Today I happened to have a free day in CA so I decided to spend it at Great America, being as it's so easy to get to from Palo Alto.
Overall, I had a pretty good time. Got to ride everything multiple times, with the only closed ride being FireFall (HUSS TopSpin). It was a little overpriced, but if I had been able to plan ahead there were plenty of ways to get a more reasonable ticket.
It was a somewhat different experience than any of the other parks I've been to. There are really no outstanding attractions here. Most of the rides suffer from some combination of being short, rough, or boring. Flight Deck was pretty good, but very forceful for a B&M, really throwing riders over the inversions. Grizzly was pretty rough and lame at the same time: boring curves spaced by jackhammer drops. Demon was a true classic ride, but you take a punch with each ride. Vortex just knocks the crap out you plain and simple. Hard to believe they actually built more than one stand up B&M.
There's also an OK mouse and an inverted Vekoma boomerang, both of which were OK.
As far as other rides go, most of them were old classics that ran very short cycles. They do have a Zamperla Disk-O coaster which was surprissingly better than the normal disk-o, and an Intamin 2nd-Gen drop tower that was OK.
The park is definitely lacking some solid attractions. It felt like everything there was worn out and needed to be replaced. The newest coaster in the park is the wild mouse which was built in 2001. I hope they get their new GCII soon, because it's hard to see what people are paying $50 a ticket for right now. Taking out Stealth for Boomerang Bay was a straight up stupid move from what I can tell. I was wearing my jacket all day and didn't feel hot except once during midday. Very few people were using the water attractions, and this was the third of August.
So if you're in the area, this park isn't really worth full ticket price as it is right now. It's an OK park, but there really isn't much substance here, just a bunch of nearly worn out rides. I do have to give them props for the landscaping though.
