Remember visiting your first amusement park? The crowds of people, women screaming, fearsome rides and fingers cemented together with pink sugar? This may describe your typical Saturday night, but at age nine this was heaven.

Now, it may seem odd to pursue the career of the suit-wearing amusement park proprietor as entertainment, but this is exactly what RollerCoaster Tycoon does. Your task is to establish a popular amusement park, building kickass rollercoasters of your own design. In this way it resembles the classic Sim City, although you're spared from tiny details like water pipes and electricity. You can include an amazing range of more than 50 rides, such as Ferris wheels, Dodgems and log rides.

The construction of the rollercoaster tracks really is the zenith of the Tycoon experience. You have amazing flexibility in how you choose the path, incorporating banks, twists and barrel rolls. You can put three loop-the-loops in a row, but you could find that the majority of your customers lose their lunch. A good rollercoaster is balanced between three elements: excitement, intensity and nausea. Correspondingly, your customers have varied tolerances to these attributes, putting a subtle financial spin on the construction of your 'Satan's Banshee' track.

In fact, there is a strong financial spin to everything in this game. You can control all kinds of money-making minutiae, from things like staff wages and ride fees down to profit margins on chips and ice cream. Helpfully, you can read your customers' minds and see exactly what they want. Balance the park in the right way and your customers will go home thoroughly fleeced.

Now for the bad news. For all its positives, RollerCoaster Tycoon is quite an elderly game by modern standards and as such it isn't exactly glossy. The graphics are flat, drab and fairly two-dimensional. The view can be rotated, but only to fixed compass point views. You can't zoom in smoothly and most objects in the game are sprites. On top of this, the sound isn't great either. Although a faithful port of the PC version, this is a fairly criminal example of not exploiting the Xbox's enormous processing power.

Overall, RollerCoaster Tycoon is an entertaining world-builder game that is only held back by its antiquated presentation. If you can stomach the graphics, it's a worthwhile investment. Just refrain from eating anything for half an hour beforehand.

1. Absorbing and addictive
2. Cool rollercoaster physics
3. Brings on nostalgia

1. Outdated and flat presentation
2. Midi-style music

Power
The astounding 2D graphics of 1999 are unlikely to cause a revelation in your eyes.

Style
A textbook world builder, you'll do a lot of bulldozing and financial fiddling.

Immersion
Although rather antiquated, RollerCoaster Tycoon fairly drips with immersion. Ultra detailed.

Lifespan
Play to objectives in more than 90 unique scenarios. Excellent. Will keep you amused for ages.

Summary
Wave your hands in the air! Tasty attention to detail is only derailed by graphics from years gone by. Recommended.