It Could Always Be Worse [CONCLUDED]

Tegan pilots a chicken

Sharpie Queen 💜
Premium Member
ATTENTION ALL ICABW PLAYERS!
We have one more prompt remaining in Chapter Two before Chapter Three: FastPass, also known as the finals of this competition!

Needless to say, ICABW has not gone quite as well as many of us had hoped. The overlap with SYWTBAI and real-world factors have resulted in a less-than-stellar player experience. However, I want to make the remainder of this competition as enjoyable as possible for all players. Thus, we’re doing some unconventional things.

The final prompt of Chapter Two will be released today. For this prompt, all players will be participating as one big team. Because of this, there will be no winning team for this prompt. It’s simply an opportunity for all players to enjoy themselves with one last project before the finals.

The finals are open to all players, and will be entirely single-player. If you competed in the regular season of ICABW, you are eligible to compete in the finals. However, you are not required to if you don't want to. You will not be automatically put in the finals unless you specifically ask to be in the finals.

If you would like to participate in the finals, please be sure to respond to this post and inform me so.

To any players who choose not to participate in the finals: Thank you so much for playing in this competition and making this such a fun event! I hope you've enjoyed It Could Always Be Worse!​
I’ll do the finals.
 

Tegan pilots a chicken

Sharpie Queen 💜
Premium Member
Needless to say, ICABW has not gone quite as well as many of us had hoped. The overlap with SYWTBAI and real-world factors have resulted in a less-than-stellar player experience. However, I want to make the remainder of this competition as enjoyable as possible for all players.
Can we all give Cap a big hand for the effort he put into this??

I think this game as a concept has a lot of potential, so I for one am hoping for a sequel sometime down the road without any significant overlap with a major comp.
 

Disney Warrior

Well-Known Member
ATTENTION ALL ICABW PLAYERS!
We have one more prompt remaining in Chapter Two before Chapter Three: FastPass, also known as the finals of this competition!

Needless to say, ICABW has not gone quite as well as many of us had hoped. The overlap with SYWTBAI and real-world factors have resulted in a less-than-stellar player experience. However, I want to make the remainder of this competition as enjoyable as possible for all players. Thus, we’re doing some unconventional things.

The final prompt of Chapter Two will be released today. For this prompt, all players will be participating as one big team. Because of this, there will be no winning team for this prompt. It’s simply an opportunity for all players to enjoy themselves with one last project before the finals.

The finals are open to all players, and will be entirely single-player. If you competed in the regular season of ICABW, you are eligible to compete in the finals. However, you are not required to if you don't want to. You will not be automatically put in the finals unless you specifically ask to be in the finals.

If you would like to participate in the finals, please be sure to respond to this post and inform me so.

To any players who choose not to participate in the finals: Thank you so much for playing in this competition and making this such a fun event! I hope you've enjoyed It Could Always Be Worse!​
Will Disney Warrior return as a competitor in the finals?
The answer is…





No. I’m devoting my time to finishing Disneyland Germany, and I will be somewhat busy with personal matters. Of course I will happily follow along and maybe give you guys some feedback along the way.

Forgot to mention that the “personal matters” is just a morning program at the high school I will be going to (school starts 9/8) every few days and I will be a freshman. I will still be active every day, but not every hour. Also I was one of, if not the only newcomers in this comp (if you don’t count @wazowski_216 ) even though I dropped out after the second prompt and basically became a guest reviewer.
 
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MickeyWaffleCo.

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
In the Parks
No
Chapter 2: Project 4
With Guest Judge @D Hulk


“Welcome back!” says Chapek as he shows us into a conference room.

“Now here’s your next assignment,” Chapek explains, pulling up a Microsoft Office 2008 PowerPoint presentation for visuals.

PowerPoint.jpg


“So as you know, we recently opened Avengers Campus in California Adventure. Well, now all of our superhero meet and greets that were filling up Hollywood Land are at the Campus, and Hollywood Land is looking a little empty. I’ve discussed things with the board, and we’re opting to completely replace Hollywood Land.”

