Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – Friday, March 4th, 2011
Berjaya Times Square Theme Park is an indoor theme park that opened in 2003 under the name “Cosmo’s World”, and it very much feels like a product of the early 2000’s. With a deep saturated complementary color scheme and rather bizarre cartoony sci-fi/fantasy design, the park feels at the cusp between old-school and new-school themed design. Apart from the name, it appears to have changed very little since it opened. Most of the major ride hardware is supplied by Intamin, including the signature attraction: Supersonic Odyssey, an impressively big-for-an-indoor-park triple looping coaster.
The rest of the park is a collection of less typical flat rides that Intamin has a hard time selling elsewhere. With no main entrance or exit, the park boundaries blur with the rest of the mall. Certainly when I first entered Berjaya Times Square I had my doubts that a theme park of its scale could be found in such an unassuming place, but soon enough the squeals of Supersonic Odyssey (were those wheels or riders?) could be heard echoing down the halls. After a quick McDonald’s meal (my focus for this excursion was emphatically not on the cuisine) I was off to experience Berjaya Times Square Theme Park.
I can tell that a western themed design company was involved, thanks to these “character backstory” panels. The tell is not only that they are firmly in the American theme park designer tradition of being unnecessarily verbose and off-topic (Professor Cosmo’s golf hobby gets two mentions in the bio despite having zero relevance to anything in the park) but use generally proper English spelling and grammar which you will virtually never find in a homegrown Asian theme park. (Also a fine use of Comic Sans to reinforce the early 2000’s vibe.)
Anyway, let’s jump right into the main attraction: Supersonic Odyssey. (Note the creepy flower face for later…)
Unfortunately I wouldn’t be enjoying the ride too quickly, as they only dispatched six trains per hour. Even with the long break between cycles, the train was virtually never filled beyond half capacity.
Supersonic Odyssey is a strange ride in many respects. Despite opening a year after Colossus at Thorpe Park, it uses the older style Intamin looping trains that have a much bulkier design. It’s honestly a blessing since having recently tried the newer trains at Chimelong Paradise I can still confirm that they are among the most uncomfortable rolling stock ever designed for a coaster. Yes, they’re pretty boxy, but that means there’s tons of legroom inside and the over-the-shoulder harness never pinches down too tight. There’s a reason that Disney has kept using these same trains at California Adventure despite having several refurbishment opportunities to upgrade to a newer, pared back design.
The layout is also pretty unorthodox. The station is elevated above the rest of the park, allowing it to begin with a slow S-bend leading into a heartline roll.
It then circles one of the flat rides on the lower level of the park before changing directions to do another partial helix cantilevered over an atrium above the food court.
It only now gets to the 124 foot tall lift hill, which is its own oddity unto itself. It uses a booster wheel lift, something I’ve never seen on a non-Schwarzkopf coaster of this scale. Perhaps it’s used for noise control or to reduce the amount of grease used in the indoor setting?
At the top of the lift it borrows a trick from Hersheypark’s Great Bear, opting to do more aerial noodling some hundred feet above the floor instead of getting to the main drop right away.
While I appreciate the layout’s attempts to be unconventional, up until this point the ride has been more “interesting” than “exciting”. It’s not until it drops into the vertical loop coiled around a pedestrian bridge (which doesn’t happen until more than halfway through the layout) that it finally kicks into high gear.
Without wasting a beat, it surges up into a rapid Stengel dive/curve (while narrowly ripping through a strange flower-lips ring), and then whips back in the opposite direction for a high-speed corkscrew. This sequence of three elements (loop-dive-corkscrew) is undoubtedly the highlight of Supersonic Odyssey.
After this dynamic but brief sequence, the train seems to quickly bleed off its kinetic energy as it curves back around above the children’s area (with some pretty strange theming nearby). There’s a quick pop of airtime (only felt in the front couple of cars, pretty much the only moment on the whole ride) as it slides into the brakes.
I wanted to like Supersonic Odyssey a bit more than I actually did. On paper, it seems like a very quirky, one-of-a-kind ride, and the loop-dive-corkscrew sequence beats anything else I’ve experienced on other Intamin multi-inversion coasters (Blitz coasters excluded). Yet the reality was that a majority of the ride time is spent on freeform noodling in a way that just reminded me that the good stuff was either still to come or had already passed. Given the constraints of the space it’s probably the best layout they could have managed, but I still wish it had more substance and less vamping before it turns Malaysia into a must-visit coaster destination.
As you may have noticed, the rest of the park around Supersonic Odyssey has some pretty bonkers design. There’s sort of two main areas, an upper children’s section that’s some sort of oversized tropical alien planet called “Fantasy Garden”, and a lower section with the larger adult flat rides that’s more generically “space” themed called “Galaxy Station”. (Supersonic Odyssey’s load platform sits between the two). I have no idea what’s going on in the upper level (giant junk food with anthropomorphic flowers and random molecular structures?) but it sure is a fever dream of themed design.
Oh, and remember that creepy flower face at the entrance of Supersonic Odyssey? Apparently they have an exact copy at the entrance of every single ride in Fantasy Garden. Nightmare fuel.
Let’s move down to Galaxy Station on the lower level…
There’s a big window along the back that should provide natural light during the day, although at night I might have assumed it was just a black wall.
Dizzy Izzy is some sort of Octopus-style flat ride.
Space Attack is an Intamin variation of Zamperla’s Hawk flat rides, essentially a giant suspended looping machine.
Another Intamin creation, Spinning Orbit is the most unique flat ride combining the motions of a Condor but with individual outward-facing fixed-position seats.
The Condor is the better ride. The awkward outward seating means the centrifugal force is too strong to be fun, while requiring the cycle to be too slow to be thrilling.
The last ride I sampled in this area was the DNA Mixer, a Moser rides creation. I’m pretty sure it broke while we were riding, because after completing a full cycle, the gondola then spent a minute stopping and starting a few inches at a time as it got closer to the home position… only to suddenly start back up and swing all the way around again. Repeat this several times, and after around ten minutes of this we finally were able disembark. Of course the ride operator gave no indication that anything was amiss, but I didn’t see it running with passengers again for the rest of the evening.
For an indoor mall theme park, Berjaya Times Square Theme Park ranks fairly well. It’s clear the design involved a lot more care and resources (and maybe a few drugs) than a normal FEC, and the ride selection is a couple notches more thrilling than you’d expect. However, like many indoor theme parks, it falls victim to a hostile auditory environment and unpleasant lighting design that’s simultaneously too dark and too bright, meaning it’s not a place I’d want to spend more than a couple hours at a time before escaping to somewhere more hospitable to human habitation. (Like, outside.) While not reason enough to anchor a trip to Malaysia, if you find yourself in Kuala Lumpur it’s certainly a place that shouldn’t be skipped, if not only to get a lap on Supersonic Odyssey.
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