Rollercoaster nerds have a fair amount to be excited about this summer: both Six Flags locations in Texas have new rides making their debuts and both of them look pretty intense, albeit in different ways.
Six Flags, of course, shares a parent company with DC Comics/Warner Bros Studios, which means that both rides—like Superman: The Ride and others before them—have a heroic theme, which makes a good deal of sense given Warner’s recent announcement about its forthcoming slate of superhero movies. Fiesta Texas’s Batman: The Ride is a “4D” experience, which means that the passengers move on an axis different from that of the track—essentially, the cars on the ride rotate independent of the track’s path—as they climb a twelve-story hill and endure a series of massive vertical drops.
For a better idea of what that looks like, take a look at the video below.
The Batman coaster is the first in the world to use magnetic technology to simulate weightlessness, but the experience is fairly conventional in other ways: It’s an outdoor coaster, there are no projected visual elements, the sound effects are the screams of your fellow passengers, et cetera.
Up in Arlington, meanwhile, the Justice League: Battle For Metropolis ride at Six Flags Over Texas goes all-in on technological gimmickry. It’s not a coaster—there are no drops or inversions—but rather a “dark ride,” which takes place indoors and navigates passengers through an interactive story built around “4D” video (which is a different fourth dimension than coasters like the Batman coaster employ, apparently), lasers, and an original soundscape.
In other words, both coaster nerds and tech nerds have something to look forward to at both parks this summer. According to the Dallas Morning News, the Justice League ride is scheduled to open in late May, while Batman’s coaster has yet to receive a firm date beyond “Summer 2015.”