“Sounds too good to be true,” murmured @D Hulk.

“Are there any limitations or restrictions?” asked @Shannoninthemagic, speaking for the group.

“What? Of course not! You just need to design an Avengers Campus expansion and a California-themed land incorporating lots of merchandise and stuff! Nothing to worry about!”


The Hollywood Sequel
With Guest Judge @D Hulk


For this assignment, your team will have to design both a brand new land and a small expansion to Avengers Campus. These newly renovated areas will replace Hollywood Land at Disney California Adventure.

The Avengers Campus expansion must include one E-Ticket attraction and one sit-down dining establishment.

The other land must, in the spirit of the original DCA, celebrate an idealized California. This land should be a smaller-scale land, and should be accessible from the end of Buena Vista Street.

IMPORTANT: ONLY PART of this round is a Lemon Round. The Avengers Campus expansion should be a regular land expansion, and the new California-themed land should be cringe-worthy.

DEADLINE:​

This project is due by Wednesday, August 18th at 11:59 PM EST.

TIPS:​

  • While you're limited to a specific theme for the Avengers Campus expansion, you have zero limitations on the other land! Be creative and cringey!​
  • Be sure to think about sight lines and guest flow! Layout will be critical for this Campus expansion, due to the space you have.​
  • Have fun with it! This is the last round of Chapter 2, and for some players, this may be the last round of ICABW. Make it a good one!​
 
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Tegan pilots a chicken

Sharpie Queen 💜
Premium Member
95F39961-B9E1-403B-A472-BD54A8EACB02.png


REVIEWS

Starting with Team Baxter, omg Tiki, your skipper voice. Please bust that out at random times. Please. Love it!

Kudos for going with an extremely unconventional presentation format. Was it born out of necessity? Sure. But that didn’t make it any less fun. And the unedited nature of the video made it all the more enjoyable. I mean this is the Chaos Verse, why not go ahead and be totally chaotic!

I really appreciate what you did with Agrabah, the Magic Carpet spinner, while being a cute ride, really does cause more issues than it’s worth in terms of crowding up the thoroughfare and making the area feel claustrophobic. By retaining the theming but removing the bulky flat ride, and replacing it with a splash pad, you successfully open the area up and make it more enjoyable to just be in, rather than an area that you just have to navigate in order to get to Jungle Cruise or Pirates. Great job.

Similarly, the new Tiki Room pre-show sounds absolutely fantastic!! The Tiki Room is a beloved classic but could definitely benefit from some non intrusive modernization. I think you nailed it with this! It sounds exciting and fun and still feels very true to the original attraction. Again, great job!

Where is Albert Awol?!?! It’s the question on everyone’s minds in Adventureland these days. I think the “missing person” posters scattered throughout the land is a brilliant way to bring the story out of the ride and into the entire land as a whole. This makes it feel more real and tangible and I really enjoy this detail. The new scenes in Jungle Cruise sound totally awesome!! Once again I think you managed to reimagine a classic experience without being too intrusive or disruptive to what makes it a classic in the first place. And the idea of the skippers being able to customize their costumes and their boats is wonderful!! I’d like to see that implemented in the real world right now! The poaching subplot reminds me a lot of the original Kilimanjaro Safari at Animal Kingdom, which is a good thing.

Overall this was a very fun project that would have probably been absolutely spectacular under the best of circumstances (without the game overlap, etc). I’d challenge you guys to come back around to this later on and fully realize it with a map and additional visuals. But great work!!

Onto Team Sklar. I really appreciate your thesis statement in the beginning. You clarify your motivations behind the project and set the tone for what we can expect while reading it.

Anamorphic animal people is not where my mind would have gone straight away, but it is certainly an extremely unique take on the ride, and land as a whole, so kudos for trying something extremely unique!

