Matt McIrvin's Freaky Alternate Reality

Lots of people I know have been streaming onto Bluesky. My main venue for public microblogging has been my Mastodon account at mathstodon.xyz/@mattmcirvin for a while, but I have now given it a Bluesky mirror at mattmcirvin.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy, and Bluesky folk should be able to follow me there. There is not a lot there yet since it just started mirroring. We'll see how well this works.

Bruce Artwick of subLogic became known for a simple flight simulator for the Apple II and TRS-80 Model 1. After he wrote the vastly more powerful Microsoft Flight Simulator for IBM-compatibles, he backported those new features to an impressive new version for the Apple II called Flight Simulator II, which he sold through his own company.

They then ported that to other 8-bit platforms, including Atari. I never actually had this as a teenager but I remember being impressed by the magazine ads for it--it was clearly basically Microsoft Flight Simulator, which I liked to play on my dad's Compaq, but for Atari? Amazing! It didn't seem to get a lot of attention, though, mostly because it was subject to the limitations of Atari's hardware. It also required 48k of RAM, and I think primarily shipped on floppy disk, which in the early years meant that only the more well-heeled users could play it. (Years later I bought the much better Atari ST version.)

Atari, though, eventually put FSII for 8-bits out on ROM cartridge as, I think, the pack-in with the keyboard bundle of the XE Game System, their very late second attempt to rework the 8-bit computer platform into a game console. Out of curiosity I recently gave it a try. It looks, yeah, pretty much like the first version of Microsoft Flight Simulator:



(I tried to do some clever stretching of the image to approximate the slightly non-square pixels that an actual CRT television connected to an Atari would have given you, but that doesn't seem to have worked. Anyway.)

It plays like Microsoft Flight Simulator, too, except that the Atari was even more CPU-bound than the original IBM PC so the best it can ever manage for the changing 3D perspective view from the plane is about 1 FPS. That makes FSII very difficult to play. It's a game of tiny touchy adjustments, best played with the keyboard. It actually is bound to the joystick, but since the Atari joystick was functionally a digital d-pad, all it could do was nudge the virtual yoke like a keypress, and you got more precision with the keyboard doing that.

One theoretical difference from MSFS 1.0 is that the civilian light plane being simulated is allegedly different: the early versions of MSFS (and some versions of FSII) all claimed their default plane was a Cessna 182, but here, it's a Piper Archer. I don't know why or if that actually makes any difference to the flight model.

Actually, the colors above are the ones you would have seen on the original Atari 400/800. By the time it came out for the XE Game System, the colors in the bottom half would have looked a bit different--I think it would have been something like this:



I'm not 100% sure that's right. It was different, anyway.

But that's because the bottom half of the screen is actually in the monohrome high-res mode and using composite artifacting to produce its colors (like many things ported from the Apple II to the Ataris), and those colors were notoriously fickle, reversing when Atari went from the CTIA to the more advanced GTIA video output chip and then changing again in the XL/XE series. That's because they depend sensitively on the sub-pixel phase of the video signal, as I explained in this old post about artifacting on CRT televisions and composite monitors.

The top half, though, is not in that mode; it's in an actual 4-color mode, I think the one that Atari BASIC nerds colloquially called "GRAPHICS 7 and a half". So its colors were more stable between hardware revisions. Atari's ANTIC chip implemented a simple display list that allowed mixing modes in horizontal bands like this. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Flight Simulator was making use of it.

Regardless, I get the impression that this port was not well-loved, because the sluggishness of it even compared to Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0 was a problem. Keep in mind, Atari owners were accustomed to the glass-smooth animation in more arcade-style games like Star Raiders, though the "serious simulation" aspect of this could excuse a lot to a person in a certain frame of mind. On an emulator, of course, you can remove the historically accurate speed limiter and play it at a higher frame rate that actually makes it fun, and since FSII's engine is not using the CPU for timing, it's still playable!

Still, the Atari ST version was much better, blessed with an 8 MHz 68000 to run the engine, and mouse-yoke support to make control a bit less painful.

In my first burst of posts about flight simulators several years ago, I noted that the Easter egg flight simulator in Google Earth Pro tried to support game controllers, but didn't work well enough to be usable with them (it was an addendum to the post on X-Plane 11, which handles them with no trouble, though I did mess with the settings quite a bit there to make it work like I liked--back then, I think I was using an XBox One or XBox 360 controller hooked up through USB, rather than the slightly less ancient Bluetooth PS4 DualShock I'm using now).

Well, now it doesn't work at all. When I launch it on my current machine, going into the flight simulator mode with a controller active offers a "Joystick enabled" box that is checked by default, but if you leave that on, the simulation just crashes. Probably just as well, since it never centered correctly, which made joystick control basically unusable.

OK, I had also forgotten how much fun it is to have a proper game controller connected to your computer. For flight simulation, it's not a geeky realistic flight control but it's miles better than using the mouse to control an imaginary yoke.

