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Flamingo Land: General Discussion

No, no and no.... Have you seen the station in real life? Its functional, it fits in with the area. The queue hold about 30mins of people with no seperate fastrack queue apart from people who buy credits from their exit pass system.

The queue moves quickly and you are always heading to the station. Music is decent... and its a grafitti free queueline, in that its hard to make a mark on steel (a lesson Drayton should learn)

Again a thumbs up from me.
 
Credit where credit's due, they have tried.

But what they haven't done is succeeded; the two impressive flat rides at Flamingo are the only things I particularly rate, and you have to go back a worryingly long time to remember the last time the park added a genuinely good coaster (I'm sure Kumali and Velocity have their fans, but I'm not among them!). If anything, despite the few new additions, including the woeful Zoooom and the promising dinosaur themed area, I was left with the impression that the park had actually gone backwards between 2009 and 2013. They've still got a very long way to go and probably survive on a steady influx of relatively local visitors who've yet to find out what a good theme park is like...
 
Note their 7pm extension this evening as well. The place is too easily slagged off by people that haven't been and/or have their Merlin and B&M-tinted glasses on all the time.
 
Tom said:
Note their 7pm extension this evening as well. The place is too easily slagged off by people that haven't been and/or have their Merlin and B&M-tinted glasses on all the time.
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Mingoland is awful, the entrance makes Towers Street look new and fresh, the rides are dire, the operations not much better, the food, the falling apart theming...

The one good thing is the zoo, and even that's looking crappy in parts...

The assumption that people hate it because of Merlin fanboyism is beyond ridiculous...
 
No idea whether this is the advert for Hero or just a short video for promoting the ride over the Interwebz, but Falmingo Land put this on Facebook this morning. It's a bit... rubbish.
 
I rode the one at Coney Island last week.

Very uncomfortable inversions.

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All those positive comments on that video.

Guests must love it. Damn you mingo building stuff which ordinary people seem to actually like.
 
thefatone said:
All those positive comments on that video.

Guests must love it. Damn you mingo building stuff which ordinary people seem to actually like.
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To be fair, in comparison to their other coasters, Hero is probably like a respite!
 
badlydrawnkelBel said:
Hero I found very uncomfortable to ride! Especially when you have boobies! Ouch!
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Agreed! and if you step on a step too high, it's a terrible choice to make between squishing your boobs more or arching your back too much >.<
 
Ellie said:
Agreed! and if you step on a step too high, it's a terrible choice to make between squishing your boobs more or arching your back too much >.<
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Yeah the ride ops seem to want you to get up as high as you can and then you're squashed in and can't adjust yourself!

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I saw the advert on TV a few weeks ago... It was pretty cringe-worthy!

The ride just doesn't look all that good and I can't really see it lasting very long!
 
I rode Hero for the first time a couple of weeks ago. I thought I'd give you a few of my thoughts and a very brief overview.

We went when the ride had it's official opening, so to the left of the ride there was live music, the local radio station and all sorts of celebrations for this new ride. Hype is not the word! I was very impressed to see that the local radio station had even branded its car with Hero vinyls all over it!

So onto the ride itself, you spend around half an hour at the very most in the queue which appears to me to have been done with as much chequer plate as humanly possible within one area. The ride then snakes towards the station with glass partitions with the hero logo keeping riders away from the lift motors. Although bits of this looked like they were unfinished when I went.

You then enter the station, when I visited staff were dressed in white masks and orange capes when we went which was nice to see! It's not as zany and over the top as The Smiler uniform, but it was still nice to see that someone had thought about it.

The ride cars themselves are very hard to describe without photos. Imagine standing on a moving stepladder before a restraint comes and pushes against you. This wasn't a problem for me as I'm fairly average height but for my girlfriend she complained being short that there was no comfortable position. She also complained that it wasn't very comfortable on the chest.

So having seen Air's frankly amazing whirl of motors to get the cars into the flying position I was intrigued to see how Hero's would work? Pulley system? Nope literally the car wheels over a concrete mound into the flying position where you then enter what I can only describe as the lift hill of death. You do physically feel the bump as the car engages with the 'lift paddle'. As soon as you reach the top there's some nice moments where you fly out your seat, but there's no way of bracing.

I also struggled because I was between two rungs on the ladder? I wasn't tall enough for one and I was too short for the other, trying to maneuver during the ride didn't really help. As we entered the inversions I have never felt pain like it! I'd say that it was up with Saw and Colossus with rides that I have to brace for.

So did I enjoy my ride? Nope. Not really it was far too rough, there's no way of getting comfortable and at no point can one adopt the superman pose! What's the point in a flying rollercoaster if you can't adopt the superman pose?

It is a good investment for the park though as other people were enjoying it, and it will bring people in for something new and unique. The problem is there's nothing about the ride to rave about. It's simply fun but rough, fast but tiresome. It's a massive shame because I wanted to prove everyone here wrong and say that I had a good time on it. But yes I eat my hat because everyone here who initially slated it off did so for the exact same reasons I have.

Least with a constantly moving rollercoaster they can't faf around though?
 
A couple of weeks ago I found myself at Flamingo Land... It was a fairly busy day, fantastic sunshine and fantastic queues to match. During my hour long queue for Velocity I found myself wondering just why everything was so slow. Granted, I figured that the best possible throughput was about 384pph. This is bad enough without the staff generally faffing about, chatting (smoking in the ride op cabin) and just showing very little interest in what was going on.

In 20mins I watched 6 trains being dispatched. With 16 people on each train that makes 288pph. SHOCKING. At times it was a good 4-5 mins loading.

Does anybody know why Flamingo Land refuse to use the air gates to pre batch? This would save the time wasted measuring kids and then counting through the required number of riders while the train sits there empty.

It wasn't just velocity, Kumali was the same. I'm sure Kumali had 2 trains last time I was there...

Despite the reviews, I tried Hero. I didn't expect much, however I have never been on a more uncomfortable ride and I certainly have never come off a coaster with the level of bruising I found after Hero. I kept quiet about reading the reviews and even my non-enthusiast friends were shouting ouch at every bend in the track. They came off and said that they flt that they had been assaulted.

I can see what FL are trying to achieve, but to get there will need much more in terms of training, throughput and ride quality.

Not a great experience of Flamingo Land at all.
 
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