D'oh... looks like my computer's too out of date to run it. It says that my graphics card doesn't support it. Oh well. No NL2 for me... I can't afford a new computer, so I'm SOL.

Wow... I can't believe that I've been on this site for 11 years now. Thanks for making me feel old, Oscar. :p

Does this mean that we can call you WWS again until the new site is up?

Originally posted by AJClarke0912 Wow that helps a ton cjd, thanks a lot for that post. That was precisely what I was hoping for. Do you perhaps have a "cliff-notes" for 2005-2008 and 2009-2013? I know it'd involve a lot of work but it'd be super cool. I have a list of coasters I want to feature bu...

As someone who's been here since the very beginning, and who kept track of the medals for years and ran the contests for years, I'm just full of memories from the very earliest days... what the trends were, and what types of coasters got the best scores. Here's my memory of the building styles and c...

I'm honestly not that impressed. There is not a SINGLE "small" element on this coaster. Every single one of the inversions is about speed and height. There are bound to be some decent g-forces in the first couple of inversions, but the rest of the ride just doesn't have that quick "snap" that makes ...

Well, you probably won't be seeing much of me around anymore. I'm not leaving, but a major life change has kept me completely 100% booked for the last 7 months or so, which I won't get into. And although I still love riding coasters, I've just lost the motivation to build them anymore. Too much work...

Originally posted by CKidd i kind of liked the coaster wars idea personally. There was a rather large turn out for that one I think Thanks... that was probably my favorite contest that I ever came up with in terms of concept and execution. With that said, though, my days of contest-hosting are prob...

Holy hell, that is one twisted knot of track!

Ever since making my post yesterday, I decided to look into this further. And the more I look into it, the more I'm convinced that this is indeed the case. I just looked at a study of which regions of America have the highest rates of assault deaths per capita. And the region of America which has th...

I know this may sound weird coming from me, a Christian, but I honestly think it's because of our country's religious base that this keeps happening. Our religious system represses people. Our entire country is full of "morality police" who are constantly yelling at people about all the things they ...

Pretty much the same reason why I don't design anymore. It's really hard to spend so much time working on something only to have it ignored. And let's face it, with so much focus on the nitpicky little details of realism recently, it takes a LOT of effort to make a good coaster nowadays, and this ef...

Wow, the physics in that video are absolutely atrocious. It looks like after every single launch there are -4g brakes, and then the rest of the ride is powered-through at about 20 mph. Hard to tell whether the ride will really be great or not without any sensation of speed or pacing.

I did get the chance to ride the Space Spiral many times, and when I was a kid I thought it was the coolest thing ever because you got to go even higher than the roller coasters. So I guess the sentimental side of me is a bit sad to see it go. But on the other hand, Gatekeeper looks really awesome, ...

I personally like the look of the classic MF-style supports, but really in the end it just comes down to a matter of personal opinion on your part. If you really want to go for accuracy, then look at the layout. If it's more about big hills and has overbanked turns, then probably MF-style supports w...

I had a bunch of ideas, and was going to do a whole park section themed around weather, but it took too long to materialize. By the end, all I had was a bunch of thunderstorm clouds, one rainbow-colored giga-coaster, and half of a woodie that was supposed to look like a tornado. Oh, well, I suck at ...

Originally posted by Tetsu I think next time around we should try to build "parks" for the whole family. IE: A few big scary coaster, 1 or 2 family ones, and 1 kiddie coaster. Maybe throw some waterslids in the mix to. I'm kind of tired of this recent shift toward focusing on over-realism myself. I...

Looks like they'll be restoring the full original height of the first drop, plus now it'll be at an 81-degree angle to boot. Forget the rest of the ride, that in itself is worth it. I don't go "wow" when looking at coasters a lot anymore, but that drop did. It looks completely insane.

At this point, I have to ask: does Six Flags Magic Mountain really need another new coaster? This will be like the 5th that they've opened in the last 3 years. At some point, I really think you're crossing a critical line where attendance isn't going to go up any more no matter what you build.

UPDATE: Isaac has finally made it to hurricane status. Reconnaissance aircraft finally found a surface wind of 75 mph at about 12:19 this afternoon. It's about damned time. This morning, the pressure was all the way down to 976 mb, typical of a category-2 hurricane, but it was still a tropical storm...

Somehow, despite the central pressure dropping by another 10 millibars to 979 mb, a pressure usually associated with weak category-2 or strong category-1 hurricanes, Isaac is still a tropical storm. The storm's still having too many organizational problems for it to intensify significantly before la...

<s>Right now, Isaac has a bit of a center organization problem... wind shear of about 10-20 kts from the south has displaced the storm's surface center from its mid-level center, which is going to make intensification a bit more difficult since it can't efficiently transfer the ocean's heat energy t...

The thing that most people are scared of is the lack of control... that once they sit down in that car, there is nothing they can do. They are going to go really high, they are going to go really fast, they are going to go upside-down, something might go wrong, it might hurt, and there is absolutely...

It looks weak compared to other B&M hypers. The drop isn't as steep, the turns aren't as sharp, and I can tell that there's a serious lack of positive g's compared to, say, "Nitro." Plus the layout really isn't very interesting. And I'm not much of a fan of B&M hypers as it is, so I can see where pe...

All right, cool. Got it working, and I like the template. Classic contest style here. Maybe this will motivate me to actually finish a coaster for a change.

I'd gladly compete in this if the judging criteria weren't so downright obnoxious. There's no category for shaping, and 50% of the freaking rating is on useless things like e-stop and rider capacity, which are things that have absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the ride. No shaping categor...