Theme Hospital
Bullfrog have a habit of turning out top games. Theme Park is still in the charts two years after its release, and Syndicate wasn't a bad waste of time either. So I wasn't especially surprised to discover that their latest, Theme Hospital, is just as spot on. What particularly appeals to me is the inane stupidity of it, but I'd better get the nitty-gritty of the game play out of the way before ranting on about how unremittingly daft it is.The scenario is that you're a hospital manager whose brief is to build and maintain a hospital in the face of disease, staff stroppiness, and other competing hospitals in your area, oh and the odd earthquake and epidemic too. This game is definitely set in the world that Maggie built, as the aim is not so much to provide a good service or help sick people, as to turn a decent profit and to maximise your own wages. If you succeed, your reward is to move on to take charge of increasingly difficult hospital scenarios, with correspondingly higher pay.
The intelligence built-in to it makes for an incredibly satisfying game, though it does make its demands on your system. You need a Pentium, with, realistically 16 Megs of RAM, and about 60 Megs of hard disk space to run the thing properly. Even with a Pentium and RAM coming out of your ears, the scrolling is slow, but there's such a lot going on once your hospital is up and running, that's hardly surprising. They also claim you need a quad speed CD-Rom, but that's only really for the cut scenes in the intro sequence. I ran it on a double speed set-up without any problems during the actual game.
And now a few details to whet your appetite. Firstly the diseases are fantastic, and, if anything, the cures are even better. There's Bloaty Head, which causes the afflicted person's head to swell up to about three times its normal size. The cure? Burst the sucker, yank off a few bits of spare flesh and then reinflate the head to the correct pressure. Or what would you do if confronted by someone suffering from slack tongue, which causes the tongue in question to hang, grotesquely vast and floppy, from the mouth? Why, chop the bloody thing off with a special slicer, that's what. There are loads more diseases, but I won't give the game away, since you only progress to more obscure and disgusting ailments when you get on to the later hospitals.
On top of all that, the patients are guaranteed to throw up in the corridors, and if you don't have enough handy men to tidy things up, you can be sure that, what with all that vomit lying around, your waiting areas are pretty soon going to become a seething mass of puking, angry patients. The toilets are a delight as well, with particularly realistic and tasteful sound effects and facial expressions. Oh yes, this is not a game that shies away from the realities of a condition like the squits.
Oh, one quick criticism, just so you don't think I've been paid by Bullfrog for all this sycophantic crap. Given the slowness of the scrolling, why not allow more than just five saved positions round your hospital to which you can jump directly using the function keys? And while I'm about it, why not save those positions with the rest of the information in the saved games? It's boring to have to reset them every time you start a new session. How about it for v1.01?
But that's all beside the point really. Mostly I've just fallen in love with the nurse on the box. What she's sees in that ugly, self-satisfied excuse for a doctor she's clinging to, I'll never know. Who knows, if I become a successful enough hospital manager, maybe she'll leave him for me. I can but hope. The Bullfrog boys live at http://www.bullfrog.co.uk, so go and have a look, but keep your hands off my nursey!
Reviewed by Ben Eveling