Theme Hospital Retro Review

Posted by Kevin in Featured, Portable, Reviews, Sony, Windows | 3 comments

In 1997, Bullfrog (which was later sold to EA by its founders, who went on to create Fabled developers Lionhead) released another title in it’s “Theme…” series, called Theme Hospital. Following on the footsteps of similar sim-style game Theme Park where you managed a… well, Themed Park akin to Disneyland, here you managed a hospital.

Slick graphics on PC were not replicated on PS1

Published by EA for PC and later PlayStation (and now available on PS3 & PSP via PSN Store) this was a brilliant management sim game that had a dark sense of humour, poking fun at diseased and dying patients of various sized hospitals as you progressed through.

Progression meant taking management of bigger hospitals, allowing you to build more wards, diagnosis and surgery rooms as well as specialist areas for newly discovered diseases. You could build a research room to discover methods of curing new diseases, allowing you to accept such patients, and earn more money.

Every level starts empty, allowing you to design your hallways, hire staff and build equipment. Your staff range from the usual doctors and nurses with varying levels of ability (surgeons, consultants, etc.) and personality traits (smelly, nice, generous) as well as handyman staff and receptionists. Of course, there abilities and personalities affected how much they had to be paid. Which was fine for the most part, but if you’re stuck and need a surgeon, sometimes you just have to settle for that smelly, inept & rude one!

Bloaty Head, Slack Tongue, Fractured Bones, Serious Radiation, Hairyitis, Baldnes, Heaped Piles, Uncommon Cold and The Squits were just a few of the diseases that would pass through your halls. Some requiring very simple diagnosis and some pharmacy treatment while others required a go on special diagnosis machinery, that your handyman would have to keep in tip-top shape.

Often the game threw out a curve-ball giving local emergencies that require a lot of patients to be seen quick, VIP inspections and natural disasters like earthquakes, just to keep your management skills challenged.

The last PC patch allowed multi-player options where two to four gamers could compete to create the best hospital, or two could pit themselves against two AI hospitals. Nothing as exciting as Quake or Unreal Tournament, but still about as good as sim management games are going to get online.

Queues could build up waiting for badly managed hospitals

This was one of my favourite games, recently revived by the PS3/PSP port via PSN as well as an amazing re-building of the game engine from the ground up by Corsix-TH this year. Given it’s a re-build with new code, it’s not necessarily an illegal download, unless of course EA somehow take issue with the project.

You’re committing a crime if you don’t enjoy this game after playing it. My poor, deluded girlfriend believes a resurgence is due to that abomination FarmVille on Facebook. But she clearly doesn’t understand the difference between genius management sim shrouded in dark, dark comedic values and a cheap flash game set up to shill money from kids.