Kings Island Pictures, Beast & Son Of Beast Video
Jun 23, 2006Third update in three weeks! This time we got a whole slew of items from Kings Island. There’s a bunch to cover so stick with me.
First and foremost 66 new pictures of Kings Island. More great ‘behind the scenes’ shots of Beast and Son Of Beast, pics of the new Nickelodeon Universe including the new Avatar ride. There’s even full coverage of the Nickelodeon Parade showing everything there is to see. A couple of new panoramic photos (Sorry I don’t have some cool name for them like Super-vision or Mega-view or whatever. They’re panoramic photos and they’re cool as hell.) - be sure to look at the large version of the Tomb Raider and Avatar panoramics. Good stuff!
I also have a new video of The Beast & Son Of Beast that shows the rides in action from some great angles. There’s even a little bit of Avatar tacked on to the end. The videos are even bigger this season and now in widescreen. In addition, the smaller version of the video is formatted for portable players like the iPod and PSP - so get over there and take a look. Things keep getting better in that area.
There’s also two new wallpaper images. Again, Beast and Son Of Beast are featured. Some cool photos for your desktop if you’re in the market for such things.
BeastBuzz was a great time last weekend and hopefully you enjoy what I was able to gather. Less than a week turnaround on all of this - not too shabby. I suppose I’d rather be the best than be the first.
Looking forward, we should be making a few more stops within two weeks. More details as things come together. Until then enjoy this update from my new home park. (the move is going well, by the way - thanks for asking)
Six Flags Great Adventure Pictures
Jun 16, 2006Welcome to the first update of many to come from Ohio. We made the move this past weekend and I have to admit I like Southwestern Ohio much more than I thought I would. You know, I bought the coasterimage.com domain and started gathering material for the site while living in northeast Florida. Shortly after that we moved to eastern Pennsylvania and I continued getting material and finally got the site online. Just a few months after going live with the site we moved to western Pennsylvania where I continued building the site including an all-new, updated design. This week we officially became Ohio residents. I suppose moving around like that makes it easier to hit new parks, right?
New Six Flags Great Adventure pictures this time! As usual they’re scattered about in no particular order, so take a look around. With this update the site now features more than 4400 photos in the galleries alone. I see no reason why it couldn’t easily top 5000 before this season ends.
Enjoy this update. Tomorrow we’ll be doing BeastBuzz at Kings Island. I expect to snag tons of pics of the new Nickelodeon Universe, updated shots of the coaster line-up & park in general and finally some new video. Speaking of which, this year we’ll be upping the ante again - increasing the overall resolution of the clips and offering an iPod format along with the large Windows Media version. On top of that I’m officially stepping up to 16:9 widescreen aspect for all videos from here on out. (I have some ideas brewing that make this switch beneficial - keep your eyes open later in the year)
It’s all good. We may have gotten off to our slowest start in a long while, but things are coming together quite nicely. Expect tons of updates this year and be sure to check back early next week for some new goodies from Kings Island.
Six Flags Great Adventure Trip Report
Jun 9, 2006So we made it to New Jersey this past Wednesday. The weather refused to co-operate with the idea of getting material for the site, but it did promote a day of hardcore riding.
I’m too busy right now with our move coming up in two days, but if you’d like to see some stuff from our trip to Six Flags Great Adventure or just read a simple trip report then take a look here. There’s photos and a little video included. I’ll eventually get around to slipping some of the new photos from this trip into the galleries, but in the meantime have to get this move finished and take care of BeastBuzz at Kings Island. So give me a week or so and we’ll go from there. Until then enjoy the trip report from this past Wednesday.
Status Of The Site
Jun 3, 2006I’ll bet you thought I left you hanging, didn’t you? You know, I promised all of these updates, did a couple of maps and then disappeared. Still no word on any actual park visits and new material for the site. A whole lot of nothing going on. You’d think we were just another run of the mill coaster media site, but alas, let me reassure that this is the place to be. Here’s the full rundown of exactly what’s been going on:
Let me just start at the beginning…err, well right after the last update to the site. I busted some serious ass and pumped out a whole slew of maps detailing park locations for most of the hemisphere. Still high from the possibilities, I proclaimed more to come along with some long overdue updated info. At that very moment I realized Google has updated their Maps API to a brand new version 2. Yup, right after I based an entire section of the site on the old version 1 standard. In the interest of not being obsolete upon arrival, I dug into the info for version 2 and began updating. (more on that in a moment)
Shortly into the process of reworking work I had just done, life just got really crazy. It seemed everyone had somewhere to be or something to do pretty much constantly. The time kept slipping away and I wasn’t making much progress on redoing the maps, let alone getting to the new stuff I promised.
Then to just keep stacking more and more on, we were presented with a personal opportunity that would be very advantageous to our personal lives, but would require a move. So now even more time was taken up working on this whole thing. But I still did what I could when time permitted.
So earlier this week I learned that as of June 12, we will no longer be residents of southwestern Pennsylvania, but rather we will officially be residents of southwestern Ohio. I believe it officially makes our new home park Kings Island in trade for our current home park, Kennywood. But what this really did was put some serious pressure on at least one trip I wanted to make. (more on this later)
Things finally started winding down with the family, we began preparing for the move and I spent nights pounding out the new maps - which now feature better markers and a fancy schmancy progress bar that shows the map loading. Really nice stuff and it’s an improvement over the originals. I learned a lot and have tons of stuff I’d like to add, but we’ll get to that when we do.
With the maps out of the way I started looking at some parks I wanted to hit and how the move affected things. Basically, some things changed but nothing too major will be missed or added with one exception - Six Flags Great Adventure. It’s been killing me since we got rained out of a visit last year and with the addition of El Toro it was pretty much a must-hit for me this season. My plan was to wait for El Toro to officially open and head over. However, adding 4 hours to the trip (after the move west) just isn’t going to happen. So now I find myself with 10 days until we move and trying to fit a trip to New Jersey in before then.
The time just wasn’t there for us to make the trip and on top of that, El Toro isn’t expected to open before the time we leave. I went into brainstorming mode and made time while recruiting my brother to ride shotgun for this one. What I ended up with is a stop at Great Adventure this upcoming Wednesday, June 7th. Almost certainly too soon to sample El Toro, but still good enough for material for the site. The plan is to have the new stuff online before we head out for Ohio. The plus side to the move is that now we’re a heck of a lot less than 5 hours away for BeastBuzz at Kings Island on June 17. You can expect pics and video from that event shortly after the 17th. In addition, this puts us much closer to Holiday World and their new coaster & Beech Bend and their new woodie. In fact, it puts us right in line to pick up where we cut last year’s two-week-trip short. Don’t be surprised if all of those missed parks show up on the site this summer. (smile)
That brings us up to right now. Things are finally looking up. Thanks to every last one of you for still stopping by and sticking with us through the slow spring (June is the latest in the year we’ve hit a park since I began the site) and be sure to check back next week for some goodies from Six Flags Great Adventure (Kingda Ka media, El Toro stuff, the new themed areas and things like that) followed closely by new Kings Island photos, video and whatnot. As long as y’all keep stopping by, Coasterimage.com will keep delivering the goods. That’s how we roll.