Clearly a lot of care went into the write up. I love the jokes and puns taken from the Skippers’ narrations. (Pretty sure that was @b-wolf95 but please correct me if I’m mistaken). The Jewel plot is fun, and feels very Indiana Jones to me. That is not at all a bad thing.

Unfortunately, while the Jungle Cruise ride itself definitely shines here, a few of the other areas of the land seemed a little forgotten about, being simply glossed over. I did appreciate the bit about the parrot man trying to hitch a ride to the Tiki Room. The expansion of Sunshine Tree Terrace is a welcome change. And I liked that you provided menus items and prices.

I would likewise challenge all of you to revisit this project down the line at some point, and try to realize it to its maximum, as I think there is a really amazing project here at the core.

I have no issue with simple forum posts for project submissions, but I would have really appreciated at least a couple images in your forum post, at least just to help shape your ideas more. But overall, great work!
 

Disney Dad 3000

Well-Known Member
ATTENTION ALL ICABW PLAYERS!
We have one more prompt remaining in Chapter Two before Chapter Three: FastPass, also known as the finals of this competition!

Needless to say, ICABW has not gone quite as well as many of us had hoped. The overlap with SYWTBAI and real-world factors have resulted in a less-than-stellar player experience. However, I want to make the remainder of this competition as enjoyable as possible for all players. Thus, we’re doing some unconventional things.

The final prompt of Chapter Two will be released today. For this prompt, all players will be participating as one big team. Because of this, there will be no winning team for this prompt. It’s simply an opportunity for all players to enjoy themselves with one last project before the finals.

The finals are open to all players, and will be entirely single-player. If you competed in the regular season of ICABW, you are eligible to compete in the finals. However, you are not required to if you don't want to. You will not be automatically put in the finals unless you specifically ask to be in the finals.

If you would like to participate in the finals, please be sure to respond to this post and inform me so.

To any players who choose not to participate in the finals: Thank you so much for playing in this competition and making this such a fun event! I hope you've enjoyed It Could Always Be Worse!​

Take it in stride. You've done a fine job! Have loved the whole idea behind this comp.
 

D Hulk

Well-Known Member
0MPJzpa.jpg


MARVEL EXPANSION & SAN FRANCISCO LAND

Good day, everyone.

This was a tricky, multi-pronged prompt: two lands in one, simultaneously resolving the problems with DCA’s existing Avengers Campus, while also going counterintuitive and creating a busted old DCA 1.0 land nearby. That would be a lot to ask even in an epic-scaled competition like Sorcerer’s Apprentice. It’s especially daunting in this present context, with other games ongoing, with everyone stretched thin, with so few folks available to brainstorm.

I strongly commend the players who truly stuck to this project! @ThemeParkPriest stepped up to lead a nearly depleted team, which cannot be easy. @Tegan pilots a chicken & @TheOriginalTiki both helped out with filling in the details and attractions, providing an invaluable assist. In contrast, @Brer Panther provided just one paragraph for something that's barely an A-ticket, which has been Brer’s standard approach. I’d love for Brer to take on more responsibilities, to risk more and create more, since I feel Brer’s capable of far more than a simple trolley description.

Overall, due to how short-handed our team was this week, there are lots of aspects which could’ve been fleshed out. Which would’ve been fleshed out in other circumstances, with more players. There isn’t much of a project intro beyond reiterating the prompt. While the attractions are all fleshed out, descriptions of the shops, restaurants, and overall area walkthroughs are all ignored. There’s no map. Given the week’s circumstances, I don’t fault Tiki Pilots a Priest for this. You did what you could with your resources.

Dr. Strange and the Manor of the Multi-verse

This attraction throughout was the creative brainchild of one @TheOriginalTiki, who truly came through with a passion project. No doubt there’s some pent up creativity from judging & hosting so much lately. This is a standout! It’s a very “Tiki” attraction, fully leaning into its own overwhelming manic style and going for broke.

