Trip Report for Buffalo Bills
7/15/04
Crowds/Weather: Empty/Rain

Park Rating
Mike: 2 out of 5
Mike’s Park Comments: The Primm casinos do a pretty good job compensating for the fact that they are so far from anything else. You are pretty much relying on them for everything during your stay. At the Primm casinos, you’ll find a fair amount of fast food and restaurants, a movie theater, a large mall/outlet store, frequent cocktail service if you’re gambling, and of course the reason we were here, an amusement park with an arcade.

All these choices are good, because you won’t want to spend all day in the amusement park. Primm’s small park is not only missing rides, it’s missing TLC. (“Tender Loving Care,” not Left Eye and Chili). Their eccentric and original log flume meets shoot em’ up dark ride feels decrepit. A whole bunch of stuff was not working in the dark ride elements, and it simply could have felt a lot more special if the casino put any effort into it. Instead, this ride and most of the others felt like what it is – a diversion the casino created for the kids while Dad gambles the house away. Which is fine, but it’s also obvious they don’t care about it.

How much you like Primm is probably in the end going to be relative to how much you like Desperado – everything else is window dressing. I didn’t like Desperado much. It was violent and the trains rattled to a degree that I just found painful and unpleasant.

Clarisse: 3.3 out of 5
Clarisse’s Park Comments: This is a park out in the middle of nowhere in the desert. The only thing notable about it’s location is that it’s the first Nevada exit on the highway from LA. OK, if you have to satitsfy your urge to gamble the SECOND you enter Nevada, then please, check out the park as well. Bring the kids, and before you gamble spend at least a half hour of qualitiy time with them in the arcade and riding the rides. The arcade is pretty sweet. Go shopping in the nearby outlets…if you’re anywhere near this park, at least stop in and see what its all about. If you’re going to Vegas, you have another hour to go on the road, so stop and stretch your legs. If you’re going to LA, well then you’re entering the middle of nowhere and at the very least you should stop to pee, you’ll regret it if you don’t.

The park is inside a casino, but then again, so is everything in Nevada. The park consists of a drop tower (closed), a movie like motion sim (closed), a coaster, a flume, a froghopper, a motion sim and an arcade. I was bummed about the movie thingy, I wanted to do it.

Desperado

Clarisse: 4.45 out of 5
Comments: This is a beautifully rough steel coaster. It becomes painfully rough in the third seat! It beat up Mike’s ribs and my elbows, and I got violently thrown out of my seat on 2 of the hills. Of course all of this is in the name of good fun. It’s got 2 tunnels in one of them the coaster goes through a helix. Desperado is pretty fast. The first drop is high steep and goes down very fast, it made me fuzzy in the head. The loading platform is inside the casino (its too hot to do anything outside in Nevada) so the transition from inside & air conditioning, to blazing, blinding desert sun is quite shocking. The scenery on the coaster is cool with mountains (and in our case thunderstorms) in the distance. On the right of the lift hill, be sure to check out the shape of the pool.

Mike: 3.25 out of 5
Comments: Whoever designed these trains needs to be shot. Strikingly similar to Gerstlauer trains in the sense that THE WHOLE THING SHAKES, this incredibly violent and unpleasant hyper coaster is too busy bruising me for me to enjoy the wild airtime on a few of the hills.

Flume

Clarisse: 3.4 out of 5
Comments: Riders get to shoot guns at targets on this flume! I won, 49 to 1 but Mike stopped playing very quickly. The water that the boat floats in is very yucky and smelly. This ride loads inside the casino and goes outside and back in through the casino floor. The change in light wreaks havoc with your eyes, especially if you’re trying to focus and shoot things. The targets are a lot harder to hit than they should be and the gun doesn’t work that well, especially in the sunlight. There’s also no way that one person can shoot all of the targets, there are just too many of them.

Mike: 2.5 out of 5
Comments: A flume ride with laser guns and Western figures that move when you shoot them. Well, some of them move, at least. A lot of stuff seems like it’s not working on this ride, and the stuff that is working is very hard to shoot. Actually, I wouldn’t know as I’m a horrible shot at these kind of games. But Cla is a good shot and she agreed many of the figures are very hard to shoot or not working. Still, this is a cute and original attraction worth checking out for the novelty if nothing else.

Coaster Simulator

Clarisse: 3.75 out of 5
Comments: The motion sim is an enclosed 2 seater contraption that rotates riders 720 degrees. The seats come equipped with over the shoulder restraints so riders aren’t just flopping about during the experience. There is a movie screen in front of riders that shows the graphic of a coaster track that the motion sim follows. The graphics suck, and they could have been more creative with the video, I mean there are other reasons one could feasibly spin around on different axis. I’m waiting for the version where riders have a control stick and you have to follow a track, now that sounds cool to me!

Mike: 2.5 out of 5
Comments: It gets the basic points any attraction gets for spinning me upside down, but that’s about it. The graphics on this “coaster simulator” are so lame it’s shocking they put this expensive car around it. Cheezy crap that doesn’t work the way it was intended. The wind effect is bad, as is the sound. Basically, the only thing it can do is spin you around, which it does well enough.