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Big coasters at Six Flags New England
Aug. 4th, 2021 05:09 pmBack in May, when COVID cases were dropping all over and it seemed like a fully vaccinated person might be able to genuinely act as if the pandemic were done, I received an excellent birthday present of tickets for Six Flags New England, to be used during this August vacation I'm on. With the Delta variant on the rise and stories of breakthrough infections all over, the question arose of whether using these tickets was still a good idea. We decided to go ahead, mask up to the extent that we could and stay outdoors, but that only goes so far. I can say that no trace of social distancing was in evidence there, particularly among groups of determinedly goofing teenagers, and almost nobody was wearing masks--some families had them on their too-young-for-vaccination kids, but, eh, there wasn't even much of that. General infection rates are still nowhere near as bad here as in the South or the West, but if the 'rona gets me it will be from the queue for Superman.
I don't necessarily recommend that anyone do what I did.
Those preliminaries over, I have to say that my bucket-list rides here were so good that it almost feels worth it. Six Flags doesn't have the charm of Canobie or Lake Compounce, but it's got the big coasters.
I am fascinated by roller-coaster fandom but I could never be a true coaster enthusiast, the kind who marathons rides--my old body just wouldn't take it. I can generally only work up the nerve to ride a few big coasters in a single park visit. So I was determined to make them count. SFNE has two rides almost universally acclaimed as world-class, and a bunch of others, a couple of which I was curious about. As it shook out, I rode the two and one other, and then went on the bumper cars with my kid. Those three big rides were enough to fill in some of the most yawning gaps in my coaster-riding experience: my first RMC, my first Bolliger & Mabillard (believe it or not), and my first hypercoaster (also believe it or not).
Wicked Cyclone
The Cyclone was a wooden coaster that SFNE put up in 1983 (under its pre-Six-Flags name of Riverside Amusement Park). By the 2010s it had a bad reputation for being unrideably rough, and repeated attempts to fix it had been to no avail. Around that time, Rocky Mountain Construction (who had been involved in the last of those repair attempts) was making a name for itself with an unusual coaster-manufacturing model: they took deteriorating woodies and rebuilt them into wild hybrid coasters with their unusual steel "I-Box" track. The wooden support structure would be based on the existing layout with some modifications--most had inversions! Relatively early in this career, RMC turned the Cyclone into Wicked Cyclone, a Massachusetts name if I ever heard one.
Batman: The Dark Knight
Many Six Flags parks have identical cloned Bolliger & Mabillard inverted coasters (seats below track) that are called something like Batman: The Ride. This is not one of those. Instead, it is a Bolliger & Mabillard floorless coaster. The trains are on top of the track, but they have an open construction, four seats across with no floor underneath you (the floor of the station folds away once the train is ready to go), so your legs are hanging out like on an inverted coaster. To me, the floorless aspect doesn't really make a lot of difference, but it's visually interesting.
This was actually my first B&M, by complicated happenstance. I'd had plenty of chances to ride some at Universal a few years back but felt a bit unwell at the time and did not. B&M was one of the biggest manufacturers of the 1990s-2000s Coaster Wars and they make several varieties of rides, which you can recognize by their distinctive track style with a box-shaped spine (well, it's more complicated than that since Bolliger and Mabillard worked for other companies before they started their own, but this is the gist). I understand this is actually a bit unusual for a B&M floorless looper since it's relatively compact; most are much larger. It has a reputation for having an odd lack of reputation-- people don't talk about it much.
Batman has five inversions, starting with a vertical loop, and they're built to be quite forceful, with strong positive Gs pushing you down in your seat. There is no airtime-- this is all about the inversions and positives, like flying in a fighter jet. I wore my mask on the ride and it was constantly slipping off my nose from the ride's forces, threatening to expose my secret identity. The seats have over-the-shoulder restraints but the transitions are well-designed enough that I didn't experience any headbanging; a shorter person might have more trouble.
It's a solid ride, though it's not quite in the class of the other coasters I rode at SFNE. The best thing about it is that it's one of the few rides at SFNE that has a single-rider line. Go in the exit, follow single-rider signs up the stairs on the right, and the ride ops will wave you into an open seat. I practically walked on; I didn't have to wait five minutes. That's pretty amazing. If I were more hardcore I'd spend a lot of time riding it over and over.
Superman: The Ride
Superman is the big draw of Six Flags New England, the one ride that gets lines so horrible that they might motivate me to buy one of the virtual-queue options next time. The ride is remarkable enough that (pandemic risks aside) the wait is actually worthwhile, but it can be arduous.
Superman is a 200+-foot-tall Intamin hypercoaster. Intamin was B&M's preeminent competitor during the Coaster Wars era, when they had a reputation for pushing the envelope a bit harder than B&M were willing to do, sometimes at the expense of reliability. I've ridden a couple of other Intamins, but they were very different rides (a compact vertical-lift looper and an elaborate family-coaster/dark-ride hybrid).
