"winter wonderland" @ the D00m
Dec. 21st, 2003 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baratronToday we went to the Dome with Tim & Peter for the Winter Wonderland indoor theme park thing. It was not bad, but not worth £20. Basically, you can get an unlimited ride wristband for £10, which is good value - there's a huge big wheel (even if Tim, Peter & Richard all decided it was only a medium wheel), a rollercoaster, a vertical drop ride, dodgems, a carousel, a "Froggit" (I don't know how to describe this. The one we went on 2 years ago at Olympia was an octopus and you sat on the end of the tentacles and got lifted up and down as the ride went round. Kinda like the Flying Jumbos, only for adults), 3 spinny rides (including one like Samurai), one extremely scary thing that we all chickened out of, and an incredibly wet log flume. And you can go on those rides as many times as you want, if you can cope with the queues. But it costs another £10 just to get in. And all that's included in that £10 is a Cartoon Network area, a tiny Lego area, and a "German market". All the other attractions (the ice rink, circus and go-karts) cost yet more money (although kids under 13 get to go on the kiddy ice rink for free). And the other problem was that there was no (or hardly any) heating in the Dome, so it was fucking freezing! Even more so if you'd gone on the log flume. I was sensible, and brought my enormous waterproof poncho - but still got soaked. Huh.
In summary: if you are feeling rich, and you wear lots of spare clothing (especially on your legs), take several Thermos flasks of tea with you, and you don't mind waiting around in queues for half an hour for a 2 minute ride, it's fun. If not, don't bother. Honestly - if the Dome was actually heated, we would have stayed a lot longer and probably would have felt it was worth the money. Whereas, as it was...
The Cartoon Network mini-tent was pretty cool - it had, among other things, a load of PS2s running Dancing Stage Party with metal dance pads (not too shabby), a load of GameCubes running the PowerPuff Girls game (which sucks, and has a control mechanism far worse than the aforementioned Spyro game), and a couple of PS2s running Karaoke Stage. This is the game developed by Harmonix for Konami, which is thus The Best of Both Worlds for rhythm action fans. (Harmonix were the people who did Frequency and Amplitude, and their lead sound engineer guy is Kasson Crooker of freezepop fame. Hence almost all the "filler" songs on those games have been written by him, and they all have the Kasson Crooker Curse of Catchiness, which means you get them stuck on your brain for literally whole days and go round singing them at the bus stop like a mad person. So "filler" is hardly the right word, and I use it only to distinguish those songs from the ones by Actual Famous Bands.) However! The Cartoon Network people had given no real instructions for how to play Karaoke Stage, the microphone headset didn't work properly (it kept giving awful feedback), and although we were in a supposedly soundproof booth, in practice it wasn't at all - there was a loudspeaker next to us blasting out the theme songs to ancient cartoons so loudly I couldn't actually hear my bad singing. And to add vast amounts of insult to injury, the game didn't even have "Science Genius Girl" in it! Sucks!! (I guess it's an unlockable song...?)
So Dome 1, rhythm action fans 0.
In summary: if you are feeling rich, and you wear lots of spare clothing (especially on your legs), take several Thermos flasks of tea with you, and you don't mind waiting around in queues for half an hour for a 2 minute ride, it's fun. If not, don't bother. Honestly - if the Dome was actually heated, we would have stayed a lot longer and probably would have felt it was worth the money. Whereas, as it was...
The Cartoon Network mini-tent was pretty cool - it had, among other things, a load of PS2s running Dancing Stage Party with metal dance pads (not too shabby), a load of GameCubes running the PowerPuff Girls game (which sucks, and has a control mechanism far worse than the aforementioned Spyro game), and a couple of PS2s running Karaoke Stage. This is the game developed by Harmonix for Konami, which is thus The Best of Both Worlds for rhythm action fans. (Harmonix were the people who did Frequency and Amplitude, and their lead sound engineer guy is Kasson Crooker of freezepop fame. Hence almost all the "filler" songs on those games have been written by him, and they all have the Kasson Crooker Curse of Catchiness, which means you get them stuck on your brain for literally whole days and go round singing them at the bus stop like a mad person. So "filler" is hardly the right word, and I use it only to distinguish those songs from the ones by Actual Famous Bands.) However! The Cartoon Network people had given no real instructions for how to play Karaoke Stage, the microphone headset didn't work properly (it kept giving awful feedback), and although we were in a supposedly soundproof booth, in practice it wasn't at all - there was a loudspeaker next to us blasting out the theme songs to ancient cartoons so loudly I couldn't actually hear my bad singing. And to add vast amounts of insult to injury, the game didn't even have "Science Genius Girl" in it! Sucks!! (I guess it's an unlockable song...?)
So Dome 1, rhythm action fans 0.