Last week was one hell of a week at work. Our launch team had multiple director reviews and pulled some insanely late hours. During all of this, I looked up the distance from Louisville to Atlanta and said "**** it, I'm doing Six Flags over Georgia this weekend."
@pkiknex25 met me at my place at around 4:00pm this past Friday and we were off!
Joker Funhouse Coaster - certainly a bizarre family coaster. It starts off with a drop above an abnormally large entrance plaza for a kiddie coaster, but then dives down below said entrance plaza. After a few helices and some neat midway interaction, the train is back in the station.
Superman: Ultimate Flight - Superman got a fresh paint job sometime recently. The track is all red now instead of red and yellow and the supports are a slightly darker shade of blue. The ride looks pretty nice! This installment of S:UF was by far the best out of the three flying coasters. It had the bone crushing G's in the pretzel loop like the one at SFGAdv, but the terrain really set itself apart. Much like Tatsu, there are a few subtle spots where suddenly the ground is not close to you anymore. More flying coasters like this please.
Battle for Metropolis - It was a pretty good dark ride shooter. It started off a bit slow with too many cut scenes, but the interactive portion was extremely fun. The virtual targets were new to me as well.
Great American Scream Machine - It's not good, but it's not bad. It jackhammers, but it's not painful. It's tall but there's not much airtime. A for effort I guess?
Blue Hawk - The former Ninja seems to have had a really bad reputation in the past so I'll admit I was apprehensive to ride. Fortunately, the ride has new trains with the vest restraints - a game changer. Not only did I get off the ride thinking it was not rough at all, I actually thought it was quite enjoyable. The butterfly is extremely intense and the layout between the butterfly and corkscrews is fast paced and fun. You can still feel where all of the bumps would be on Ninja, but the vests are forgiving and allow you to move with the bumps. I would be more than happy with every Vekoma (and even Arrow) looper like this receiving these new trains if they improve a ride as much as this one.
Dare Devil Dive - We tried to ride this first thing, but it wasn't open yet. Thus, we had to suck up our **** and wait. Luckily, they weren't utilizing VR and the ride ops were doing a pretty good job at keeping trains moving. Hands down, Dare Devil Dive is one of the smoothest roller coasters that I've ever been on. I liked how tricky and technical all of the elements were - the airtime in the dive loop's roll, the airtime in the immelmann's exit, the upwards barrel roll, etc. It really was a great little ride!
Mindbender - It's a classic Schwarzkopf, so you know it's going to be excellent. It's unbelievably good. Mindbender's layout flows so nicely - both loops have the typical Schwarzkopf intensity but are broken up by a few moseying curves and the giant and ultra intense rose bowl. I can't put into words how much fun this ride is - it's just so damn good.
Batman: The Ride - Another delicious Batman clone. This one didn't seem to have quite as much oomph as the others, but you won't hear me complaining.
Goliath - I spent the entire '05/'06 offseason watching this ride get built. With every photo (construction or complete) and every POV I saw, I thought to myself "yeah, there's no way that's not an amazing ride." Like Tatsu, I finally got to ride this monster. Although a bit rattly in the first few valleys, Daddy G is an airtime monster and its helix turnaround is pure coaster nirvana. I loved every second of it.
Dahlonega Mine Train - At the beginning of the ride, I looked at the layout and wondered what in the world this ride was. It's bizarre. It has three lifthills and they're all short. The ride doesn't seem to go anywhere or do anything. Yet as the ride went on, I found myself enjoying it somehow. So much better than the one at Six Flags St Louis.
Acrophobia - Now THIS is how you drop tower. For whatever reason, there aren't many drop towers in the United States that tilt your seats. Holy ****ing **** it was terrifying.
Georgia Scorcher - If all stand ups were like this, B&M would still be selling them. Scorcher had the classic B&M forcefulness with some nice twists and turns and even a bit of airtime here and there. It's layout flowed the nicest out of the few stand ups I've been on.
Overall thoughts - I'm pleasantly surprised at how nice the park was . There was tons of shade throughout the park and the entire park was quite scenic. The operations were halfway decent and we didn't have that typical "have a Six Flags day" snafu as we've come to expect. Finally, as you can probably tell by my summaries of each ride, I thought the park's lineup was absolutely stellar. It took such a long time to get down here for a number of different reasons (geographic location, airfare, never going to Atlanta, etc), but I'm glad I finally got to make it down here.
Georgia Cyclone. While there's no visible signs of deconstruction yet, we could hear saws when walking by the ride in the morning.
I'll have another post tomorrow. When originally drafting this little road trip, we considered Dollywood (expensive for only a few hours that we'd be able to allot), Carowinds (I didn't want to spend 11 hours in a car today), and Alabama Adventure (we would have if they had more than just Rampage), but we ended up deciding on Lake Winnie, which was right on the way back to Louisville.