Our XBoxes are so old that the wireless controllers for them aren't standard Bluetooth devices and I was wary of once again installing the increasingly sketchy third-party drivers to use them. But our PlayStation 4's Dual Shock controllers are just standard Bluetooth devices, and pairing one was not difficult at all. (Its battery was dead, to begin with, but it also works wired up through its old USB Micro port to my USB dongle, which charges the battery.)

X-Plane makes interesting default assumptions that I don't think are good for me: it maps one stick to roll/pitch and the other to the throttle up/down. I guess that makes some sense IF you have a separate pedal controller for the rudders, which I don't.

I mapped the left stick to the rudder, in lieu of pedals, and the right to the yoke. Up and down on the D-pad became throttle controls, and then the other buttons on the controller face became trim controls corresponding to the stick nearest them--because actually having a centering stick makes you appreciate what trim is for in a real aircraft; you want those. Suddenly it's possible to get your plane properly trimmed and leave it in very stable flight. Also, having separate rudder and pedal controls teaches you what the turn coordinator/slip-skid indicator is for. And if the mouse isn't controlling the yoke, it can be used to manipulate the other cockpit controls if you don't necessarily know the key commands (if any) that are mapped to them.

I guess the shoulder and fire buttons could be weapons controls for the fighter planes. Thought about mapping flaps to something but the keyboard is good enough for that.

It Just Works with the Stella Atari 2600 emulator, too, though the default mappings follow post-Nintendo game controller norms: your left thumb is operating the joystick and the fire button is X. That's not very Atari, is it? Maybe for a truer experience I should have the joystick control over on the right and the fire button at the upper left.

Funtown Splashtown up near Portland, Maine is the most major amusement park in New England that I hadn't yet been to (I have also not had the pleasure of visiting Santa's Village or Quassy), but my sister-in-law gave us tickets to there for my birthday. Sam and I finally used them last weekend, with the end of the season looming. We had a great time.

Coincidentally, the illustrious YouTuber Canobie Coaster just got back there and got some fresh POVs, so I can do my usual lazy thing of illustrating with other people's video.

Funtown Splashtown is, as the name implies, a dry amusement park joined to a waterpark; I'd say it's about the size of Canobie Lake Park except that relative to Canobie, it has less Funtown and more Splashtown. For today's amusement market, that's a sensible balance--you want a lot of waterpark. Crowds were very light on the dry side today but there was still a substantial wait for some of the waterslides, which always have pretty low capacity and relatively high demand.

Sam is more of a waterpark person so she spent most of her time on that side, whereas I mostly sampled the non-waterpark rides. But the one ride we did together, at the beginning and end of the day, was Funtown's spectacular new addition, a shooting dark ride called either Haunted Hotel (according to signs and promos) or Whispering Pines Hotel (on park maps and the ride itself). At any rate, the Whispering Pines Hotel is definitely haunted:



There's some lore about a witch's curse and an otherworldly realm with the hilarious name of "Dimension Dark X", delivered by a well-done animatronic in the queue. Your job is to shoot at clusters of purple LEDs representing the curse, or something, while all sorts of spooky manifestations appear. It's not a long ride, but everything looks really impressive for a ride at a park like this--it's easily the best dark ride in the region. I did find that scoring high required enough concentration that I ended up missing some of the effects, but that just encouraged re-rides. Later in the afternoon, the ride was an absolute walk-on (it seems to have good capacity), so this was pretty easy.

The horror in this ride is pitched at about the "Goosebumps" level, nothing too disturbing or gory, so it's pretty family-friendly but still scary enough that older kids will find it worth doing. A good call by the park all around.

But, of course, the ride I was itching to ride was the park's signature coaster, Excalibur:



This is an impressively big CCI wooden coaster from 1998 with a twister layout that mixes good drops and strong laterals, tucked away in the back next to the parking lot. You get there via the lightly themed "Camelot Bridge" that passes through a beautiful wooded area and over a stream--it feels like you're leaving the park entirely, a great touch. The station is themed like a castle and the train cars are labeled with the names of the Knights of the Round Table. It's not, you know, Disney, but it's some really great presentation for a small amusement park.

There are separate lines for the front row, back row (for the connoisseurs), and for all other rows. It's one-train operations and not particularly fast ones, but on the day I visited, this was not a big problem--the ride had more than enough capacity to keep the lines short. The ops were letting people get back on for re-rides, which is something I hardly ever see these days.

And this thing is running like a dream--honestly I was surprised and impressed; it's not so smooth that it doesn't feel like a wooden coaster, but there is no real rattle or buffeting. Apparently, this ride has been blessed with Gravity Group's pre-cut replacement track, which explains why it's tracking so well. This may be the best wooden coaster in New England at the present time, and in a field that includes Boulder Dash and Roar-O-Saurus, this is saying something.

(The park has a second coaster, a Wild Mouse that I actually could not ride, at least not without dragooning some random passerby into riding with me, because they were not allowing single riders and Sam definitely wasn't going on it. It didn't look like a big loss.)

After my first ride on Excalibur, I hit the park's flume, Thunder Falls. I don't have a good/legal POV of this, but here's someone's off-ride footage of the big splash:



This is billed as New England's tallest flume, and it probably is, though I don't know exactly how tall it is. I'd guess it's somewhere in the 60-foot range. After the splash, there are some coin-operated water cannons that people can use to shoot water at you when you're returning to the station, but nobody did that to me.

