Universal Studios

Universal Studios Japan is apparently veryt similar to the Universal park in Orlando, USA except this one was built on an old contaminated site. This might explain the extreme happiness of the all the park staff and its craziness.

The park is themed into its different sections like new york, hollywood, Amity Village (jaws), Jurassic park, Snoopy Studios etc. It basically a mix of shows, rides and a crapload of merchandise.

Some of the shows included Shrek 4-D, Terminator 2 - 3D and there were many others. Were weren't really interested in any shows but as we were walking around we just happened to come across the Waterworld show which was just starting so we took a look. It was basically a 20minute action scene in an outdoor theatre including boats, fireworks, fighting, jet ski's and a almost full scale sized plane flying over the wall towards the audience giving everyone a scare.

Univeral Studio's offers a different way of reducing the waiting time for rides than Disney and thats buy paying an extra premium at the gate. Basically for an extra 22$ you can get four fast passes which enable you to go into another line and usually wait 1/4 or 1/10 of the time. This was well worth the money as the park wasn't too busy and allowed us to go onto the ride in no time as the lines were still 30-45mins long if you had no pass. Screw going to a theme park in peak season.

The rides we went on were:

Spiderman, you sat in a moving vehicle/pod thing and wore 3d glasses. The pod was on a tracks and was hydrualically controlled so you were move and thrown about here and there. The effects were quite good using alot of flames, hot air and water. The best effects were the feelings of extreme movement via the pod moving and also the 3d movie. One of them included flying up up above a skyscraper then back down against the road. This ride was quite good.

Back to the Future, your in a delorian and in a huge imax theatre and you are basically taken through time and into different scenarious. it was ok.

Jurassic park, a log cabin ride through some rivers with a few animatronic robots and the finale was a 25m near veritcal drop into the waters below. It was a pretty short ride and sorta boring, bar the drop at the end.

Jaws, your in a tour boat around Amity Village and Jaws is chasing you and the finale is him being fried to death. Sneh. :)

I got to see a delorean back to the future version (replica) :)

Because the park wasn't very busy and we had our fast passes we were able to get around the park in only a few hours so we had to kill some time until the days show finale, Peter Pans Neverland so we went to the Hard Rock Cafe for dinner. We thought the meals were a bit expensive for what they were but when they came out they were friggin huge, neither of us could finish our meals.

The peter pan show was in the huge lake within the park. It was basically the story of peter pan with fireworks, trampolines, music and the peter pan flying 30 odd meters into the air above the lake and the audiences.

Basically Univeral Studios is family oriented so you couldn't really go there expecting hard core extreme rides so they are a bit lame if your looking for a good scare. An example of this is their Dream Ride rollercoaster which looks to be for Cinderella with all its lights and looked quite slow for its size. It was still good though with how well everything was themed.

Pictures

Shaun