TheThemeParkGuy

Wet’n Wild boasts the most thrilling and mad water slides in all of Florida. ‘The Bomb Bay’, ‘Brain Wash’ and ‘The Storm’ will make your sister cry, your father scream and your mother faint. A unique feature is the use of ominous music in the slides to prepare you for the drops, turns and spins. This water park won’t please the fans of themed surroundings, but it’s the perfect home for thrill seekers. ...

While it is the least beautiful of the existing Universal Studios parks, this is truly a world-class theme park and a must-see when you visit Orlando for your thrill ride dose. 'Revenge of the Mummy' is the park’s highlight, a well-themed, fast and surprising dark ride/ghost train/roller coaster-mix, different and superior to its Los Angeles version. Equally excellent is 'Jaws', a boat ride through Amity Village with a panicking skipper on board fending off...

This is the only Universal theme park in the world which doesn't have the 'studio' theme. It's a great adventure-themed park featuring some of the world’s best and most thrilling attractions.
You'll enjoy the 'Jurassic Park' flume ride, beautifully integrated into a jungle setting instead of a studio surrounding, featuring caves, primeval forests, swampland with dinosaur animatronics and John Williams’ film music. At the climax you’ll face a...

What a wave, what a crazy wave! The first time I saw it coming and it crashed over me I thought: 'Does this conform to Disney’s safety standards? Someone must be getting hurt, people must be bumping into each other!” I looked around. Everybody ok. Uh-oh, next wave. Rumble, rumble, rolling rumble... yikes, mothers and children behind me... and here's another face-slapping crash-splash! Bobbing up, scanning the crowd: again, everyone’s happy. No one’s...

Aquatica by SeaWorld is the newest and unfortunately least enjoyable of the Orlando water parks. Disney's two parks have much more style - and similar or more thrills - and Wet’n Wild has more thrills. Its 'Polynesian' design leaves the impression that a kid put 100 little colored chunks of wood together at random. The park's trademark tunnel slide Dolphin Plunge doesn’t really work: you slide with such velocity that for the second or two you’re in the...

While not the best in Walt Disney World, Disney’s Hollywood Studios is still the world-class theme park you would expect. These are the unmissables: • 'The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror' free fall ride is the best of its kind: the dropping elevator doesn’t just plunge you straight down, it takes you a bit around the hotel as well, which makes the Tower experience less predictable and more 3-dimensional. An absolute must. This Tower of Terror was Disney's...

Here are two reasons why Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom is not the best Disneyland park in the world: 1) Access: the carpark is a one-mile walk and boat/monorail ride away from the park's entrance. This takes a lot of time and energy and creates a bottleneck, especially when the park is busy. 2) It's not as original as Disneyland California, not as beautiful as Disneyland Paris and not as attraction-packed as Tokyo Disneyland. If you make it to Walt Disney World, visit...

This is the original Disneyland, created by legend and entrepreneurial mastermind Walt Disney himself, inaugurated in 1955 in Anaheim, south of Los Angeles.
Many of the attractions have now been updated or replaced, but the original tiny castle is still there, the tiniest of all the Disney castles (except for its Hong Kong Disneyland copy). Unfortunately, the vast, picturesque orange farms once surrounding the park have been turned into a quite unpleasant...

Disney’s California Adventure is a rather underrated theme park. Some critics say it’s the worst park in Disney’s history. True, the overall design of the park isn’t that good considering Disney’s standards: California Adventure lacks a centre, a landmark, and has a very unfortunate shape which divides the park into two halves.
However, there’s a major revamp addressing the park’s design and a very promising new...

This is the original. The one and only Universal Studios Hollywood, the place where movie history was, and still is, made. The incredible Steven Spielberg has his office here, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer run Imagine Entertainment from the backlots, Robert Zemeckis and Alfred Hitchcock worked in the studios. Movies like ‘Back to the Future’, ‘Indiana Jones’, ‘War of the Worlds’ and ‘Apollo 13’ were all partially shot on these...

Good Disney water park with a snow storm-theme: great when you arrive in Florida on a hot and humid summer day, not so great when you arrive on a chilly winter day. Brrr.
There are two monstrously fast and steep slides starting from a fake ski jump on top of the park's centerpiece mountain structure. 'Summit Plummet' is so frighteningly steep that I was clenching my teeth while thundering down. Some of the potential sliders in the queue looked like they were about...

Epcot is an incredibly unique member of the Disney theme park family and I would call it Disney's second best in North America. Opened in 1982, its 'futuristic' design is a bit timeworn but inside the decades-old structures you will be amazed by genuinely state-of-the-art crackerjack rides. Not to forget the best world exhibition ever, which awaits you after! 'Test Track' is Epcot's best attraction and exclusive to the park. Your ride vehicle speeds, brakes and moves again,...