The other big must-ride I hit, and apparently one of Funtown's most famous rides, was the Astrosphere. Canobie Coaster just posted his POV of this one a couple of hours ago, which spurred me to write this article now. A content warning: this video does have a lot of flashing strobe lights:



Yeah, it's a Scrambler, running pretty fast in a dark dome with projected images, lasers, fog, disco lights and the sound system blasting ELO's "Fire On High." This is a great phantasmagoric experience but the ride is basically "Very Strong Laterals: The Ride" and it ultimately gave me a headache.

Canobie Lake Park has a ride along these lines called the Psychodrome, and in all my years going to Canobie I've actually never ridden it, but I ought to just to say I did it once. I think the show/music is different. These rides aren't really my cup of tea, though my sister loves them and always has. Anyway, Funtown's Astrosphere is reputed to be one of the best, so I couldn't pass it up.

It is quite a low-capacity ride, so it had one of the longer waits in Funtown. There were also quite elaborate safety spiels on the way in, some of the most involved ones I've heard for a ride. I suspect these are the result of some accidents that have happened in the past with these rides, most often involving the ride starting up when someone is standing in the way in the dark enclosure. They were being very very careful, it seemed to me.

All in all, a great day out. Even though Funtown Splashtown is a small park, there's quite a bit there I didn't get to that I'd like to do on a later visit: some of the waterslides (particularly the family raft slide), the bumper cars and bumper boats, maybe the go-karts which are actually included with park admission. There's also a truly enormous drop tower; I have not gotten into drop towers but who knows, I might someday.

We just got back from a ten-day trip to Japan, divided between Tokyo and Osaka. As a theme-park fan, one of the highlights of this trip for me was a one-day visit to Tokyo DisneySea, a park sometimes described as the best theme park in the world.

I can't say for sure that it is, but it is an astonishing place. As a Disney park, it's obviously not geared to thrill-seekers, though there are some rides with a thrill component there. It does have some of the most extravagant immersive theming I've ever seen, outstanding even by Disney-park standards.

That's probably because the Tokyo Disney resort has an unusual corporate status: while it appears in every way to be a Disney resort, Disney doesn't own or operate it. They just hire out Imagineering and license their IP under contract. It's owned and managed by OLC, a Japanese company whose largest owner is the Keisei railway, an operator of a number of rail lines including the Skyliner airport shuttle. OLC's sole job is basically running the Tokyo Disney resort, and its pockets are apparently deep. It's not competing with all of Disney's other cost centers and it's insulated from Disney's sometimes dunderheaded recent management decisions. What you see there is what you get when the ideas Disney Imagineering comes up with actually get fully funded.

The resort has your basic Disney resort setup: a bunch of hotels, a free-admission shopping area, and two large theme parks (Disneyland and DisneySea), all connected by a themed monorail. Unlike the Walt Disney World one, the Tokyo monorail is not free and has tickets and fare gates like any Japanese rail line, but fares are reasonable and you can get unlimited day passes.

Tokyo Disneyland is the classic Disney "castle park", closely patterned after Orlando's Magic Kingdom. I've heard great things about it--my sense is that it's a superior version--but we didn't go there. We'd allotted Disney one day out of our Japanese vacation and we wanted an experience you can't get anywhere else.

Tokyo DisneySea has its roots in a failed project to build a second California Disney park at Long Beach, as part of a development around the Queen Mary called Port Disney. That didn't happen, but many of the ideas ended up in Tokyo. There's even a replica ocean liner at one end of the park, the "S.S. Columbia", resembling the Queen Mary and containing a restaurant. The areas of the park all have port and sea-related themes, a couple of which are American: there's an "American Waterfront" which is themed after New York City in the early 20th century, and "Cape Cod", which is generally Massachusetts (there's a hilarious statue of Mickey Mouse as the Gloucester Fisherman, who is not on Cape Cod but I'm not going to quibble). So now I've been to Disney's Florida version of Japan and their Japanese version of Massachusetts. The theming is well-done and, as Sam noted, extends to planting vegetation approximating the various regions of the world.

Probably the biggest area is generally Italy-themed, with aspects of Venice and Florence. One of the most charming rides is just a Venetian-style gondola ride on a real boat with a real gondolier, who banters with riders (in Japanese, but I could appreciate the atmosphere at least). I found it more pleasant there than in the actual Venice, but that was probably more down to the season than anything else. Here's Michael Mastrile's video with a POV:



By freakish coincidence, the best day to go on our itinerary happened to be the opening day of a new large expansion called Fantasy Springs, a sort of second Fantasyland with attractions themed after Frozen, Tangled and Peter Pan. Access to Fantasy Springs was only possible with a special pass, and we decided to just not bother with it--the whole park was new to us, and Fantasy Springs would probably be jammed with people. This turned out to be a stroke of brilliance. Crowds at the rest of the park were quite light and even standby lines for the very biggest rides were not running over 40-60 minutes.

