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Malaysia - Part 1: Kuala Lumpur and Supersonic Odyssey

Gavin

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Christmas. Ever heard of it? We get a holiday for it over here, so I went over to Malaysia for a bit, starting off with Kuala Lumpur.

I’d been to Kuala Lumpur before, back in 2008, but there’s a whole new park (kind of; we’ll get to it later) since then. Technically, I’d been far more recently (less than a month before this trip), but that was literally just a one-night trip to go to a Dua Lipa concert since I’m down with the kids and slightly extra.

View from the hotel:

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The first day started with a walk from the hotel down to Independence Square, an area I’d somehow missed last time. I took loads of pictures, but they’re all very similar. There were also a couple of markets, but if you’ve seen one overcrowded Asian market, you’ve seen them all.

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We walked around to the new stupidly massive building, Merkeda 118, but none of the public spaces are open yet. Officially, it’s the second tallest building in the world, but shoving that spire on it seems like cheating to me. Then again, the top 30% of the Burj Khalifa is also unusable vanity height, so if it’s so important to them, let them have it I guess.

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It was early afternoon, and we were about a 15-minute walk from Berjaya Times Square, one of many shopping malls in the city, so I suggested heading there for food. It wasn’t because there was a coaster in there at all. Supersonic Odyssey (thanks autocorrect – I can never get that word right) is one of those quite clickbaity coasters that sometimes pops up in those “Wow! Can you believe this CRAZY Asian coaster?! Would you ride this?!” bulls**t videos. Admittedly, it does look very cool and is pretty major for what’s essentially a shopping mall cred.

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I’d ridden this before, so I didn’t need the cred. It’s also a pay-one-price park, so I wasn’t really up for bothering with that either, but getting the ticket online though trip.com (or Klook – can’t remember) was only about 12 quid I think, so I ended up popping in and getting a quick few rides in since the coaster was walk-on.

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I’d quite liked this last time. It was around 5 years old at the time and was really smooth and pretty fun despite the layout not really being particularly interesting. It’s turned to s**t though. I rode in the front seat for the first ride, and it was “fine”, as in you could tell it was a rough coaster but you were in the best possible seat to deal with that. Next, I went for the back. They weren’t using the back car at all, so I was in the one in front of that, and it was absolutely vile. I don’t know if they’ve completely stopped using the back car thanks to roughness, or whether it was just ride ops on that day not bothering to open all the restraints (very quiet, never enough people to fill a train etc.), but it’s just an awful, awful ride now. Such a shame.

We had more time to kill, so got a taxi over to KL Bird Park, the world’s biggest walkthrough aviary. It used to be anyway, not sure if it still is and can’t be arsed to check. Again, I’d been here on that first visit back in 2008 and really liked it, but it’s all very run-down now. There’s also not much in it anymore in terms of variety. It’s expensive for what it is as well at about 15 quid a ticket I think. Malaysia is also absolutely awful with their “foreigner prices”. It’s literally everywhere, including the bird park and the cred. Pisses me off.

Anyway, here’s a picture of a peacock. If you like peacocks, go the Kuala Lumpur Bird Park; it’s f**king saturated with the things.

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Proper park day in the next bit.
 
It didn't do much for me.
Was running fine when i was there, but it spends so much track length mucking around on the pre lift, and then even more dicking around with those slow high level turns, and then finaaaaalllly you do a drop more gentle than sliver bullets, loop, turn and corkscrew at high speed and that's it.

Also that weird Intamin star liftoff thing was shut and i wanted to ride that.
 
I don't recall Supersonic Odyssey being that awful back in February, but I hardly remember thinking it was good too. I think the scale of it for a mall cred carried a lot of it, to be honest - the layout is quite faffy in reality.
 
