Six Flags New England - May 26, 2024

Six Flags New England! A park I visited for a few summers as a child. While it's not quite the park it used to be, it has one of the best one-two punches of any park, and a solid supporting cast. It's also a very good-looking park by Six Flags standards, and has retained much of its regional/trolley park atmosphere from the days it operated as Riverside Park.

I'll address rides first, then get to park quality, crowds, food, etc afterwards.

A good selection of flats here:

A word about park operations and Flash Passes:

Visiting a park on Memorial Day Weekend is always a touch-and-go affair when it comes to crowds, but the crowds at SFNE were actually not as bad as I was expecting. Unfortunately, the experience was marred by awful park operations. The staff seemed to be doing the best they could given the circumstances.

Let's start with Pandemonium. SFNE removed the shade from this long queue, as well as any nearby misters. Additionally, the Flash Pass handling in this park is atrocious. The standby line for Pandemonium slammed to a halt when my wife and I were only a few people away from the station because of a slow trickle of Flash Passes coming through. We waited in the same spot for 40 minutes before the ride ops allowed more regular standby guests to enter the station. I don't hold it against anyone for buying skip-the-line passes, but between the removal of the shades and misters, AND the poor Flash Pass handling, it's obvious that SFNE (and perhaps the chain as a whole) is making the standby line experience as unpleasant as possible in order to sell more Flash Passes. They've also removed Single Rider lines from this park, another nefarious way to punish people who haven't shelled out. Unsurprising scummy business practices from Six Flags.

A similar issue at Catwoman's Whip. Gates open, Flash Passers are allowed to enter and board the train, then standby line is allowed through. But the gates only seem to open for a limited time, so massive swaths of the very-long train are left empty once the gates close, as many of the kids riding need to be measured for height. With such a long train, this ride should absolutely rip through riders, but because it's run in this ass-backwards fashion, it takes way too long to get on. The line for this coaster was obscene by the end of the day because of this.

Batman was another wait that took way longer than it really needed to, especially when running two trains. Once again it comes to a total neglect of the standby line when Flash Passers are present. If you never stagger the lines, the standby line slows to a full stop, while Flash Passes just keep on coming. For the first time ever at any park, I heard other parkgoers complaining about this as well in almost every queue that day, and the increasing discontent and frustration among many of the park guests was noticeable as the day went on.

I'm not one of those people who will ever yell or demean skip-the-line users at the park. I think it's fucked up and weird to try and start fights at an amusement park over a service that anyone can buy. If you paid for it, then I'm not here to judge. But the park needs to handle these things better, because the regular old standby line experience (the vast majority of the parkgoers) is awful! No other parks have these issues with their skip-the-line systems. Hersheypark, Cedar Point, Kings Island, etc handle much bigger crowds and don't have these issues. But from what I've observed at both SFGAdv and SFNE, the chain is artificially inflating standby wait times and making those waits as unpleasant as possible in an effort to sell more Flash Passes. Premiumization is here, and it is actively hostile to the average customer.

Moving on from that:

SFNE shows much of the decline and decay exhibited by the rest of the chain sans SFFT. While the rides are still fun, there seem to be maintenance issues, and these coasters are overall rougher than they were two years ago. And the concession prices have spiked out of control - $17 for a slice of pizza? $18 for a hot dog? $9 for a bottle of Powerade? Get real.

The theming of the park overall is decent, especially towards the park's entrance, the Old West area, and in the DC area near Superman. Towards the Batman/Joker area, it's more of a collection of rides in a flat concrete patch.

The crowdedness of the park only worsened once Hurricane Harbor closed, so we cut the day short early and grabbed dinner around 7pm. Monday's forecast was extremely foreboding, with thunderstorms engulfing basically the entire day, so we headed home. Apparently the rain ended up holding up until after 4pm that day, but I had had my fill of SFNE for the weekend.

TL;DR: