a wonderful and hours-and-days-and-weeks-of-fun game.

i don't spend much time on it but when i do, i thoroughly enjoy all the new options up from rct 2 (and 1 even).

its not hard to adjust to after the old ones, just takes a few minutes of clicking around and playin around

Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 is a great game with great features, and it is very fun. I enjoy playing it a lot.

BUT, some of the controls are hard to use, and the instruction manual doesn't help much. The staff management is annoying, but you get used to it. Also, on some computers, it is slow. You need lots of memory, horsepower, etc. Also, difficult to learn at first.

Still, the game itself is fun, without the several bugs. Not suitable for very little kids.

4 stars for kids 10 and up