After our somewhat disappointing day at Disneyworld, we visited Universal Studios with the aim of seeing the new Harry Potter themed part of the park. We had a brilliant time - so much so that I've had to split Universal Studios into two blog posts to fit all of the photos in. The queues were much shorter - I think the longest we waited for a ride (on a Saturday) was 30 minutes, vs waiting over an hour at Disneyworld (on a Friday).
Universal has two parks as well - the "Universal Studio" park which has more of the movie-related tours and shows, and "Islands of Adventure", which has most of the rides. A smart designer, however, has put the Harry Potter part into Islands of Adventure, and put the tallest rollercoaster in the park into the Universal Studios park - a smart way of encouraging people to buy two-park tickets. Even better, they put both parks on the same map - deliberately pointing out what you were missing out on every time you looked at the map.
Things are much more modern and better set out in Universal. It's not groundbreaking by any means, but they have boards all over the place showing you what the ride queue times are - it's good because as a visitor it means you can plan your rides without running all over the park, and from the park's perspective, it would help to balance queues by encouraging people away from rides with long queues and into rides with shorter queues. More good user experience design.
They'd obviously learned a lot from Disney in terms of theme - I loved how different each part of the park looked. This is the Superhero Island (Marvel Comics stuff).
Complete with X-Men in their original costumes! Hi Cyclops!
Toon Lagoon was like hanging around in a cartoon, and contained most of the water rides.
Ripsaw Falls was a log flume ride - after the couple of droplets we received at Disneyworld, we weren't really prepared for the Universal water rides.
Here's Stephen after Ripsaw Falls - at one point they squirted everyone in the face with water cannons. We got pretty wet.
Being as we were already wet, we decided to check out the Popeye Barges - your typical tyre-based white-water rapids ride. This ride was ridiculous - they basically poured buckets of water onto you from above multiple times. The water from the "rapids" wasn't even a factor. I think most of the laughter from people on our boat was the incredulous laughter of people who didn't believe that they would design a ride to make you this wet.
Here's Stephen after the ride. We might as well have just jumped into the lagoon fully-clothed. It was crazy.
Amusingly, they had "people drying machines" setup around the place - you put in your $5, and you basically hung around in the giant air drying machine for 5 minutes. Not a bad idea, considering how wet people got.
There were a number of Jurassic Park themed rides too - here's Stephen doing his worst impression of being terrified of a T-Rex (while soaking wet).
The Hulk Rollercoaster was their big one - it has 7 inversions and is a launched hill coaster, so rather than having a conveyor belt take you to the top of the hill and then you falling down along the track, they start you moving and then you are suddenly accelerated to 65kph as you're going up the hill, and then straight into a zero-g roll, a drop and then a Cobra Roll (as you can see in the photo). It was pretty good, although I still think the Superman Escape coaster at Movie World beats it.
The coolest part of the park was without a doubt the Wizarding World of Harry Potter - which gets its own blog post tomorrow.
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