On top of that, we had some good luck: some English-speaking tourists who were visiting on some kind of resort package, and happened to be leaving early, gave us ride tickets that allowed us to use the local equivalent of a Fastpass or Lightning Lane queue (I forget the name) for a selection of rides, including Indiana Jones and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Were they supposed to do that? I don't think so. Were we going to pass up that windfall? Also no.

We went on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea twice, because we liked it so much and it was a mild ride we could all enjoy. It's one of the rides in the park's centerpiece area, Mysterious Island, which is Jules Verne-themed and built around an enormous fake volcano, Mount Prometheus. 20,000 Leagues seems to get some shade because of misplaced expectations: people seemingly expect it to be a major thrill ride and it's not. Instead, it's a suspended dark ride inspired by Submarine Voyage, but with only simulated submarine action. I think theme parks need these kinds of rides and they're a good complement to the more thrilling ones. You ride in submarine-themed ride vehicles that ride under the track, looking through large bulging portholes with bubbling fluid effects embedded inside of them, simulating passage in and out of the water and giving the ride an underwater appearance. We fight a giant squid with electricity, witness shipwrecks and underwater creatures and ultimately visit a strange Atlantean civilization (the book had Atlantis, but not living Atlanteans!) There's some kind of audio narrative that, like all of the rides here, is mostly in Japanese, but I didn't get the sense I was missing much by not understanding it. Here's LMG Vids:



Depending on where you sit, you may be looking out the front or side windows of the vehicle. The best view is from the front, but there are animatronics and figures in the scenery that are designed to be seen mainly from the side portholes, which adds to the re-rideability.

The tickets didn't get me into my #1 bucket-list ride, Journey to the Center of the Earth, so I had to do the full standby queue there. My wife and kid took one look at the ride's one visible moment (when the vehicles pop into the open near the top of Mount Prometheus, then plunge into the climactic, roller-coaster-like drop) and noped out of riding. So I went solo. The queue is entertaining, though, all indoors in a simulated cave with lots of steampunk scientific bric-a-brac and illustrations of the wonders to come, with English text.

Aside from some general flavor, the narrative here has almost nothing to do with Jules Verne's novel of the same name: in the ride continuity, Captain Nemo has been running a side project from his volcano base to burrow into the Earth with tunneling mole vehicles (more like Edgar Rice Burroughs' "At The Earth's Core"), and is now equipped to give you a tour of his discoveries. The ride system is the same one used in Epcot's Test Track or Disney California Adventure's Radiator Springs Racers. The vehicles are powered slot cars, actually running on bogies hidden under the visible floor, and the ride is divided into a dark-ride section and a fast-moving thrill-ride finale. In the dark ride, we wind through subterranean caverns with glowing crystals and mysterious fungi and other creatures, then encounter an animatronic lava monster like a giant segmented arthropod. That leads directly into the thrill-ride section: instead of Test Track's straight launch followed by curves, the ride vehicle is blasted up a fast spiral ramp (with strong lateral forces), then emerges into the open for an instant and plunges back into the darkness in the ride's final drop. It's an impressive ride with some mild thrills, nothing too extreme, but enough that my family didn't want to ride it. Here, again, is LMG Vids:



The last real thrill ride we rode was DisneySea's version of the Indiana Jones ride, which also exists at some of the other Disney parks. At Animal Kingdom, its counterpart is Dinosaur, a ride with a time-travel and dinosaur theme, but apparently that's going to be rethemed into yet another Indiana Jones variant. Anyway, Tokyo's is "Temple of the Crystal Skull." In these rides, you're in a ride vehicle that is also basically using the Test Track system, except that the vehicles also have a simulator motion bed that allows them to tilt and jostle around, simulating a jeep moving over rough terrain. You progress through a spooky temple with various traps and supernatural goings-on, occasionally encountering an animatronic of Indiana Jones, who urges you on through the ride while he tries to extricate himself from whatever trap he's fallen into. In this case, it's all full of angry skulls and skeletons (Attractions 360 video):



This was just a great ride. I rode it with Sam and I was worried that it might be too much for her, but she loved it. The physical thrills aren't on the roller-coaster level and it really puts on a show.

I did not get any creds, as the coaster enthusiasts say, at this park: the one large coaster here, Raging Spirits, is reputed to not be very good, and given that I preferred to hang with my family riding milder rides. But while I was off riding other things, my wife and kid did get rides on Flounder's Flying Fish Coaster, in the park's particularly gorgeous Little Mermaid-themed area:

Having re-read both Arthur C. Clarke's novel of 2001: A Space Odyssey and its 1980s sequel 2010: Odyssey Two last year, I was interested in getting my hands on an odd companion book I remembered from the 1970s, The Lost Worlds of 2001, but it's very out of print and used copies seem to go for extortionate prices. But now there's a Kindle edition, so I was finally able to read it. The scan is a little slapdash--there are a couple of typos and several places where a footnote got absorbed willy-nilly into the text, but it's readable.