The coaster visually dominates the park, with its first couple of hills at the riverside looming over almost everything else. Hypercoasters traditionally lack inversions (though there have been exceptions, especially recently) and often have a simple out-and-back layout like many old woodies, scaled up to giant size. Superman is a little more involved. It starts with a 220-foot drop directly into an underground tunnel. After going out over another large hill it turns around and goes back past the station, into a twisty section with a couple of large helixes (you get a good view of these from the queue), then returns from there with a diagonal run of bunny hills (actually rather large--only "bunny" by Superman's colossal standards), to a quite short and sudden brake run at the station.
The seat restraints are pretty similar to Wicked Cyclone's: there's a seat belt and a bulky lap bar, with weird little plates welded to the side supports. I gather the ride originally had a lighter T-bar restraint but this was changed after an accident in which a rider with limited body control fell to his death from the train. As with Wicked Cyclone, the current ones lock you in pretty securely. Enthusiasts complain about the current restraints but I did not find them to be a problem.
Because of the coaster's huge size I expected the forces to be relatively mild and floaty, but this ride actually has a kick to it-- the airtime is sustained ejector, not as intense as Wicked Cyclone's but made impressive by its length. The forces in the twisty section are fairly strong. And since the ride is so huge, there are spectacular visuals everywhere; most of it is pretty high up and you get nice views of the river and the park.
What theming there is consists of simple flat cutouts and Superman-shield rings the track goes through, pretty basic stuff but cute and in keeping with the comic book theme. For a few years it was temporarily renamed "Bizarro" and had onboard audio and some fire effects, but they took those out with the re-theming back to Superman. There are some speakers on the lift hill now that play John Williams' Superman theme as you go up. There was briefly a virtual-reality option that nobody seems to have liked and that slowed down operations, but it's gone.
Superman is my first hyper and I don't have a lot to compare it to. Fans seem to still rate it one of the best hypers, even superior to the other Six Flags hypers named Superman. It was utterly thrilling to me; the hype is real. There is nothing quite like that first gigantic drop on a hyper. That said, I think I might rate Wicked Cyclone slightly higher overall-- it's just so wild and you don't have to go through as much hell to ride it.
I don't necessarily recommend that anyone do what I did.
Those preliminaries over, I have to say that my bucket-list rides here were so good that it almost feels worth it. Six Flags doesn't have the charm of Canobie or Lake Compounce, but it's got the big coasters.
I am fascinated by roller-coaster fandom but I could never be a true coaster enthusiast, the kind who marathons rides--my old body just wouldn't take it. I can generally only work up the nerve to ride a few big coasters in a single park visit. So I was determined to make them count. SFNE has two rides almost universally acclaimed as world-class, and a bunch of others, a couple of which I was curious about. As it shook out, I rode the two and one other, and then went on the bumper cars with my kid. Those three big rides were enough to fill in some of the most yawning gaps in my coaster-riding experience: my first RMC, my first Bolliger & Mabillard (believe it or not), and my first hypercoaster (also believe it or not).
Wicked Cyclone
The Cyclone was a wooden coaster that SFNE put up in 1983 (under its pre-Six-Flags name of Riverside Amusement Park). By the 2010s it had a bad reputation for being unrideably rough, and repeated attempts to fix it had been to no avail. Around that time, Rocky Mountain Construction (who had been involved in the last of those repair attempts) was making a name for itself with an unusual coaster-manufacturing model: they took deteriorating woodies and rebuilt them into wild hybrid coasters with their unusual steel "I-Box" track. The wooden support structure would be based on the existing layout with some modifications--most had inversions! Relatively early in this career, RMC turned the Cyclone into Wicked Cyclone, a Massachusetts name if I ever heard one.
Wicked Cyclone was my first ride at SFNE and it absolutely floored me. They say you never forget your first RMC. This thing is extreme, but not rough--the track is glass-smooth. At 109 feet high, with a relatively compact layout, the ride is not huge by elite-coaster standards. What it has is this absolutely relentless succession of elements designed to give you ejector airtime, that is, negative G-forces giving you the sensation that the coaster is trying to throw you out. Between those are some wild overbanked turns and three inversions, embedded within the wooden ride structure. The second and third are rolls, but the first one is a disorienting "zero-G stall" that seems to be a roll but then reverses midway through.
You're held in pretty securely--I'm sure some coaster freaks would say too securely, but it was fine with me. There are no over-the-shoulder restraints! (This was only the second inverting coaster I've ridden with no OTS restraints--the first was the relatively gentle sooperdooperLooper at Hersheypark.) But there's a lap bar and a seat belt, and when the bar comes down they make you bend your knees far enough that before my knee replacement I might have had trouble with it.
It makes three laps around its layout. Some enthusiasts complain that it often runs out of steam a little in the third lap and feels like it's crawling through the last few elements, but I did not find this to be the case at all. It had a relatively full train and I didn't ride it right after opening--it may have been running unusually good. Or maybe I'm just easily impressed.