The Winchester Mystery House is an ideal choice for DCA. To be honest, this doesn’t tonally fit the existing Avengers Campus (which is generally more tech than mystic), nor is it what I’d expect for a big MCU E-ticket, though perhaps it’ll fit better with Phase 4’s multiversal focus. On its own, it’s wild. DCA desperately needs an anchoring trackless dark ride. This fits that role well. The ride storyline is overwhelming, even more nonsensical than Forbidden Journey, using the multiverse as an “in” to pile on as many random Marvel-adjacent concepts as possible. Zombies, monsters, wizards, cartoons, Adam Sandler! I’m not a huge fan of all the non-MCU cameos (even though the multiverse concept allows for them), partly because the primary founding Avengers still somehow don’t have proper representation in Disney Parks. Oh well. This is technologically ambitious, with more complex scenes than even Rise of the Resistance, meaning that maintenance and breakdowns might be an issue. But hey, that’s what Disney E-tickets are these days! It’s a big crazy swing for the fences gamble, and a definite highlight of the week.

X-Men: Danger Room Debacle

So this replaces Monsters Inc.? That’s why a map would’ve been so useful. That section of DCA is totally not contiguous with Avengers Campus. Perhaps you could’ve used the Animation Academy building, with a new entrance facing Mission: Breakout?

The X-Men’s Danger Room perfectly suits a simulation ride. Even though I’d rather see more practical attractions come to DCA, and fewer screens, this does indeed fit the IP. And you totally own the IP’s possibilities, providing another sensory overload storyline which piles in every conceivable (non-Disney) X-Men performer possible! At times, the riders feel a little left out of the action, more like they’re just there to watch some computer-rendered superhero action. A stronger version of this could use more direct rider interaction, like Universal’s Spider-Man does oh so well, and a more streamlined storyline to match.

Lastly, Tegan sure does love capping ride capacity at 960! That’s too low, Tegs! That’s the same throughput as Dumbo, when an E-ticket like this wants something approaching 1,800 (at least), so it doesn’t become another virtual queue nightmare for guests.

San Francisco Land

This is an especially tricky thing to judge, since you were explicitly trying to make a “lemon” land in the style of DCA 1.0. In that, you succeeded. This all sounds so deliberately, intentionally lame. I think Cap’s intent with the lemon prompts is for players to simply have fun with a concept, so I hope that was the case here.

Lombard Street definitely lends itself to a Wild Mouse coaster…one of the lamest coaster types out there…and one already seen at DCA. Lemons -> lemonade! Well done! Part of me genuinely wants to experience a Virginia Reel, warts and all, just for the historical interest. Nice nod to the dreaded Superstar Limo, and good on you for not simply recreating it. (That would’ve been too easy.)

The additional “attractions” all fail to make San Francisco Land any better…meaning they perfectly serve their so-bad-it’s-good purpose. With everything, from Pier 39 to the Trolley to Chinatown, it’s super easy to imagine something better than what you’re providing. Lime a trolley that moves, for example. I keep asking “That’s it?!” That’s precisely how I felt when I first visited DCA in 2001 (I cried), like Disney was aggressively aiming mediocrity and still coming up short. You’ve captured that anti-timeless awfulness quite well. Needs more terrible puns though!​
 

MickeyWaffleCo.

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
In the Parks
No
Chapter 2: Project 4
WAFFLE'S REVIEWS


As @D Hulk mentioned, this was a very challenging prompt. The goal was to have fun with it as the last prompt of the regular season, though, and you did a fantastic job. Hats off to @ThemeParkPriest for really taking on the leadership role this week.

@TheOriginalTiki, you said that Manor of the Multiverse was one of your favorite projects, and with good reason. This would be a fantastic attraction for DCA. It's like a blend of the best parts of Tower of Terror, Mystic Manor, and some attraction concepts I've seen on the forum.