This is Clarke's own contribution to the large literature about the tangled creative process that produced Kubrick's epochal film--only it focuses mostly on the creation of Clarke's novel, which was originally envisioned as a kind of book-length story treatment for the movie, but ended up evolving in parallel to the point that they were developed more or less simultaneously with mutual feedback (but still ended up rather different from one another, albeit with more or less the same story in the broadest strokes).

Spoilers ahead, though really there's not a single coherent plot here to spoil, unless it is the story of the development of 2001.

Clarke reproduces some of his notes from the film's production, which have been cited elsewhere, near the beginning of the book. The book also reprints the famous 1948 short story "The Sentinel" (basically the first version of 2001's Moon section, in which the alien artifact is a shiny pyramid) that was the seed of the whole thing. But it mostly consists of large, multi-chapter excerpts from discarded alternate versions of his novel. These are fascinating and often very good, full of vivid and often melancholy-tinged imagery of the sort Clarke was a master at writing, though it seems Clarke often wrote these chapters without a clear idea of where they were going. The story's enigmatic last act was a particularly tough nut to crack.

My one content warning is that there are a couple of fleeting instances of antique homophobia here which now read as peculiar especially given that we know Clarke was gay (and in his later books, he tended to write more liberated societies).

Some interesting roads not taken:

• Clindar! The first version of the Dawn of Man sequence is all written from the aliens' POV! The protagonist is a fellow named Clindar, a roughly humanoid extraterrestrial who lands in prehistoric Africa in a prosaically mechanical spaceship, hangs around with a group of australopithecines, befriends them, sedates and medically examines one of them (giving him the nickname Moon-Watcher, which survived into the final novel) and eventually coaches them in tool use like an alien gym teacher. Stanley Kubrick really, really did not like this approach, preferring something much more mysterious and indirect, but it was Clarke's default way of handling things. In any event, this draft seems to have started as a loose adaptation of Clarke's 1953 story "Encounter in the Dawn", which also named one of its meddling aliens Clindar.
• Crawling rocks! The book actually opens with a passage Clarke wrote early in production about the state of the fictional world circa 2000, including a vignette in which a robotic rover/lander similar to the ones we've actually got today lands on Mars and immediately discovers life in the form of multilegged Stanley Weinbaumesque rock creatures. It's characteristic of 20th-century science fiction that this is taken not as the scientific bombshell of the century, but as a mild disappointment since there are no civilizations there. When I was in elementary school, a friend of mine who had procured this book described this sequence and I had trouble believing it was in there, since it seemed to bear no relation to 2001: A Space Odyssey whatsoever. But there it is.
• The "Getting the band together" sequence. Clarke wrote a lot of background material about the crew of the Discovery, including those guys who, in the final movie, we only ever see in hibernation and then dead. They had personalities and careers and everything. There are multiple chapters about them being summoned to join the mission to Jupiter (and, yes, it was Jupiter, not Saturn, through most of the process--more on that further down). I suppose that to build a believable world it's common to write a lot of this stuff and then throw it away. 
• Socrates and/or Athena, the helpful AI. Clarke was not an author who naturally gravitated toward hero/villain conflict stories; that was just not how his brain worked, and the struggle between the astronauts and the deranged computer HAL 9000 that animates the central portion of the finished story was a late addition that was not there through most of development. I am not sure but I suspect that without Stanley Kubrick's input he would not have written it that way at all. Instead, the AI character is initially a robot named Socrates and then a disembodied AI named Athena, and the AI is... generally helpful. There's a whole version of the middle section here in which the drama comes from a series of accidents: a space-pod crash ultimately caused by a purely mechanical failure, then a failed revival of another crewmember from hibernation. Some drama involving Athena creeps in when Dave tries to go chasing after some components that have been knocked clean off the ship, but Athena is programmed not to let him leave the ship uncommanded--but she's a machine in the end, and the worst that happens is that he has to waste some precious time hacking her command scripts. The seed of the conflict with HAL is probably there, but it's in embryonic form and Athena is not the tragic character that HAL would become.
• Jupiter V! Famously, Clarke put the huge monolith that is the aliens' Star Gate on Saturn's moon Iapetus ("Japetus"), but in the movie, it's in free space orbiting Jupiter. Actually, the target of Discovery was Jupiter through most of the development process; Iapetus was a late addition. Specifically, it was Jupiter's small inner moon now known as Amalthea, which at the time was usually just called Jupiter V. Clarke had used the idea of Amalthea being an alien space station in a 1953 short story called "Jupiter V", in which it was apparently just background for a story about a futuristic art heist. Here, he describes Jupiter V as having one end sheared off by apparently artificial means, with a huge rectangular slot descending into the moon that somehow comes out... somewhere else, and, my God, is full of stars. In this version, Dave isn't the only survivor of the mission, and there are some charming bits about the astronauts camping around the Jupiter V Star Gate methodically examining it with robotic probes before Dave makes the bold decision to jump in. I imagine all this material pleasing Clarke and boring Kubrick to tears. I do wonder if the shape of the slot in Jupiter V was the genesis of making the Monolith a rectangular slab instead of a pyramid or a cube.
• Aaaannnd, last but not least... Unfilmably wild and awesome alien worlds!!! Clarke clearly wrote a huge amount of discarded material about what happened to Dave after he fell into the Star Gate. They really didn't know where they were going with it until the very end. The Lost Worlds of 2001 reprints several different versions of the psychedelic journey, none of which I can remotely imagine being feasible as a movie in the late 1960s, unless it was a René Laloux-type cartoon. In some versions, the entire spaceship Discovery goes in with several surviving crewmembers; sometimes it's just Dave in a space pod. In several of them, they fly through a sprawling alien city inhabited by a thousand species of strange intelligent creatures. There are worlds suspended in oceans of supercritical fluid, landscapes where gravity goes every which way, a recurring motif of levitating islands out of Swift or Magritte.
• In some versions, the floating island is none other than the private estate of Mr. Clindar, the alien who taught the proto-humans how to use tools a million years ago (Clarke explains that he's had a lot of bodies between then and now). The climax seems to be the reunion between Clindar and the line of intelligent beings he fostered. But Stanley Kubrick was aiming for something much more abstract and cosmic, and aside from the extreme technical difficulty of filming any of these ideas, I think he was the one who steered Clarke away from ultimately telling a much more conventional story, for all the arresting imagery he put into it.

