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A.P.I Review: | THEME HOSPITAL | ||
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Developer: | Bullfrog | OPTIONS: | SCREENSHOTS: No.1 No.2 No.3 |
Distributor: | Bullfrog | 1 Player | |
Game Type: | God Game | Memory Card (2 Blocks) | |
Review Date: | June 1998 | Standard Joypad |
Setting the Scene
Are you sick of playing games that are so gory they make you feel really ill? Maybe you're in need of a doctor because you've been whiling away too much time operating your beloved Playstation. Perhaps your patients is wearing thin with 1st person shooters and you require an urgent tonic from a rather attractive nurse. Well if you can ignore the abundance of puns in the previous statement this may just be your lucky day. Theme Hospital is the second 'God game' from Bullfrog (more famous for the 'Syndicate' series) after Theme Park. In Theme Hospital you are offered the post as an administrator who is responsible for all the operational functions of a designated hospital. This includes everything from building the diagnosis and treatment facilities to hiring and firing staff. Most important of all you must cure your patients of a selection of outrageous diseases while making sure they always remain safe and cheerful. As you progress through the game your success at each point is assessed by the amount of profit you make, while the number of patients you heal against any fatalities that befall you is also taken into consideration. Your reward for success is the offer of a position at bigger and better hospital with an increase in salary.
Genre
In the grand tradition of the Maxis 'Sim' games and the aforementioned Theme Park this title is a God/Simulation game. You take the role of an omnipotent manager who's role it is to take charge of all aspects of a particular scenario, be that a bustling City, ever expanding Amusement Park or, in this case, a flourishing Hospital.
Graphics
Anyone familiar with Theme Park will feel right at home here. The isometric top-down view, 2D graphics, detailed sprites and icon based interface remain true to the original Theme design. Unfortunately, this means that the graphics in Theme Hospital don't do anything to stretch the boundaries of the PSX games console. The visuals really should have advanced over years since the days of Theme Park, but in reality they haven't. The graphics run in low-res and are definitely not using the full palette the Playstation has to offer. One noticeable element is the fact that most of the colors you see on the screen are dithered and not shaded. The other area that could have been improved is the very 16-bit looking interface, the buttons and icons representing the actions you can perform are mostly 2 color and dull looking. The graphics aren't all bad, there are some nice transparency effects and the sprites that represent your doctors, nurses, patients and hospital equipment are reasonably detailed and varied.
Sounds and Effects
The most noticeable aspect of the sound in Theme Hospital is not so much what you do hear but what you don't hear. There is no in-game music at all, probably a good thing since if it kept with the theme of building a hospital it would likely be trite elevator music and better switched off. The sounds you do hear are mostly appropriate and totally belong in a living, breathing hospital. The constant chatter from the intercom calling doctors and nurses from one room to another can get a little annoying, but can be turned off or down if required. This 'Tannoy', as the game terms it, is actually vital to the success of your hospital since it informs you of areas of your building that need urgent attention. For example "Doctor required in Inflator room" will prompt you to grab a doctor and place them in the relevant room ready to burst some poor patients head, weird. Other sounds serve as more of an amusement and do a good job of lightening the stress of running a hospital. Highlights include vomiting (which you will hear a lot if you're no good at building hospitals), using and flushing the toilet and the sounds of your doctors playing pool in the recreation room.
Playability
Imagine having to take care of every administrating aspect of a hospital, hiring and training your doctors, laying out diagnosis and treatment rooms, buying and maintaining equipment, attracting patients and expanding your facilities as needed. You'd think that this type of occupation would be about as exciting as... well, running a hospital and ordinarily it would be. The developers knew this and have thus introduced comedy and humor into every aspect of the game. This is where Theme Hospital wins in the playability category. Not only is it extremely interesting to play, it's also pretty funny at the same time. The game begins with a very handy tutorial that guides you through the basic of building and running your hospital. You start the game with an empty building. Your first task when you take charge of your empty hospital is to build the basic rooms to be used for diagnosis and treatment of potential patients. Best construct a GP's office and a reception desk - you can then hire your first doctor and a receptionist. From this point you can expand on your basic hospital, building more rooms and hiring extra staff in order to increase your profit and reputation in the community. Initially there are only a few basic rooms you can build, which include Toilets, Staff Room, a couple of Clinics, General and Psychiatric Diagnosis and a Pharmacy to sell drugs. However, as more funds become available you can purchase adjoining land offering you the space to construct Operating Theatres, specialist Clinics, X-Ray and Scanner departments. Specialist Clinics allow you to treat some of the more peculiar diseases such as bloated head and the amazing slack tongue. Placement of your rooms is very important and will ultimately effect how successful you are. Imagine that your patients are on a conveyor belt when deciding the positioning of each room. You want them to move smoothly through your hospital in an orderly manner not wander aimlessly through the corridors. It should go something like this:- main entrance, reception, diagnosis, treatment, drugs, exit. Research and Training facilities can be placed in a building far away from the organized chaos of your main hospital. Staff are the all important commodity and there are four basic classes you can hire:- Doctors, Nurses, Handymen and Receptionists. Each staff member has certain skills and attributes that will make them suitable for employment at your hospital and they all come with a description of their attitude and approach to work. These can range from "Careful and dependable in an emergency" to "Deaf as a post and smells of cabbage". If you hire all the best staff before your CPU competitors this will greatly enhance you reputation (since the other hospitals in town will obviously smell of cabbage). You must balance the salary each staff member demands against their potential skills and character before employing. Once