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The Definitive Roller Coaster Theme Park Management Game

I remember first playing this game back in 2005 after convincing my parents to let me buy it at the Scholastic book fair at school and what I didn't realize back then that I know for sure now was just how groundbreaking this game was at the time for how many hours sunk into curating the greatest roller coaster theme park that my imagination (and game's limitations) would allow me to achieve.
While Frontier would eventually follow up with Thrillville, Planet Coaster, and Planet Coaster 2 - I still feel that RCT3 remains (debatably) the perfect version of the roller coaster theme park management games. Sure, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles that Planet Coaster has, but I think (for what it had envisioned) remains the better version of the two. Perhaps it's just the nostaglia talking - but for the sale price, I think it's still worth the playthrough - two decades later.

The Stuff I Liked
Unparalled Building Freedom
Off the bat, what RCT3 does exceptionally well is its ability to allow you to build whatever you want, however you want, with a wide assortment of different rollercoasters that were popular during the era that the game released in. Each ride has its own set of limitations in terms of how fast and high it can go, but for the most part, you can do whatever you want with it and it's up to the NPC customers (they're termed as "peeps") to rate if it's a good ride or not.
This can be done with the roller coasters, transport rides, as well as a selection of the more gentler rides as well. It's all up to you with how you want them to look. And maybe you're just not the creative sort - there's always at least one pre-built set available for you to use and you can always use the ride editor mode to create your own variations of the rides and use those presets later in-game.
Unique Themes
The Complete Edition comes with all the themes and DLCs that came out through the game's original run (gosh, I remember buying the DLC discs for "Wild" and "Soaked") so it includes the additional safari and dinosaur theme packs that come with the game. However, the base game still had the spooky, western, sci-fi, adventure, and generic themes - which had their own fun variety of different rides available for you to use. These were fun to play around with - but I always found that the generic theme had the most in terms of rides and decorations.
Management at Every Level
You can customize just about everything you see in the game, some of which being the customization of items at food/drink stalls, speed and intensity of your rides, color uniform of vendors and employees, training levels of those employees, patrol areas for janitors, security guards, and mechanics, as well as the color coding of most rides. It seriously put a lot of thought and consideration into those areas that are available for management.
One of the best perks too is having the park inspector go around and notify you in real-time of any issues he spots out that you can quickly rectify on the fly.
Cool Soundtrack
"Summer Air" by Alistair Lindsay remains the nostalgic theme song to this amazing game and there was a good variety of different songs included in the original soundtrack that fit whatever theme you applied to the different parks. It hits different when you heard these same songs decades ago!

The Stuff I Didn't Like as Much
Limited Theme Packs
While the variety of each theme is unique, the actual amount of stuff in each theme varies from theme to theme. For example, you'll find a lot of cool gentle rides in the spooky pack, but good luck finding much in the sci-fi pack - to where there were maybe 2 or 3 rides overall. I found that extremely limiting and wished there were more unique themes to that so that way you could build entire parks to that specific theme. In Planet Coaster, I was able to build a whole park just out of the sci-fi theme - something that game improved upon compared to this predecessor.
The Peeps' AI has always been Strange
The peeps that are your chief patrons have always had the strangest AI to me. For the most part, the AI is built to visit the most popular rides around the park and that's mostly based off how much money the family unit has to spend on rides/food/souvenirs. However, I've found that the AI is finnicky with how it perceives each ride and sometimes there's no rhyme or reason - even when their preference is set for gentle/thrill rides, there seems to be no for sure way of meeting their standards. You'll always meet at the most 99% of their satisfaction, but forever evade that remaining 1%.
Terrain Editor was the Bane of this Game
Something that stood out to me in 2005 as it does now in 2024 is that dreaded Terrain Editor. Whereas, if you study the pre-built parks in the campaign, there is always this varying level of beautifully crafted hills, mountains, lakes, and ridges - but when you yourself try to apply those same concepts, you'll run into a slew of problems. Chiefly, terrain leveling that openly interferes with your ability to place rides and pathways. This is easy to manuever around once you discover the "level terrain for rides/paths" option in the editor, but I found it excruciatingly frustrating that there were two different types of leveling editors - one for rides, one for seemingly no reason at all other than to upset you.
Using the latter will just make rides float slightly above ground and pathways that can't connect for no reason whatsoever. Probably the most frustrating mechanic that has plagued this game for decades.

After 20 years of consideration, this game still holds an 8/10 for me.
Call it the nostaglia factor or maybe I just can't let go of the past in favor of the new - but RCT3 remains - in my opinion - the best and definitive roller coaster park management game to-date. It's timeless, it's nostaglic, and it's simple enough where you don't get lost in the twenty thousand sub-menus (obviously, I'm exaggerating) that Planet Coaster is plagued by.
That being said, I don't think it's worth the $20 retail price. That's a ballpark of how much it was worth in 2005, but in the modern era - pick it up during one of the sales. Sink a couple hours and see if it works for you. It's fun.