Anyway, this is all great fun to read, though, again, the whole point is that it didn't come together into a final narrative until all this was thrown out.

 Back in 2012 I noted that while Canobie Lake Park's Yankee Cannonball is often described as a relocation from a defunct park in Connecticut, the only known photo of it in its original location shows a substantially different ride. (The pages linked from there are defunct, but Quassy's website has a copy of the picture.)

This story is a bit reminiscent of that, though the details are different. In my previous post about Six Flags New England, I described the 1941 Thunderbolt at that park as a reconstruction of the Cyclone from the amusement area of the 1939-40 New York World's Fair (as related by several sources, including RCDB). (This ride is not to be confused with the unrelated, and far more famous, Coney Island Cyclone.)

More recently I tried to find some photos of the World's Fair Cyclone and was slightly puzzled trying to match them to the Thunderbolt's layout. Either trains were going the wrong way, or I had the ends of the ride confused or something. That none of the photos really shows the whole thing made it more difficult.

This photo from the Museum of the City of New York finally made it clear: the Thunderbolt is a mirror image of the New York World's Fair Cyclone. That's the top of the lift and the turnaround into the first drop, and the pop up from the double down into the second lap in front. The corresponding elements on the Thunderbolt are reflected left to right.

While poking around, I found another surprise: there was another Cyclone with this layout at the other big American fair of 1939-40, the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island in San Francisco. And the San Francisco Cyclone was a mirror image of the New York one, that is, identical to the Riverside/Six Flags Thunderbolt! So while the Thunderbolt opened with the trains from the New York coaster, in a sense, it's more accurate to say that it is a replica of the ride's San Francisco counterpart.

(Most of the articles about roller coasters and the Golden Gate Exposition are mostly about the never-realized, truly daft plan to build a world-record roller coaster on the Golden Gate Bridge itself. But I appreciate the ones that mention the ride that was actually built.)

As a quasi-enthusiast of roller coasters, I always come off a visit to a big park a bit chagrined that between my sometimes recalcitrant nerves and my aging body, I can never ride quite as many rides as I hope to. The thing 21-year-old enthusiasts do, where they ride all N coasters at the park (where N is frequently greater than 10) and get multiple re-rides on the highlights, is just not in the cards. That means some missed opportunities if it's a really loaded park I might not ever get back to again, but I have my must-rides and I stick to them if I can.

We spent the past week vacationing in Barcelona, and had a wonderful time--it was the second visit there for Sam and me, the first for our daughter. I had initially had ideas of getting out to TIbidabo, a picturesque little amusement park next to a giant church on a high hill overlooking the city--you can see it from many places we did visit. Our kid, though, was adamantly opposed to "going to theme parks" on an international trip, even if they're as peculiar and locally-colored as that one, so it would likely have been on one of our split-up days. I never did visit Tibidabo and it's high on my list if I ever get back to Barcelona (which I probably will, frankly, since we like the place so much).

But... thanks to a decision by my wife and daughter, the expedition got upgraded. They had an idea of making a day trip by airplane to Palma de Mallorca. Sam and I had been there briefly before, and while it sounded like a neat trip, I wasn't sure I wanted to go through all the rigmarole of air travel another time to get there... and, anyway, I had a different crazy idea. While they were off in Mallorca (having a wonderful time, by all accounts), I could take a side trip to PortAventura, a great big theme park in Salou, a seaside town an hour-and-a-half ride from Barcelona by bus or train, which had some absolute bucket-list roller coasters. When they booked their flight to Palma, I booked admission to PortAventura.

PortAventura World

PortAventura World is a full-sized resort that was, at one time, a Universal park. Remnants of this remain: the park still uses Woody Woodpecker as its primary mascot, and the paid Express Pass skip-the-line system (worth every penny) works like Universal's and is similarly branded. Today it's owned by Parques Reunidos, which technically puts it in the same chain as New England's Water Country, Story Land and Lake Compounce (edit: this is incorrect--I think I was mixing it up with the Madrid parks; it's owned by a couple of private equity firms now). PortAventura feels like a slick, clean, pleasantly-themed big-chain park, with big thrill rides that go more for quality than quantity, maybe most comparable to the SeaWorld/Busch Gardens parks in the US in overall vibe. Its areas are themed to different parts of the world, on more or less a Busch Gardens level.