The pre-show to boarding area transition is an excellent way to start the show, and I would’ve loved to hear more about the practical effects you’d use to accomplish the transition. Actually, more effects descriptions throughout the write-up would have been much appreciated.

Including a Turtle Talk A-A as part of just the loading area? Are you nuts? This is an excellent idea! I’d love to see more detailed and interactive loading areas/queues like this employed at other attractions.

I love the inclusion of McGuire Spider-Man and the multiple versions of the Fantastic 4, and the Hydroman A-A is something I’d love to see in real life.

Danger Room Debacle is an excellent attraction in many ways. My only complaint with it is that you give no explanation for the appearance of the X-Men in an MCU-themed area. Even just a sentence explaining that the appearance of the attraction was caused by the multiversical shenanigans over at the manor would have been helpful.

The ride system is an excellent choice for this attraction. I do worry about information overload, though. The details of the storyline and the fast-paced events may be difficult to communicate over a couple minutes in a simulator. As Hulk mentioned, some parts might make the audience members feel like spectators instead of participants.

I would love to eat at Wong’s Tuna Melts.

Spin-Out is the worst. Good job! I'd actually like to try this coaster, but I can only imagine how terrible it would be. 😅

The Fishing attraction is so, so terrible. 🤣 It makes me imagine that you could purchase a large magnet from a next-door gift shop if you’d like to catch more fish at a time.

The cringe photo op with DCA is a work of art. The Trolley photo op itself is a funny addition, but the write-up made it even better.

Lucky Fortune honestly doesn’t sound that bad. Does this place have a bad reputation I’m just not aware of?

Ah, In-N-Out. Honestly I can fully support including it in a Disney park. But yes, putting it in DCA is very repetitive.

“Sorry, there is no Chinese chicken here” 🤣🤣🤣

Overall you guys did really well with such a challenging prompt, and I hope you all had fun with it! Now on to the finals!​
 

MickeyWaffleCo.

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
In the Parks
No
Chapter 3: Project 1
As construction begins on Manor of the Multiverse, @Tegan pilots a chicken gets a phone call.

"Excellent job on the new land, guys! Looks really great! I think you've all earned a bit of a break, so the company is paying for an all-inclusive vacation to Disneyland Paris for all of you!"

DSC_0146_024-800x400.jpg


Our group erupts in cheers at the news, but spirits are quickly dampened as we hear what follows.

"Of course, you won't be doing this for nothing! We need you to design a new land for Disneyland Paris. I'll forward you the details," Chapek says as he hangs up.

Moments later, @TheOriginalTiki receives an email with the criteria for the new land.

"Oh boy, this isn't looking great," he says. "We need to design a new land next to Discoveryland, and we're replacing Autopia."

"Yikes," exclaims @Brer Panther

"Indeed. I'll forward this to Coulson, but we'd better hop a plane to Paris and get this done."

Discovering a New Neighbor

For this prompt, you'll be tasked with designing a small new land for Disneyland Parc at the Disneyland Paris Resort. Your land will replace Autopia, in addition to encompassing some existing backstage space.

DEADLINE:​

This project is due by Tuesday, August 24th at 11:59 PM EST.

TIPS:​

  • Some sort of map or overview of your new land is highly recommended.​
  • Details aren't as essential with this prompt, as you'll be working solo. Only go into detail on the highlights of your land. You don't need to write a three page essay on a counter service restaurant.​
  • Choose a theme that you're passionate about!​
  • Remember that the park railroad goes straight through this plot of land, so be sure to make plans for covering it, raising it, rerouting it, or otherwise adjusting this portion of the track to your needs.​
  • You have approximately 35,000 square feet of area to work with, and you might want to design some sort of a berm or facade to hide the roadway around the park.
    Smaller.png

PLEASE NOTE:
There will be three players eliminated this round. Only four will move on to the final round of ICABW.
 

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