Hey all, hope you’re having a fantastic week! I’m having a good one, thanks for asking. Primarily because I’m reliving some games from my childhood!
Now, I’m not exactly what you’d class as a ‘Doom-era’ person. Infact, I’ve never played Doom in my entire life (Oh my!), but I did grow up in the 90s and therefore have played a lot of games that just don’t seem to exist today. From what I can remember about that era of gaming, most games required patience, skill, knowledge, luck or any combination of them. It’s the primary reason why a lot of the time I enjoy playing a couple of old games.
The game I’m playing at the moment is called ‘Theme Hospital‘. It was a pain to get it working on Win7 x64, but once I did, it worked like a charm. I won’t get into the nitty-gritty of it all, but it requires you to own an original copy of Theme Hospital and to download a modified and updated version of the game engine. I’ll remember to write up a guide at some point this week for it.
Theme Hospital may not LOOK the best, but it sure is addictive!
For anyone that hasn’t played Theme Hospital, it’s the same basic idea as all the other Theme games (If you haven’t played a Theme game, I suggest you do so immediately.) You start off with a small yet humble little hospital that you, yes you, have to organise and manage, bringing your hospital to the top. It may not sound like much, but it sure is addictive. It’s pretty difficult when you first play the game to effectively set up your hospital. You’ll be putting your GP office far away from all the other diagnosis rooms, and your pharmacy somewhere on planet mars, but after you get used to what is classed as a ‘good’ layout, you’ll be fine. That’s where the fun begins. You’ll begin researching new ways of dealing with a whole range of different diseases, medical conditions, physical conditions and more. This will require specially trained staff, not to mention the specialist rooms to deal with the issue. It’s a combination between strategy and skill. The strategy obviously being that you know where, when and how to layout your hospital, with the correct amount of staff with the best qualifications and CVs, the skill being that you keep your workers (specifically handymen) busy, making sure that your ques are as low as possible, whilst retaining high profit margins.
Whilst the graphics of theme hospital may not attract you (Saying that though, I personally quite like the style of Theme Hospital), the game-play will almost certainly keep you entertained for hours. There’s even a patch/update that enables online play, pitting three players against themselves to see who can create the best hospital. I’m not too sure if the online servers for the game have been shut down (Probably) but I’m sure there’s a work around, regardless if they have. It doesn’t overly matter if there is multiplayer anyway, due to the nature of the game, you can send it to your friends and chose a specific scenario offered to you (There are around three scenarios offered at the very start of the game, each posing different challenges) and simply see who can do the best. You could even Skype up with a couple of friends and have race to see who can beat the scenario the fastest!
What’s even better, is that I’ve yet to come into any ‘serious’ bugs within the game. Occasionally you’ll get a mysterious error message pop up, asking if you’d like to recover (Just press yes, it does nothing and you can still play) or one telling you that a ‘humonoid’ (or in normal non-Bullfrog talk, a patient) has glitched out of the que and now has nothing to do, you can chose to send them home and it’ll remedy the problem. Neither of these are anything game breaking. It may crash every now and then (It’s yet to crash on me, but my girlfriend has crashed on it multiple times. I blame her.), not that it matters. It’ll autosave your game for you, so you’ll just need to start it up again.
Look at all them custome- I mean patients!
Overall, Theme Hospital is worth more than just a look-in, it deserves a full play. The game IS completable (Though from what I’ve heard, it gets dastardly difficult at the later levels), and once you’ve completed it you’re free to roam any hospital you want. I’m very happy that I’ve managed to get this old charm working again, and look forward to having many hours of fun, and I hope you will too!
Gaming Respite 