(Another point of similarity with SeaWorld/BG is that they have the rights to the Sesame Street characters, who are the basis of an adorable and heavily themed children's area and more walk-around mascots. I got to wave to Cookie Monster and Abby Cadabby.)

Aside from PortAventura proper, there is a smaller second gate there, Ferrari Land, which has a bunch of indoor dark rides and kiddie rides and one gigantic launch coaster, Red Force (the tallest coaster in Europe--basically what Kingda Ka or Top Thrill Dragster would be if it used a magnetic LSM launch). I actually bought a combo ticket to give myself the option to check all that out, but with the limited time and endurance I had, I ended up not using it. I do regret missing out on Red Force but by the time it was a consideration, I was pretty pooped out for that kind of extreme experience. There was a lot more I would have done at PortAventura if I had a second day.

At this time of the year, PortAventura closes early (I think Ferrari Land is open later, but I was a bit confused about that at the time) and some rides at both parks close significantly earlier than the park closing time. I also had a train I really, really needed to catch to get back to Barcelona at a reasonable hour, so that was hanging over me toward the end of the day--the train station, on the other side of the hotel resort and a couple of main roads, is a reasonable walk from the park, about a kilometer, but you do need to figure in maybe 20 minutes of padding if you want to be safe about catching your train. There are packages that come with shuttle-bus transit to the park from downtown Barcelona; I probably should have bought one of those since the travel time is about the same and I think there's more flexibility.

Pitfalls and advice

Aside from getting the combo ticket, my other big mistake was not having cash on hand--though this was really only an issue for one thing: the ride locker system. There are lockers near some of the big rides, but they are old-school: 2 euros and they take coins only, not cards or bills. They are also not portable rentals like they have at Six Flags: if you want to use them they're 2 euros a pop, giving you one close-and-open cycle, so you'll need a lot of those coins.

There are ATMs in the park, but they are wonky, extortionate things that charge huge fees and, anyway, did not work with my debit card at all. What I didn't notice until it was too late was the exchange bureau immediately outside the park gate (with a big Woody Woodpecker sign over it). You'll want to use that if you need cash and have only foreign bucks. I think the only other things you really need cash for are the game token machines, and a few oddball things like the full-body dryers near the water rides. For concessions and such, a credit card will serve you fine.

I was initially worried that PortAventura had a loose-articles policy like some Cedar Fair and Universal parks that absolutely required you to use these lockers, which would mean I was hosed. So I wasted a lot of time in a frantic, fruitless quest for cash inside the park. I eventually decided to just forge ahead and, if necessary, use my old dumb-kid method of just jamming everything I owned into my zippered jacket pockets, coping as best I could with the ride restraints. But the only ride where I had to do this was Stampida (see below). The others did all have typical bins for your loose articles on the platform, which helped me a lot.

Another thing that helped me was that I sprung for the Express Pass, which was awesome and which I highly, highly recommend if you can afford it, especially if you have a time crunch like I did. Nearly all the rides in the park offer this and I spent no time waiting in lines at all; I just walked on, at times when standby wait times could be over an hour. I don't know much about availability of single-rider lines, if any, because I just used the Express system.

Finally, I recommend paying close attention to park maps because PortAventura is sprawling and can be confusing to navigate. The overall layout is just a circle around a central lagoon, but there are many branches that look like through routes but actually dead-end in a ride. I kept getting stuck in the Frontierland-like "Far West" area particularly, and didn't even figure out the passage that led to the other half of it until almost the end of the day. Besides effectively breaking the O-shaped layout into an exhausting C, this oversight contributed to my missing out on some awesome-looking water rides, though, honestly, they were the kind of rides that would have been more fun if I'd been there with my whole family.

Shambhala

I blew what remained of the morning stomping around PortAventura in an increasingly foul mood, getting lost repeatedly and trying to find cash for the lockers. Once I abandoned that strategy, I got myself a big Coke Zero and instantly cheered up. In hindsight, I think I was dehydrated and undercaffeinated and it was affecting my brain. And then I rode Shambhala, my most absolute must-ride at the park and one of the best roller coasters I've ever ridden, and that made me a happy man. Here is Theme Park Review's POV (note, the surrounding landscaping is finished and much prettier now):

Shambhala is a Bolliger & Mabillard hypercoaster that, at the time of its construction, was their biggest ever (something of a foretaste of the "gigas" they would build later) and was the biggest coaster in Europe. It dominates the "China" area and arches right over the top of Dragon Khan, the park's previous headliner. It's about 250 feet tall and almost a mile long, so it's the tallest and second-longest coaster I've ever ridden. It is gorgeous, with a blue and white paint scheme and pseudo-Tibetan theming around the station and the surrounding area.

