Review: AirCoaster 3D for iPhone/iPod Touch
As the only member of the staff to have an iPod Touch, I bought and downloaded “AirCoaster 3D.” You may be thinking, “That’s really cool! A coaster editor for your iPod!” Well, it’s actually quite lame and is very disappointing.
For starters, all this does is makes a bunch of random track over an impossible enviornment. As you can see above, this is not realistic at all. To create a “ride,” all you do is slide bars left and right to decide how many loops, curves, and turns you want. Pretty lame compared with RCT3 and NoLimits.
The custom track editor is lame too. It’s based off of the premisess of using slider bars to change the height, width, and curve of a section of track. Can you make realistic tracks? You can try, but once you put it in one of it’s silly enviornments, it’s done for.
AirCoaster 3D gets a 2/5 from me. The graphics are great, and this would be a fun app to have it you were stranded on an island. If you’re looking for a portable Roller Coaster Tycoon, you’ll need to wait.
You can buy AirCoaster 3D on iTunes for $0.99 USD.
Mar 21st, 2009 at 8:35 am
Well that’s rather disappointing. I have a iPod touch as well. Good thing I didn’t buy it, thanks for the review and the heads-up.
Mar 23rd, 2009 at 3:53 pm
The way I see it, AirCoaster is about the best roller coaster sim you can get on the iPhone, given its hardware and form factor limitations (it’s a phone for crying out loud). The UI is very different for those who are already familiar with RCT3 and NoLimits, but if you are looking for the high-speed thrills of riding a roller coaster and are not overly fixated on reproducing every aspect of the roller coaster experience, I *highly* recommend AirCoaster.
Mar 24th, 2009 at 10:28 am
I don’t like this review. All you ever seem to want is realism instead diciding if it’s fun or not. Of course it’s not a Roller Coaster Tycoon, but you are forgetting the fact that the ipod is originally made for music. This is probably just a to play when you are bored, it’s not supposed to be ulrta realistic or be as huge as RCT is. Trey K has already stated the limitations of the hardware. It’s a bit sad that you expect so much from a game that costs a dollar.
Apr 1st, 2009 at 11:28 pm
The review is probably true. I cannot imagine a very realistic “Roller-Coaster” Sim game for iPod Touch. The graphics and processor required to make it even look like RCT1 and RCT2 would be astronomical in an iPod Touch, so I would not have very high expectations. Maybe a NoLimits! type game would be possible on the iPod Touch as the PC version is mostly comprised of dragging around track vertices. It is possible to do something like you want, it’s probably more or less an issue of copyright. For example, I downloaded X-Plane 9/10 for my iPod… it was published by Laminar Research which is the original owner of the PC version (own that too)… so for a “Portable RCT3″, Atari and the likes would have to get back together. And that won’t happen anytime soon… unfortunately. In response to smurfkiller: You can have high expectations for a $0.99 game… I DLed the cheapo version of X-Plane (for fun, because I have the full version) and it was above my expectations which were quite high.