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Crazy Bats VR Coaster - Phantasialand

JoshC.

Strata Poster
Nope. 100 minute wait, dispatching slowly and single rider line closed.
In my experience, they close the single ride queue on Taron when it's extremely long. So it's basically a signal of 'you'll be waiting a very long time, best to come back later'.


Quiet days and June are not something you’d see in the same sentence unless you added the words “there are no”.

This kinda goes for any European park tbh, it’s the best weather, and all the school trips to parks generally happen on the weekdays in June.

Most of my European trips have been around the last week of June / first week of July and, for the most part, have been fine. My first visit to Phantasialand in 2015 was a weekday at end of June, managed to do everything and get plenty of rerides too. Obviously the parks are livelier, but usually it's no problem for the parks.


Are they only running 3 or less trains? They only use the unload platform when running 4 trains. Taron had a lot of train problems these last days, probably because of the wheels melting again in the heat.

Is that a recent thing? I'm sure whenever I've visited and it's running 3 trains it uses the offload platform. It's only during hotel ERT I've seen them not use the offload platform?


Does sound like a bad day for Phantasialand. I've heard a couple of horror stories about their operations on busy days not really cutting it, but I've never experienced it myself. I do hope that in the mid-term reliability isn't an issue for Crazy Bats..
 

Ethan

Strata Poster
In my experience, they close the single ride queue on Taron when it's extremely long. So it's basically a signal of 'you'll be waiting a very long time, best to come back later'.
Oh ok that would make sense, there was quite a few people in the single rider line when we passed it in the main queue!
To be fair, the Taron wait was advertised as 90/100 minutes, however the queue times were not accurate at all yesterday, so that’s another thing to add to the list of cock ups ?

Mid-afternoon, Taron was advertised as 60 minutes, in reality we waited 35. Mystery Castle was advertised as 25, it was actually walk on. Chiapas was listed as 45, we waited 20. Black Mamba said 20, was also walk on. You get the idea. I mean, I’m glad that the queues weren’t actually that long, but it put us off riding a lot of things that we probably could have if the wait times were more accurate.

Ah well, we still had a great few days at the park, just a shame about the business, operations, and the usual rowdiness/stupidity of school trips. The amount of queue jumping done by both kids and adults was appalling, never seen anything like it at Phantasialand before.
 

NightHawkFur

Roller Poster
I think Taron does operate without the unload station, when only 1 or 2 trains are in use. They seem to still have issues with the wheel rubbers disintegrating.
 

Chris Brown

Mr CoasterForce 2016
Oh ok that would make sense, there was quite a few people in the single rider line when we passed it in the main queue!
To be fair, the Taron wait was advertised as 90/100 minutes, however the queue times were not accurate at all yesterday, so that’s another thing to add to the list of cock ups ?

Mid-afternoon, Taron was advertised as 60 minutes, in reality we waited 35. Mystery Castle was advertised as 25, it was actually walk on. Chiapas was listed as 45, we waited 20. Black Mamba said 20, was also walk on. You get the idea. I mean, I’m glad that the queues weren’t actually that long, but it put us off riding a lot of things that we probably could have if the wait times were more accurate.

Ah well, we still had a great few days at the park, just a shame about the business, operations, and the usual rowdiness/stupidity of school trips. The amount of queue jumping done by both kids and adults was appalling, never seen anything like it at Phantasialand before.

This is similar to what I've noticed. I spoke to the ride op on my last visit and he said the single rider policy is weird, if the queue is more than 15 minutes they shut the single rider queue entrance and let people group outside it, every 10 minutes or so they open it up and let people through that are waiting. Its almost like the single rider queue is a secret and they're concerned that if left open it would just end up ridiculously long.
 

Peet

Giga Poster
I rode Crazy Bats today, never went on any of the old incarnations of this ride so I may have a slightly different perspective to most.

The advertised queue time was 35 mins but the line moved very quickly and I was on within 20. You get handed the wireless headsets just before batching which seems to work well. There's not much in the way of a pre-show or any kind of introduction to the bats, you just pop on the headset and there they are. The VR works fairly well, I think this coaster is a good layout for it - not very intense but nice and long. It's fun, I guess. There are a couple of clever bits (such as the part with the mirror at the end, for those who have been on).

Overall it's probably the best deployment of VR I have tried. It makes a pretty dull seeming coaster a lot more interesting, and the ops are so slick it doesn't affect the throughput. Let's see if it lasts longer that the average VR overlay!
 

vaugc002

Mega Poster
Oh yeah meant to say I rode this a month back and it's a far better ride than the original.
Because the coaster is quite tame so works well with a VR experience, an I thought the VR was actually pretty impressive quality.

Genuinely enjoyed the change. It gives Temple of the Night Hawk a new life. The only disappointment was the beautiful original station has been redesigned and it looks very temporary.
 

UP87

Mega Poster
it's a far better ride than the original.
Temple of the Night Hawk was not the original but the cheapest "we have to fit it to our themed area" approach ever. Space Center was a lot better than "you go through an all black building".
 

_robin_

Roller Poster
Oh yeah meant to say I rode this a month back and it's a far better ride than the original.
Because the coaster is quite tame so works well with a VR experience, an I thought the VR was actually pretty impressive quality.

Genuinely enjoyed the change. It gives Temple of the Night Hawk a new life. The only disappointment was the beautiful original station has been redesigned and it looks very temporary.

I think crazy bats is not that great. The capicity of the coaster is totally gone. only 2 trains. And it takes 5 minutes before they display a train. With temple they used 3/4 trains... Also. Crazy bats looks very cheap / doesnt fit wuze town at all.

I mean. Yeah it is populair at the moment. But real theming inside the building would be much better. Also the beautiful imascore soundtrack is gone...
 

Fluorineer

Mega Poster
I mean. Yeah it is populair at the moment. But real theming inside the building would be much better. Also the beautiful imascore soundtrack is gone...

I'm glad that Temple (and Fantissima for that matter) got a little facelift, and I'm also glad that still, everything is pointing towards the park not giving this eyesore of a building too long of a future. I mean, for what it is, a VR coaster, I like Crazy Bats. However, it also doesn't reinvent the wheel and has all the well known VR coaster issues, the main one being that it's not that great of a concept. Still better than nothing I suppose, and Temple pretty much was the coaster-equivalent of nothingness.
 
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