Shambhala's trains have an interesting seating arrangement, four across but with the outside rows staggered relative to the inside ones, which creates a real sense of space and freedom. The restraints are B&M's beloved clamshell lap restraints, with no over-the-shoulder collar. You really feel exposed on this ride. The lift hill is fast, and you get a tremendous view of the park and the seaside from the top. The gigantic first drop leads into a huge camelback hill and then the first turnaround, a unique element called the "ampersand" that feels like but is not quite an inversion.  From then on, it's a collection of airtime hills of various sizes, with a graceful feel. There's a "splashdown" element that is just for show, actually a dance of coordinated water jets--you don't get wet on the ride. There is a midcourse brake run maybe 2/3 of the way through, the only break in the action.

The coaster in my experience that it's easiest to compare this to is Superman: The Ride at Six Flags New England, by B&M's great competitor Intamin. Shambhala is conceptually simpler, taller and less forceful than Superman, though some of the speed hills do give pops of ejector air. Most of the airtime has a floatier quality, and it's very nice.

El Diablo: Tren de la Mina 

As a palate cleanser before trying Dragon Khan, I went for PortAventura's Western-themed Arrow Mine Train, El Diablo. Here's Coasterforce: This opened in 1995 and it seems to have been Arrow's second-to-last Mine Train. These are family rides without big scary drops, but offering a lot of fast turns with lateral forces and, usually, an extended layout with multiple lift hills. My very first roller coaster was Hersheypark's Mine Train, the Trailblazer, though that is an unusually short and tame one with only one lift.

I liked El Diablo a lot. It has three lifts and keeps going a lot longer than you expect it to. It has the janky feel you expect from an old Arrow, but it's not super-rough for all that, and the final lift leads into a long swooping dropping turn that makes an excellent finale.

Dragon Khan

Okay, this is the interesting one. I went directly from there to Dragon Khan and it kicked my ass. I honestly came off of it needing to sit down and rest for a while. I think it's one of the most intense coasters I've ever ridden. And I think this is mostly just because it's slightly too long--maybe the only coaster I've ever ridden where I just wished it was shorter.

I suspect I am not the only person who came off thinking that, because Dragon Khan is the only B&M looper ever made that has eight inversions. They've made a lot of them with six or seven. For eight, there's just Dragon Khan. They made it as an opening-day ride for PortAventura in 1995, and then they never did that again. At the time, it had the world inversion record, though other manufacturers have surpassed it since then. It looks dwarfed by Shambhala today, but this is a more violent beast than Shambhala. This is no Drachen Fire--it's quite smooth and I did not bang my head on the over-the-shoulder restraints, though others have had problems with this. They tell you to keep your head back, and I suspect this is actually the opposite of what you should do on this ride. But the inversions all have a lot of force and they just keep coming.

The layout has been described as similar to Kumba at Busch Gardens Tampa, but with an extra loop. It starts like many B&M loopers, with a straight vertical loop after the first drop (though it is a bit unusual that the drop itself is straight--I like that). It also ends similarly to many B&M loopers with a pair of interlocking corkscrews. In between is a dive loop, a zero-G roll and a cobra roll, and then something fairly unusual for them: a second vertical loop. (Is this the only B&M that has two vertical loops? I think it might be. [Edit: No, SeaWorld Orlando's Kraken has two vertical loops--the order of elements is basically Dragon Khan minus the last corkscrew.])

I think I'd have loved this ride if they just, maybe, left off the final pair of interlocking corkscrews. As it was, I was noticeably flagging at that point, and came off the ride almost nauseated. I'm not getting any younger, I guess.

Stampida

The last coaster I actually rode was a bit of a surprise, since I hadn't read up on it extensively: Stampida, a Custom Coasters International racing/dueling wooden coaster in the Far West area. Stampida is from 1997 and, having ridden it, I strongly suspect it was the inspiration for Hersheypark's Lightning Racer, a somewhat longer version of the same concept built by CCI's successor company GCI.

Wooden racing coasters are far from a new thing, but Stampida and Lightning Racer (and GCI's later ride Joris en de Draak) add the twist that they go from side-by-side racing to some "dueling" moments where the two trains seem to be coming at each other head-on, and then back to racing again, which is relatively unusual for a wooden racer. It's a clever design. Whether you use the standby or the Express line, you can pick your side on the way in, red or blue. I rode the red train, and got the back row; they were operating with both sides running, which seems to be the norm there (with some of these coasters it can be disappointingly hard to actually get a race). 

My side lost the race, but it was a lot of fun. Stampida is pretty smooth for a wood coaster and there's a lot of airtime and laterals. Lightning Racer is a slightly larger ride and I've heard people complain that its pacing has suffered over time, but this was a solid, peppy ride.

The other one that got away

I didn't ride Ferrari Land's Red Force, but I also didn't ride Furius Baco, PortAventura's Intamin hydraulic launch coaster. This seems to consistently get the longest lines in the park, probably in part because it's right at the front. It's a very unusual launch coaster with wing seating on the sides of the track. I had been a bit hesitant about this one since it's often described as very shaky and rough, though it's also not very long. I ended up giving it a pass, though it would have been an interesting experience.