Six Flags isn't known for strong theming, but Wicked Cyclone actually has some clever theming around the queue depicting storm damage and disaster rescue equipment. The ride passes over and near the queue in spots.
Batman: The Dark Knight
Many Six Flags parks have identical cloned Bolliger & Mabillard inverted coasters (seats below track) that are called something like Batman: The Ride. This is not one of those. Instead, it is a Bolliger & Mabillard floorless coaster. The trains are on top of the track, but they have an open construction, four seats across with no floor underneath you (the floor of the station folds away once the train is ready to go), so your legs are hanging out like on an inverted coaster. To me, the floorless aspect doesn't really make a lot of difference, but it's visually interesting.
This was actually my first B&M, by complicated happenstance. I'd had plenty of chances to ride some at Universal a few years back but felt a bit unwell at the time and did not. B&M was one of the biggest manufacturers of the 1990s-2000s Coaster Wars and they make several varieties of rides, which you can recognize by their distinctive track style with a box-shaped spine (well, it's more complicated than that since Bolliger and Mabillard worked for other companies before they started their own, but this is the gist). I understand this is actually a bit unusual for a B&M floorless looper since it's relatively compact; most are much larger. It has a reputation for having an odd lack of reputation-- people don't talk about it much.
Batman has five inversions, starting with a vertical loop, and they're built to be quite forceful, with strong positive Gs pushing you down in your seat. There is no airtime-- this is all about the inversions and positives, like flying in a fighter jet. I wore my mask on the ride and it was constantly slipping off my nose from the ride's forces, threatening to expose my secret identity. The seats have over-the-shoulder restraints but the transitions are well-designed enough that I didn't experience any headbanging; a shorter person might have more trouble.
It's a solid ride, though it's not quite in the class of the other coasters I rode at SFNE. The best thing about it is that it's one of the few rides at SFNE that has a single-rider line. Go in the exit, follow single-rider signs up the stairs on the right, and the ride ops will wave you into an open seat. I practically walked on; I didn't have to wait five minutes. That's pretty amazing. If I were more hardcore I'd spend a lot of time riding it over and over.
Superman: The Ride
Superman is the big draw of Six Flags New England, the one ride that gets lines so horrible that they might motivate me to buy one of the virtual-queue options next time. The ride is remarkable enough that (pandemic risks aside) the wait is actually worthwhile, but it can be arduous.
Superman is a 200+-foot-tall Intamin hypercoaster. Intamin was B&M's preeminent competitor during the Coaster Wars era, when they had a reputation for pushing the envelope a bit harder than B&M were willing to do, sometimes at the expense of reliability. I've ridden a couple of other Intamins, but they were very different rides (a compact vertical-lift looper and an elaborate family-coaster/dark-ride hybrid).
The coaster visually dominates the park, with its first couple of hills at the riverside looming over almost everything else. Hypercoasters traditionally lack inversions (though there have been exceptions, especially recently) and often have a simple out-and-back layout like many old woodies, scaled up to giant size. Superman is a little more involved. It starts with a 220-foot drop directly into an underground tunnel. After going out over another large hill it turns around and goes back past the station, into a twisty section with a couple of large helixes (you get a good view of these from the queue), then returns from there with a diagonal run of bunny hills (actually rather large--only "bunny" by Superman's colossal standards), to a quite short and sudden brake run at the station.
The seat restraints are pretty similar to Wicked Cyclone's: there's a seat belt and a bulky lap bar, with weird little plates welded to the side supports. I gather the ride originally had a lighter T-bar restraint but this was changed after an accident in which a rider with limited body control fell to his death from the train. As with Wicked Cyclone, the current ones lock you in pretty securely. Enthusiasts complain about the current restraints but I did not find them to be a problem.
Because of the coaster's huge size I expected the forces to be relatively mild and floaty, but this ride actually has a kick to it-- the airtime is sustained ejector, not as intense as Wicked Cyclone's but made impressive by its length. The forces in the twisty section are fairly strong. And since the ride is so huge, there are spectacular visuals everywhere; most of it is pretty high up and you get nice views of the river and the park.
What theming there is consists of simple flat cutouts and Superman-shield rings the track goes through, pretty basic stuff but cute and in keeping with the comic book theme. For a few years it was temporarily renamed "Bizarro" and had onboard audio and some fire effects, but they took those out with the re-theming back to Superman. There are some speakers on the lift hill now that play John Williams' Superman theme as you go up. There was briefly a virtual-reality option that nobody seems to have liked and that slowed down operations, but it's gone.
Superman is my first hyper and I don't have a lot to compare it to. Fans seem to still rate it one of the best hypers, even superior to the other Six Flags hypers named Superman. It was utterly thrilling to me; the hype is real. There is nothing quite like that first gigantic drop on a hyper. That said, I think I might rate Wicked Cyclone slightly higher overall-- it's just so wild and you don't have to go through as much hell to ride it.