Onto a proper park then, Genting SkyWorlds. It’s part of a large complex on top of a mountain which includes huge hotels and a casino. I’d been here before, but since then, the outdoor theme park was completely rebuilt from scratch. There's probably a trip report somewhere if the forums go back that far (there was some kind of reset at some point), but I’m not going to bother digging it out since all the photo links will be well and truly f**ked by now anyway.

A quick bit of background. This was supposed to be a 20th Century Fox theme park, but then Disney bought out 20th Century Fox, meaning that licensing for this place basically disappeared, further increasing the construction/opening time for an already behind schedule park while they dealt with legal issues and scrambled to get other licensing deals. I’d been putting off a Malaysia revisit for years to give this place chance to get its s**t together, but seeing as how a couple of their coasters are unlikely to ever open, it didn’t seem worth holding off any longer.

The way most people get up to the resort is by cable car. Since my last visit, there is now a second cable car, not far from the original. I booked everything online beforehand, choosing to book the old cable car (which I’d done before) on the way up, and the new one on the way back down. The website at that time even made a huge deal of both cable cars being open.

They weren’t though. After around an hour in a taxi, we got to the original cable car station, with a pre-booked, dated ticket from the official website, to find it closed. Some time between me buying the ticket and getting there, they’d decided that they wouldn’t be operating both after all. A very confused security guard told us to go to the new cable car. Luckily, we were still in the taxi and the new cable car station was only a couple of kilometers away, but what a pack of bastards to sell a dated ticket and not bother to send an email to let people know that they’d changed the opening dates.

The cable car station was rammed, but I’m not stupid so had bought an express ticket, meaning we walked straight into a cabin, bypassing what must have been at least an hour’s queue, probably more. The views going up the mountain were incredible.

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The cable car s**ts you out into the main hub of the whole complex, and you head down a few floors to get to the outdoor park.

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It was really foggy up there for the whole day, and much colder up there on the hill than back down in the city, but not uncomfortably so. They have a free fast pass system using their app (I think you get three), so I set up a couple of those for later and joined the regular queue for the suspended coaster, Samba Gliders, which was posted at 15 minutes, but took half an hour. There’s also an enforced, paid locker system for any and all bags, a slight ripoff at about £3. 50 a pop, but at least it was reusable. The coaster was decent. I’ll throw in some pictures of that along with some general mistiness pictures.

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Night at the Museum – I think a shooting dark ride – was closed. This was at least listed as closed on the website, so it is what it is. The boat ride (Epic) and drop tower were also down for the day, but no mention of those on the website.

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Mad Ramp Peak – which would have had a Sons of Anarchy theme – is listed on the app and website as “coming soon”. It’s one of two coasters here (their two most major rides really) which they stupidly bought from Dynamic Attractions, a company with absolutely no proven track record with coasters and who had, by this point, already been struggling for years to get that thing in Dubai operational, and have since, somewhat predictably, gone bust. Morons.

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The only other coaster that’s actually open is Acorn Adventures. They went with Beijing Shibaolai with this one, a company that usually just deals with stock models, so it was interesting to ride something more bespoke even if it wasn’t particularly good.

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The pre-booked, timed (supposed) fast passes kicked in soon after, starting with Independence Day, a flying theatre with a semi-decent, escaped alien preshow. I’m sick to death of flying theatres, but I liked this one. The space theme was at least unique, and there was a bit of a story, so it was much more interesting than the “flying over landmarks” s**t that the vast majority of the others have. The "floating in space" illusion in some parts worked surprisingly well.

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Remember the amazing 2005 animated feature Robots? No, nobody does, so why not make it a whole land here? It was tiny, with two flat rides in it that we didn’t bother with.

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Planet of the Apes is one of the major dark rides here, using trackless vehicles moving through sets and 3D screens. I’ve got no idea who made the ride system, but it reminded me of that old, terrible penguin ride that used to be at Sea World Orlando. This was much better than that though. The queue line is very well themed, and the ride is very good. It’s just not great. Operations were also appalling. We had the fast pass ticket, but it still took us an hour to get on - with the standby queue somehow only being listed as 45 minutes (no way it could have been) - since they were only loading one car at a time despite the station being set up to load four. There’s also some rather awkward merch in the gift shop.

