Bumping an old thread, but I can’t find much on USS recently and don’t think we need a new one.
Universal Singapore is currently a bit embarrassing and it’s not because I dislike Minions Land. The park is now coming up on 15 years old. We think of a lot of the half baked new gates that proceeded this resort, but a lot of their grand makeovers have occurred by now. In fact most of them are onto makeover round 2.
New to me: spaghetti chase. It’s Cute!
They did a pretty good job with Minions actually. Blue box didn’t bother me. It’s only a single theatre and it’s not really that big. The rest of the land is the most competent version that I’ve seen. It does of course replace something that was also mediocre. I certainly could have done with anything other than Minions Mayhem, but this seems like a park on a budget nowadays.
The park itself is still reasonably pretty. All piled on top of one another perhaps. A lot can be said for being a mini Universal simply being for the most part more pleasing to look at. Though I am far more entertained in just USF. That’s saying something.
So let’s get to the embarrassing bits. I don’t think this park is healthy. It seems covered up by Genting as an accessory on their Sentosa bangle. Maybe there was 2.5k people in the park today. I thought I was a bit crazy, but I’ve now noticed USS has completely fallen off TEA reports and this has not been discussed. It was around 2.1M visitors in 2022 and since then it is not breaking into the top 20 Asian parks, so somewhere I assume between that and the 4.2M cut off.
It runs itself like a regional park as well. 5 minute waits, but don’t worry, Battle Star Galactica runs 45min, with its single train operations. This is barely 200 people an hour. Waterworld isn’t running, I assume to save on costs. The Troll show blocked off 6 of 9 sections in its massive theatre for the only afternoon showing because there just aren’t people here. The fireworks is one day a week and the parade another one day a week. I’m not knocking it for these reasons, but Jurassic Adventure and Puss in Boots are also down for maintenance today.
I left the park after a meandering all inclusive 4.5H and not because I’m trying to be obnoxious about it, I just didn’t have anything left to do.
So in the midst of Disney having a maiden voyage today on their ex-Genting vessel that coincidentally enough will also turn through 2.5M guests a year, I can’t help but figure maybe they are entering this market in a better fashion. Ironically these are the only two markets now (including Orlando) I actually feel they are head to head competitors. I really don’t think California is that much overlap and the other sites are so geographically distinct, including the new UK park, they are not worth as many words as they tend to receive.
Some Nintendo site photos to follow.
