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mmcirvinSo there's a lot of controversy going on in the roller-coaster-fan community about the big coaster YouTubers fluffing Six Flags Qiddiya, the massive Saudi Arabian amusement-park project that includes a coaster over 600 feet tall. I don't think I'd participate in that, but I feel a bit sheepish about being too critical, since when all this broke I was, myself, busy having adventures in a country that is no bastion of liberal democracy. I do think it's also difficult for an American to throw stones: I think the current regime in the Republic of Singapore does care more about basic competence and the well-being of its residents (and certainly about maintaining a diverse, tolerant, multi-ethnic culture) than the one currently in federal power here.
That said... we spent a day of our trip on Sentosa, an island south of the main island of Singapore that allegedly used to be a hideout for pirates but today is a massive cluster of resorts. I'd been here before but had not gone to Universal Singapore, the highest-profile park there. My kid was not interested--but this time, she's old enough that she could go off and do other stuff with a friend who had come along.
The Singapore park has a reputation for being the runt of the Universal chain, and it kind of is, but there's plenty of interest there. Unfortunately the park was slammed with crowds, queues got very long and we didn't have a lot of time. At rope drop, we prioritized the things we wanted to ride together, so the waits there were relatively short. The first ride we did was Revenge of the Mummy, an indoor dark-ride/coaster hybrid memorialized by Huang Yongquan here:
I haven't ridden the US versions of Revenge of the Mummy but I understand they have more of a metafictional, fourth-wall-breaking hook, about the set of a fictitious sequel to the Brendan Fraser Mummy being cursed by the actual Mummy. This one is more straightforward: some theorize that it's the story of the movie they were making in the other rides. But I'm not sure it's all that coherent. There are a lot of good scary effects, but it felt like it ended kind of abruptly, as if the actual finale were missing. I suppose I can't complain too much about the plotline of a roller coaster.
It is more of a roller coaster, and less of a pure dark ride, than, say, Escape from Gringotts at Universal Orlando. There's some speed and force in the coaster segments, a brief backwards section and a surprise turntable transition.
Next we did the Jurassic Park Rapids Adventure, a version of the Jurassic Park/World water ride that exists at the other Universal resorts, but, uniquely, this one is a raft ride rather than a flume. Here's XtremeCoasters' POV:
As a raft ride alone this is middling but as a storytelling ride, it's superb. You can guess what happens: it starts out as a majestic ride through dinosaur habitats at Jurassic Park (similar to a real-life water ride we'd ridden at the River Wonders zoo/aquarium earlier in the week!), then things go horribly wrong; the dinosaurs get loose, floodwaters sweep you into a dino-infested "backstage" area where you're not supposed to be, and you end up menaced by an overhead Tyrannosaurus while ascending an elevator lift to the climactic drop.
Finally, despite a brutal 110-minute wait, I just had to try out the park's most thrilling ride, the roller coaster Battlestar Galactica: Cylon. XtremeCoasters again:
This big Vekoma coaster is a bit of a time capsule by now--it went up in 2010 when the revived Battlestar Galactica series was a big deal, and it had two dueling tracks, a non-inverting ride representing the Human side in the conflict and an inverted looper for the Cylons. I only had time to be a Cylon. The long wait was in part because of technical and operations issues: the ride got overhauled in 2013-15, replacing the originally four-across trains with lighter, two-across ones, which reduced capacity but I suspect were needed to reduce structural stresses on the ride. They were also doing metal-detector tests for loose items at the beginning AND end of the queue. I was wondering if they'd detect my metal knee (I am a bit of a Cylon myself) but it wasn't a problem.
The queue, at least, was all indoors and air-conditioned, and had clever shiny-chrome/biomechanical-horror theming and amusing video spiels from Michael Hogan and Tricia Helfer as their characters in the show. And I made friends in the queue: a guy from Pakistan who was there with his daughters and bailed after about half an hour of waiting, and a very nice family who gifted me with a front-seat ride because their kid was too nervous to ride in the front.
After all that, the coaster itself turned out to be really good, way better than I expected! It started with a powerful, fast LSM launch up the lift hill (I'd forgotten it did that so this was a surprise), and the inversions were all as smooth as they were forceful, with a fighter-jet feeling and none of the jank people associate with early Vekoma coasters. One maneuver dipped into a mist-filled trench below ground level. It was interesting to see that the track itself had the "new Vekoma" design they use with their current major coasters--it must have been one of the earliest ones of those.
My spouse saw the "Lights, Camera, Action!" special-effects show, and some roaming performers playing "Waterworld" characters, while I was waiting for this--she enjoyed them a lot. After I was free of this ride, we needed to get lunch somewhere but found, mysteriously, that most of the food joints at the park were closed--the only one available was a counter-service pizza place. Not sure what was going on there.
But we had our pizza, then headed over to the somewhat less slammed Adventure Cove Waterpark, a repeat favorite. The big attraction here is their amazing lazy river, part of which goes through sea-life tanks--here's Theme Park Family World Wide:
Good times, all in all.
