Six Flags Great Adventure - Opening Day 2024

The Excellent:

• El Toro - Offseason maintenance worked wonders for this ride and it seems to be running better than it has in many years. Even the oft-maligned turnaround is smooth now. From drop to brake run, this now stands as the best coaster in the park without question or caveat.
• New Footpaths - One of the biggest issues with SFGAdv is navigating the east side of the park. Before, there was no easy way to access Kingda Ka from El Toro or Medusa without walking all the way back to the "Boardwalk" section of the park near the carnival games. Now there is a cut-through footpath from Toro's entrance to Ka's entrance. It looks like that area of the park is being cleared out and will possibly be seeing new attractions and construction. Additionally, the park demolished the old paintball building to restore Dream Street. Now from the park's entrance fountain, you can walk a straight path all the way down to the nexus between Toro, Medusa, and Ka (Plaza Del Carnival, Frontier Adventures, and Golden Kingdom are the names of the specific park regions). This is a major quality of life improvement.
• Batman: The Ride - This 31-year-old B&M shows no signs of slowing down or aging. It's the slickest-looking ride in the park by a longshot, with great orange track, dark gray supports, and black Batman logo trains. Compact, whippy, packs a great punch. A joy to ride every time.
• Staff - Maybe it's just because they haven't had the chance to be worn down by park guests and summer heat, but all the staff were friendly and enthusastic. This is probably the best showing I've seen from park staff in all my time coming to this park.

The Good:

• Nitro - Running as good as ever, with ample airtime and that great double helix, but has not yet been repainted as has been rumored for years now. I absolutely love Nitro's original color scheme, but its old and faded appearance do no favors for a park that needs everything it can get to look prettier.
• Jersey Devil - Offers RMC's signature airtime and hangtime moments, but much more rattley and uncomfortable than any of their I-Box conversions.
• Fresh Paint - Some parts of the park still need it, but what they did manage to cover over the offseason looks great. Specifically the Carousel is looking just fantastic. Hopefully they can manage to give the rest of the park that treatment. A literal fresh coat of paint is what this park has been needing for ages.
• Flash Progress - Footers have been poured and new track is onsite for the Flash: Vertical Velocity. That's more than I was expecting of SFGAdv at this juncture, so I'm actually pretty confident that they'll actually get this open by the summer.
• Merchandise - I like a lot of the merch offered at this park. Ride shirts look great and not embarrassing like some other parks. The 50th Anniversary themed stuff looked great. And best of all, it's actually quite reasonably priced. Passholder discounts are paltry, but those diamond hand holding onto their old DEVIP memberships are still taking advantage of a 50% discount! Ride that shit out to the end, you beautiful bastards.

The Bad:

• Kingda Ka - After weeks of hyping up this ride opening for the first weekend, it was closed both Saturday and Sunday without explanation. The circulating rumor is that it did not pass state inspection. The attached drop ride Zumanjaro was running without issue. At best, it was irresponsible marketing to hype this ride as part of opening weekend and then fail to deliver. But failure to deliver is just part of the Six Flags experience.
• Closed Sections - In addition, Mine Train, Green Lantern, and Superman were also closed because their respective sections of the park are totally fenced off. We knew this going into Opening Day - the map lists Mine Train as opening in spring, and Green Lantern and Superman opening Memorial Day weekend.
• Other Closed Rides - The Skyway, Log Flume, and Big Wheel are still undergoing renovations and are supposed to be opening later this year. Cyborg Hyper Spin was closed due to constuction on Flash. Skull Mountain was closed for no apparent reason.

The Ugly:

• Ride-Again Wristbands - Unbeknownst to me and my wife (Diamond passholders), they offered "ride-again wristbands" for opening weekend. This allowed riders with wristbands to ride twice. This would have been a great promotion for early May or June, before peak season hits and you're trying to drum up off-peak traffic to the park. For opening weekend, it was a disaster, and only compounded by...
• One-Train Operations - I know it's opening weekend. I get it. The park opened two weeks earlier than it normally does and "we should be grateful" or some shit (that's what the mouthbreathers on Great Adventure Connoisseurs keep saying). With so many rides closed and with the wristband promotion, only running one train on every coaster was always going to be a mess, especially allowing people to ride back-to-back. We rope dropped El Toro and Medusa and got on those with minimal waits, but it took an hour to get on Batman, almost two hours to get on Jersey Devil, and over an hour to get on Nitro. The park wasn't even that crowded - the lines took forever because of the one-train ops and wristbands. This element just about ruined our day at the park. Between 11 AM and 6 PM, we got on 7 rides. That's an abysmal pace. And that's not the only reason the lines crawled throughout the day - there was also the issue of...
• Inefficient Flash Pass - Bad on Nitro and just about catastrophic on Jersey Devil, it seems like SFGAdv doesn't quite understand how to handle their Flash Pass. Between the wristbands, one-train ops, and Flash Pass lines, the regular standby lines moved painfully slow. Jersey Devil is the worst offender of this, as I experienced the same thing a year and a half ago during Fright Fest on that ride. But that was three-train ops with a way bigger crowd. This past weekend, we had the same Flash Pass issue as before, but the wristbands and one-train ops made the standby lines feel like a peak summer weekend day or a Fright Fest weekend night rather than a cool spring afternoon.
• Speedy Parking - This year, Six Flags installed a prepaid parking option known as "speedy parking." Buy parking online, enter your license plate number, and you'll be automatically let in when the camera scans your plate. In theory this is a great idea, but it seems either nobody got the memo or the system was hopelessly broken. We got to the park at 10:30 AM and it took just about a half hour to get past the parking booths. There weren't that many cars in line! There was one guy helping 5 or 6 different lanes of traffic to get through the booths, and hoooo boy people were UPSET.
• Drink Changes - In the past, if you had a drink plan (or simply needed to refill your water) you could easily do so at a self-service station. This is no longer the case. Now you need to wait in line and have someone behind a food counter do the refill for you. This may be due to people abusing the old system, but this (along with many concession stands being closed entirely) made food and drink lines untenably long. Not that I'd recommend eating 95% of the food offered at this park anyway, but the point stands.

TL;DR:

• More bad than good
• Made me mildly regret buying a pass this year - hopefully things improve
• Rides are still great, but they're better when they're actually open and the lines move at a reasonable pace