the basic rooms are suitably staffed you may open your hospital for business. From the moment your first patient arrives your staff are constantly in action. Your building comes to life as they freely move around the hospital diagnosing and treating illnesses. At any time you may select a member of staff and rearrange their positioning, schedule, salary and work-load. Soon you will be able to build a Research Centre where highly skilled doctors will work towards improving treatments and even discover a new range of drugs. Doctors and nurses will encounter up to 40 crazy diseases of which some are particularly weird: * Slack Tongue : Where the hapless patient walks around with their tongue hanging out, the only cure is to send them to the Slack Tongue Clinic where they get their tongue tightened. * Bloated Head : The patient has an extremely big head and must be cured in the Inflator Room where the doctor will pop the patients head and re-inflate it. * Invisibility and Transparency : Two similar diseases which leaves the patients in a state that renders them extremely difficult to see. This can be cured with drugs or therapy. * King Complex : The patient is under the delusion that they are the King of Rock 'n Roll and will dress and act appropriately. Send them to psychiatry immediately where the shrink will take good care of them - for a fee of course. The ultimate goal in most levels is to achieve a good reputation and make a big pile of cash from your suckers..err..patients. Reputation is gained mostly from curing patients and keeping them happy during their stay. Money is eventually made by maintaining a good reputation thus attracting many more patients. You are also competing at all times with three other computer opponents who's awful AI makes me hope that your rival administrators will never be allowed near a real hospital. Not in my life time anyway. As is the problem in real life, the best staff members are not always available at the right time. It may sometimes be necessary for your highly trained surgeons to attend bed pans in a ward or your psychiatric doctors to perform radical experimental surgery. You must keep a constant watch on all your staff to make sure they remain upbeat and working hard or they will become disgruntled and threaten to resign. Even worse or worse they could give you hospital a bad reputation by bad mouthing your decisions. Playing the game offers a reasonable amount of fun. You do gain an enormous amount of satisfaction from building your hospital and watching it function. Once it is up and running you can just sit back and watch it all happen. Assuming you have the right balance of staff, rooms and equipment you hospital will run itself with very little input from you. The only real problems with playability revolve around the interface and the control. The interface takes a little getting used to, buttons or icons represent all the actions you can take in the game and there is very little written text anywhere. While this makes the game ideal for the international market it doesn't help playability much. However, once you understand what each icon means (or thoroughly read the manual) it becomes much easier to navigate yourself around the menus and get your hospital running. My only other complaint is the control. While the developers have done a good job of adapting the control to the PSX controller, it would have been a whole lot easier with the mouse and it is a real pity there is no support for this peripheral in the game. Moving around the screen using the joy pad is a little sluggish and it is quit often difficult to spot where the little cursor is on the screen. The isometric view also makes it awkward to get a descent full view of your corridors and rooms which makes layout and maintenance a little difficult at times. This could have easily been avoided by including an option to rotate the screen. Overall the game is a blast to play. The humor makes light of the suffering and pain normally associated with hospitals while keeping the game playable. Moving the control issues to one side, the game makes an ordinarily run-of-the-mill job, quite interesting.
Value for Money
The most successful games in the genre allow you to build and improve without the restraints imposed by a mission based game structure. Unfortunately in Theme Hospital the entire game swings around a series of levels or missions. Each level has certain success criteria that you must satisfy to move on, there really isn't any scope to explore or build beyond what is required to complete the mission, hence the replay value of this title is limited. This doesn't necessarily mean that the game is not got good value for money. There are 12 levels to progress through and each one is interesting and unique. This essentially means that if the game holds your attention long enough to complete the first couple of missions then it is likely to suck you in to playing all of them.
Opinion | ||
CHRIS | ||
GRAPHICS: | 10/20 | I'm
a real sucker for 'Sim' and God type game, but this genre has a very
limited appeal for the majority of Playstation gamers. For players expecting fast action and non-stop excitement, this may not be the game for you, Theme Hospital is more suited to players who have plenty of patience and would enjoy spending time on trivial matters like keeping corridors clean or watering plants. Once you have completed the design of your hospital it seems that you just have to sit and wait until you reach your target while making sure that the staff members are happy and your machinery is sufficiently maintained. Theme Hospital kept me interested for a reasonable amount of time but there does seem to be a lot of waiting around for something to happen or simply for your level objectives to be completed so you can move on. There's just one thing I'd really like clarified, how the heck do you X-Ray an invisible man? Hopefully the answer will come from many more hours of play, but then again, maybe not. |
SOUND: | 6/10 | |
PLAYABILITY: | 46/50 | |
VALUE: | 15/20 | |
OVERALL | 77% |
Opinion | ||
MARTIN | ||
GRAPHICS: | 14/20 | I
really enjoy these type of 'God games' but the simplicity of Theme
Hospital could be it's failing. Knock up a few diagnosis and treatment
rooms, then apart from the occasional earthquake (which damages your
equipment) you can pop off and do something else while the money rolls
in. Surely you should be visiting the bank manager for a loan and then
crawling back to his office to beg for a reduction in interest rates
rather than regularly dipping into a pile of cash for new hospital
equipment without second thought. If only Bullfrog had corrected the single angle viewing problem and expanded a little more on the gameplay they could have been sitting on a sure fire winner with Theme Hospital. As it stands the game is packed with rib tickling humor which allows it to be more of a lighthearted experience for the young rather than a serious management sim for the budding tycoon. |
SOUND: | 6/10 | |
PLAYABILITY: | 44/50 | |
VALUE: | 15/20 | |
OVERALL | 79% |