Roller Coaster Reviews - Six Flags Magic Mountain

Batman: The Ride This is one of many exact copies of our favorite roller coaster. As always, it's exhilarating and comfortable, and it leaves us breathless.

The Riddler's Revenge The only other stand-up we'd been on before this was Mantis at Cedar Point. But Riddler's Revenge blows that away. This lime-green monstrosity is huge. The trip up the lift hill just seems to go on forever, and the ride lasts a long time (about three minutes). It is wonderfully smooth the entire time, like most B&M coasters. Riddler has a good mix of coaster elements, including vertical loops, hills, and barrel rolls, so you alternately feel like you're floating, then you feel heavy pressure in your legs as the g forces climb, and then you're spinning upside down.

- That's a great name. It implies that this coaster is a "clone" of the world famous Coney Island Cyclone. But it's not the same, merely similar. The Psyclone is a little bigger than the New York original, but it's not quite as steep in the first drop. From then on, this ride is just a little too rough. It has a good number of drops, but it doesn't feel like it goes very fast, and it doesn't smoothly move from one hill to the next. Also, the day we visited, this ride had the longest wait of any coaster, so we didn't bother to ride it more than once.

Viper Built the year after Six Flags Great Adventure's Great American Scream Machine, Viper is similar in that it was built by Arrow Dynamics, and is a large, steel coaster with seven inversions. But Viper is a little bit better in just about every way. It's first hill is over 30 feet taller, giving a more exciting first drop. It's also slightly smoother, and there's less braking during the ride. Viper is, like its cousin, a whole lot of looping fun.

- For some reason, this ride is billed as "the first looping roller coaster ever built." Actually, the first looping roller coaster opened in 1848 at the Frascati Gardens in France. (This may be the first "modern" looping coaster, made from steel, in 1976.) We noticed the similarity to Hersheypark's Sooperdooperlooper, which was built by the same company (Schwarzkopf) the following year. But we like the layout of this ride better. There are 2 or 3 hills before you come to the loop, which helps build some anticipation. The track leading into the loop is bizarre: instead of dropping steeply down into the loop, the track angles straight down from a hill-top down into the loop's entry, but the angle is not very steep. The train just sort of ambles into the loop. Nevertheless, this ride has good drops and turns as it snakes through the woods, but it's not easy to see the layout either from the ground or even while on the ride.

- Another well-named coaster, Colossus takes up an enormous amount of real estate, and it's the first thing you see when you park your car. Its 115-foot first drop is pretty large for a woodie (and yet, 70 feet less than Viper), but like Cedar Point's Gemini racer, the trains slow down too much at every turnaround. While this can make it more fun when two trains are "racing" side by side, only one train was running when we were there. As a result of the slow speeds at the tops of the hills, there's hardly any air-time on this ride.

- What a nightmare. This twisty little mutant is now at its third Six Flags park, and apparently has been giving people headaches across the country. Originally called "Z-Force" at Six Flags Great America, then at Six Flags Over Georgia, we rode it in the front row and our necks nearly snapped off. This is the only model of this kind of Space Diver coaster that its maker (Intamin) ever built, and it's no secret why. Perhaps this ride might have been a little better if we had been in the middle of the train, but we weren't willing to try. Flashback wins the dubious honor of being our second-least favorite roller coaster of them all, beaten out only barely by Knott's' Windjammer.

- Yet another Arrow mine-train type coaster. Like all of these kinds of rides, it's supposed to feel like a train about to jump the tracks and fly out of control. There's nothing exceptional about this model. In fact, it's so unremarkable that when we originally posted this web page, we forgot about it and left this coaster off our list.

- Sometimes called a reverse-freefall coaster, this ride is not universally accepted as a roller coaster. A car-load of 15 passengers is launched, using Linear Synchronous Motors (LSMs), along a flat, straight stretch of track from a standing start to 100 miles per hour in just seven seconds. Then, the track curves upward until it's pointing straight up to the sky. The car shoots up this track to a height of nearly 400 feet, before falling back down the way it came. It provides riders with over 6 seconds of free-fall air time.

- A suspended coaster, with cars that hang below the track. Newer than Cedar Point's Iron Dragon, Ninja reaches much higher speeds. We can only hope that it's more fun that the Ohio prototype.

Since we visited this park, more coasters have been added which we hope to review some day.