RollerCoaster Tycoon's fireworks fetish

Give Atari credit - the bods there can spot a slow news day coming. Hence an item discussing the addition of - yes - fireworks displays to RollerCoaster Tycoon 3. To be fair, RCT3 - in development at Frontier here in the U of K in conjunction with creator Chris Sawyer - is a game we are certainly looking forward to. In fact, we can't wait to vomit all over it. But we probably could be writing about more interesting things.

Still, we might as well get on with it. RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, then. Has something called a 'Fireworks MixMaster', which allows players to create "pyrotechnic masterpieces" and synchronise them to the supplied music - or, in a fit of brainwaves, their own MP3 collection. The game will apparently also allow you to assign MP3s and such to individual rides, which sounds like a laugh - and could be particularly useful if you record your own stuff. We like the idea of a Haunted House attraction featuring excerpts from our SingStar repertoire.

The upshot of having all sorts of fireworks displays, incidentally, is that visitors will find it all very appealing and be more inclined to spend lots of money in your park - an example, we'd argue, of some of the new thinking Frontier is trying to inject into the project. Which is good, since it can't just be RollerCoaster Tycoon in 3D, can it?

The game is currently set to ship in November, according to Atari's latest release.