worlddreamer said:
Personally, I WILL NEVER GO TO UNIVERSAL AGAIN! Let me explain..
Stayed onsite at Disney for 10 days. First trip, so I figured we would need to "escape" from that atmosphere for a day. The entire time we were at US/IOA, we wished we were back at Disney for several reasons..
1) While there were a few rides that were unique (MUMMY, Spiderman) for the most part you could find exactly the same thing at Disney except with better themeing. For example: MIB is the SAME as Buzz Lightyear.
2) The only ride I really considered a rollercoaster was the HULK, and it was fun, but not enough to make up for all the "thrill rides" I had heard and read about. Take this with a grain of salt though because we live pretty close to Cedar Point which boasts 16+ legit rollercoasters including most of the tallest and fastest in the world. My boyfriend and I LOVE rollercoasters, and were disappointed in what we found at US/IOA.
3) We commented several times that we felt sorry for anyone who had purchased the express passes (and I know several had because I tried and they were sold out) because the parks were soo slow we never waited more than 5 minutes for a ride (with the exception of Jaws). We were able to do BOTH parks between the hours of 10 and 4 riding every single ride and we sat to eat at Mythos for an hour.
4)The MAJORITY of rides are motion simulators. The first one we went on, someone was actually vomiting in front of us, and the next smelled of vomit. Of the rides that aren't simulators, the rest will get you SOAKING wet. Not splashed or wet, but DRENCHED!
5) The locker system is HORRIBLE! Not a single machine in the whole park would read my finger prints- any of them! 3 different times we had to have park security help us get our stuff into and out of a locker just so we could ride a ride!
6) The park seemed sadly unthemed and dirty after being in WDW for so long. The employees were completely uninterested and rude. And between the shuttle, tickets, and food we had paid over $250 to be there!
All that being said...
it was nice being out of Disney for a few hours. We did enjoy Suess Landing. But next time, we will ABSOLUTLEY be going to Sea World!
But should you decide to go, I hope you have a great time!
1) Completely a matter of opinion, and I completely disagree with yours. MIB may use the same basic premise as Buzz, but to me the theming is way better on MIB, not to mention the added bonus of an actual storyline that continues throughout the whole ride, and the extra bonus of actual competition between the left and right halves. Also, if Disney is the same, where in Disney can you find Posiedon's Fury, Twister, Jaws, a racing coaster like Dueling Dragons, Earthquake, a themed restaurant to compare with Mythos, the E.T. Adventure, or anything that comes close to T2:3D?
2) As others have said, IOA has Hulk, Dueling Dragons, the Mummy's Revenge, and even the kiddie coaster called the Flying Unicorn. Compare that to Disney's Space and Splash Mountains, RNRC, and Expedition Everest. Two parks-four coasters, vs four parks-four coasters. And when it comes to quality, I think that IOAs coasters match up pretty much evenly to Disney's. Of course, if you want to compare to Cedar Point, then you conveniently forgot that Disney also fails miserably to compete with Cedar - but it's not supposed to, and neither is Universal/IOA.
3) You felt sorry for those who bought the Express Pass yet you tried to buy one yourself? Maybe they weren't sold out; maybe Uni was just not selling it that day, just like Disney turns off FastPass when it gets slow.
4) MAJORITY? Count 'em, you're wrong. And there are only two soaking rides in IOA (plus one wet ride that doesn't soak) and none in USF at all.
5) I've seen plenty of people having problems with the lockers, and 9 out of 10 of them were operator error. You need to use the same finger to drop off and pick up, you need to put the finger on in exactly the same way both times, and you need to put the whorls or the fingerprints on the reader, not the part further down.
6) I don't know what parks you're talking about, but the USF and IOA that I have visited every year since 1990 is today as clean as Disney (for a while they were actually cleaner), and I have not encountered a Uni TM who was not enthusiastic, polite, helpful, and seemed to be very happy in their jobs for years.
My experiences at the Uni parks are so radically different from yours I can't explain it. Perhaps it's because I go to Uni looking for fun, and maybe you went to Uni looking for an excuse not to go back.