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It was a similar story with the Ice Age ride. Actually, I think this might have been worse since we eventually saw that the standby queue was shorter than ours. By the time you’re in a position to figure this out though, especially as a first-time rider, it’s pretty much too late. This, disappointingly, had the exact same ride system as Planet of the Apes. They were at least loading two cars at a time with this one, but the ride was s**te with some of the most piss-poor animatronics I’ve ever seen.

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And then there’s this huge elephant in the room, which isn’t acknowledged in any way on the park’s website, app or maps. The drop tower in front of it was also closed that day.

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We were done by this point. Neither one of us was bothered about riding any of the flat rides, so we headed back into the mall/casino/indoor park/food court/hellscape to get food and have a quick look around.

The only surviving ride from the old park is a Zamperla Volare. This used to be outside and was an upcharge attraction back then. I’m pretty sure it was my first ever Volare, but no amount of nostalgia necessitated a reride here given that I don’t count relocations and there was also an absolutely enormous queue. There’s also a new coaster here, which should have been open by now, but isn’t. It’s barely a coaster from the looks of it, more of a sightseeing style ride that circles the park, but with a few small changes in elevation. I don’t have any specific pictures of it since the station is up on another level and the track is mostly obscured by the rest of the tat in the park.

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Back to the cable car then. I’d splashed out on a glass-floor cabin for the return trip, which was totally worth the extra cost.

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I wanted to like this place, but I just didn’t. On the plus side, it’s an attractive park with very good theming, a thousand times better than the “crap shoved around a stagnant pond” aesthetic that used to be here. They’ve also done a very good job of squeezing in a decent number of rides into a very small space. Unfortunately, those rides just aren’t particularly good. I might have seen that differently had Night at the Museum and Epic been open, two seemingly major rides. Operations on the coasters were actually decent, but on the dark rides were total crap. The fast pass system is also a total joke in that it doesn’t save any time at all on a busy day; there’s just no point in using it.

Would I go back? If they got those other two coasters running – well, three, since Mad Ramp Peak has two tracks – then yes. However, that’s not going to happen is it, so I’m glad that I’m unlikely to ever have a reason to have to head back to Genting Highlands.[/i]
 
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Can't wait to visit during CNY 🙄🤮 used to be so excited for this park and now it's gonna be a nightmare chore. Useful info though.
 
Great report @Gavin!

Genting SkyWorlds is a bizarre-looking one in that it looks to have some of the thematically-focused IP park vibe of the likes of Disney and Universal (and despite no longer being 20th Century Fox World, it appears to have retained some Fox IPs), but the ride hardware just doesn’t quite look to be there at the moment.

Out of interest, are it and Skytropolis separate parks, or are they considered the same park?
 
Can't wait to visit during CNY used to be so excited for this park and now it's gonna be a nightmare chore. Useful info though.
Just make sure that you get the express tickets for the cable cars - they're not a huge amount more and totally worth it - and buy them online beforehand. You'll get a QR code that you can use directly at the gates. Don't be too put off by those crowds either since most people heading up won't actually be going to the outdoor park. With any luck, they'll open both cable cars to get crowds down - it was crazy that they just decided not to bother over Christmas - but if you've got the express tickets, it won't make much difference anyway.
 
Great report @Gavin!

Genting SkyWorlds is a bizarre-looking one in that it looks to have some of the thematically-focused IP park vibe of the likes of Disney and Universal (and despite no longer being 20th Century Fox World, it appears to have retained some Fox IPs), but the ride hardware just doesn’t quite look to be there at the moment.

Out of interest, are it and Skytropolis separate parks, or are they considered the same park?
I'd call them separate. Sky Worlds is a pay-once, ticketed park, but Skytropolis is a free to enter, pay-per-ride deal.
 
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