This is really a park for kids and their parents. There are no thrills (except maybe 'Test Track', the park's major roller coaster) and no surprises: everything is sweet and child-compliant. Unfortunately, there are no mentionable innovations either: Legoland has an Egyptian-themed ride in Indiana Jones style, a Jungle Cruise with LEGO elephants and a castle roller coaster featuring LEGO animatronics that look even less life-like than your lego figures back home. Yet, it is...

The Six Flags brand usually stands for roller coaster farms, but the chicken in the henhouse was laying a SeaWorld egg and a mixture of coaster paradise and zoo was hatched.
Set in the beautiful hills of the Northern San Francisco Bay area (half an hour drive from the city), it easily beats its competitor in the south, 'California’s Great America', which by comparison lacks design, beauty and attention to detail. Five major roller coasters deliver the...

I was really disappointed when I visited SeaWorld San Diego the first time. This is the original Sea World! It is supposed to look awesome, isn’t it? Well, it doesn't. The marine theme park is located in a quite neglected stretch of land: no landscaped access road, no inviting atmosphere, no music - it is in the middle of “nowhere”. Inside the park you will feel like you are nowhere as well. There is no architecturally appealing design to the buildings and...

Discovery Cove is less of a water park and more of an interactive aquatic zoo experience. Stingrays are there to touch, exotic birds to feed, dolphins to ride. The latter is the highlight of the park, the so called 'Dolphin Swim Experience', and is a real joy. It feels quite intimate being in groups of around ten in the water with these amazing animals as they wave, splash and shake their fins at you before taking each participant on a quick, invigorating ride through the...

Animal Kingdom is the best Disney park in North America, containing unique thrill rides, a drive-through safari and terrific landscaping. I love strolling around it: its dense jungle and perfect cocktail of rides make for the best possible theme park experience. 'Expedition Everest', opened in 2006, is a colossal, fast and surprising backwards-and-forwards roller coaster careering through a Himalayan landscape in search of the yeti. With stops, thrills and a stunningly...

Every time I think back to this water park, I remember and say to myself: “Hey, that was the water park that closed at 3:30pm”. It’s true! It was April in Hawaii and the one and only Hawaiian water park closed at 3:30pm! 5pm would be an early closure, 4pm would be an untimely engine stall, but 3:30pm? I witnessed people arriving at the park's gate at 2pm, only to find the staff getting ready for supper.
Nevertheless, Hawaiian Waters is worth a...

The Orlando version of Anheuser-Busch's SeaWorld is superior to its San Diego cousin. Better and more rides, neat landscaping and its satellite water parks Aquatica and Discovery Cove make for an interesting marine theme park experience. The world-famous killer whale show 'Believe' marks the highlight of the park with its outstanding orca whale and trainer performances (not to be forgotten: the brave fish, which are getting fed to the whales for performing the stunts)...

Las Vegas once hosted a Wet'n Wild water park, a MGM theme park, a Star Trek ride at the Hilton and an IMAX flight simulator at the Luxor. They are all gone. Remains of its theme-parky past are the Stratosphere Tower with its three very good thrill rides on top (all playing with your fear of falling over the edge), a wild launch coaster at the Sahara (fun!), the yellow roller coaster at New York, New York (looks better than it is), an indoor theme park called...

While you're hurtling down the water slides at Atlantis The Palm in Dubai, Caribbean Bay in South Korea or Aquatica by SeaWorld in Florida, you're probably too busy screaming to wonder which Bermuda-short wearing geniuses designed and built those funnels of slippery thrills. Well, you certainly wouldn't picture them making their home next to the snow-covered pines of Canada's Rocky Mountains! But it is in the unlikely town of Kelowna, BC, that WhiteWater West's slide...

'The Wizarding World of Harry Potter' is a section within the existing Universal's Islands of Adventure theme park in Florida. There will be a winterly-themed Potter-esque village boasting charmingly crooked Hogsmeade architecture and two overhauled 11-year-old roller coasters, but the true monster of a new theme park attraction awaits inside the castle: I am really keen to see what the Universal Creative teams have conjured up with the Harry Potter signature attraction...

I really like Splendid China. In China's Shenzhen, next door to Window of the World, it is fully operational and showcases Chinese miniature landmarks amongst well-groomed and beautiful gardens. The Florida version, inaugurated in 1993 and co-owned by the Chinese government, wasn't lucky with visitor numbers and closed for good in 2003. Since then, the abandoned property has played host to invading burglars, skaters and vandals and the remaining miniatures models and...

Cedar Point is a 100-year old fun fair that turned into a wholeheartedly American suburban coaster jungle. It is so spread out and boasts so many coasters that it's a struggle to make it round the park in one day. There are hanging coasters, racing coasters, dueling coasters, even standing coasters (imagine approaching a loop while standing!), catering to all ages, though pubescent teens are well overrepresented. The park contains some of the highest and wildest coasters I...