That said... we spent a day of our trip on Sentosa, an island south of the main island of Singapore that allegedly used to be a hideout for pirates but today is a massive cluster of resorts. I'd been here before but had not gone to Universal Singapore, the highest-profile park there. My kid was not interested--but this time, she's old enough that she could go off and do other stuff with a friend who had come along.
The Singapore park has a reputation for being the runt of the Universal chain, and it kind of is, but there's plenty of interest there. Unfortunately the park was slammed with crowds, queues got very long and we didn't have a lot of time. At rope drop, we prioritized the things we wanted to ride together, so the waits there were relatively short. The first ride we did was Revenge of the Mummy, an indoor dark-ride/coaster hybrid memorialized by Huang Yongquan here:
I haven't ridden the US versions of Revenge of the Mummy but I understand they have more of a metafictional, fourth-wall-breaking hook, about the set of a fictitious sequel to the Brendan Fraser Mummy being cursed by the actual Mummy. This one is more straightforward: some theorize that it's the story of the movie they were making in the other rides. But I'm not sure it's all that coherent. There are a lot of good scary effects, but it felt like it ended kind of abruptly, as if the actual finale were missing. I suppose I can't complain too much about the plotline of a roller coaster.
It is more of a roller coaster, and less of a pure dark ride, than, say, Escape from Gringotts at Universal Orlando. There's some speed and force in the coaster segments, a brief backwards section and a surprise turntable transition.
Next we did the Jurassic Park Rapids Adventure, a version of the Jurassic Park/World water ride that exists at the other Universal resorts, but, uniquely, this one is a raft ride rather than a flume. Here's XtremeCoasters' POV:
As a raft ride alone this is middling but as a storytelling ride, it's superb. You can guess what happens: it starts out as a majestic ride through dinosaur habitats at Jurassic Park (similar to a real-life water ride we'd ridden at the River Wonders zoo/aquarium earlier in the week!), then things go horribly wrong; the dinosaurs get loose, floodwaters sweep you into a dino-infested "backstage" area where you're not supposed to be, and you end up menaced by an overhead Tyrannosaurus while ascending an elevator lift to the climactic drop.
Finally, despite a brutal 110-minute wait, I just had to try out the park's most thrilling ride, the roller coaster Battlestar Galactica: Cylon. XtremeCoasters again:
This big Vekoma coaster is a bit of a time capsule by now--it went up in 2010 when the revived Battlestar Galactica series was a big deal, and it had two dueling tracks, a non-inverting ride representing the Human side in the conflict and an inverted looper for the Cylons. I only had time to be a Cylon. The long wait was in part because of technical and operations issues: the ride got overhauled in 2013-15, replacing the originally four-across trains with lighter, two-across ones, which reduced capacity but I suspect were needed to reduce structural stresses on the ride. They were also doing metal-detector tests for loose items at the beginning AND end of the queue. I was wondering if they'd detect my metal knee (I am a bit of a Cylon myself) but it wasn't a problem.
The queue, at least, was all indoors and air-conditioned, and had clever shiny-chrome/biomechanical-horror theming and amusing video spiels from Michael Hogan and Tricia Helfer as their characters in the show. And I made friends in the queue: a guy from Pakistan who was there with his daughters and bailed after about half an hour of waiting, and a very nice family who gifted me with a front-seat ride because their kid was too nervous to ride in the front.
After all that, the coaster itself turned out to be really good, way better than I expected! It started with a powerful, fast LSM launch up the lift hill (I'd forgotten it did that so this was a surprise), and the inversions were all as smooth as they were forceful, with a fighter-jet feeling and none of the jank people associate with early Vekoma coasters. One maneuver dipped into a mist-filled trench below ground level. It was interesting to see that the track itself had the "new Vekoma" design they use with their current major coasters--it must have been one of the earliest ones of those.
My spouse saw the "Lights, Camera, Action!" special-effects show, and some roaming performers playing "Waterworld" characters, while I was waiting for this--she enjoyed them a lot. After I was free of this ride, we needed to get lunch somewhere but found, mysteriously, that most of the food joints at the park were closed--the only one available was a counter-service pizza place. Not sure what was going on there.
But we had our pizza, then headed over to the somewhat less slammed Adventure Cove Waterpark, a repeat favorite. The big attraction here is their amazing lazy river, part of which goes through sea-life tanks--here's Theme Park Family World Wide:
Good times, all in all.
no subject
Date: 2026-01-10 07:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-10 07:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-11 05:42 am (UTC)I was at Orlando around '95, IIRC, for a Microsoft TechEd conference, and we were staying not far from the Universal park. We got there early enough before the conference started that we went there to putz about and I remember seeing the show, but my only real memory is people racing around on Jet Skis and water geysers. But in '95, the movie was much more current, albeit still a big commercial flop.
no subject
Date: 2026-01-11 03:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-11 08:16 pm (UTC)It's weird how Asia et al sometimes gloms onto movies that a lot of the rest of the world consider to be bombs. Different strokes.