Theme Hospital

Theme Hospital is an old classic which I recently found in my ever so large collection of cd’s. I thought what the heck, it’s Easter weekend, I have plenty of time to kill, so I went ahead and installed it. To cut a long story short, this game consumed three quarters of my weekend and I still haven’t finished it!

If you are not familiar with this game, its just over a decade old and was made my EA Games back in 1997. It was created after the great success its predecessor Theme Park was. The jist of the game is you are given an empty hospital in which you have to build all different sorts of hospital rooms, hire staff, treat patients and keep the hospital running whilst trying to achieve set goals to proceed to the next level, there are 3 competing hospitals in the same area. The game is filled with humor, for instance some of the sicknesses which you come across are Bloaty Head, Jellytitis, Baldness and Serious Radiation just to name a few. These illnesses are treated in different ways depending on what it is after the required research has been done.

In the corner of the game there is an advisor which gives you comments and tip offs throughout the game, a lot of the things he say are complete piss takes though, such as “You are three quarters of the way to losing this level” and ” Kill another 132 patients to lose the level”. Messages pop up through the game where you must make decisions on certain things such as whether or not to take a chance on a certain patients cure, whether or not to invite or fob off  VIPs who wish to visit your hospital or whether or not to accept a handful of patients from an emergency.

I found that Theme Hospital did not run too well on my Windows Vista computer, which is understandable seeing as this game was designed for DOS and Windows 95. To make it run properly I ran it through a program called DOSBox. This program emulates a computer running DOS, which makes all the old classic DOS games like Theme Hospital run fine on this days ultra computers (compared to a decade ago).

Nevertheless this game is fun and addictive, I have spent the good part of three days playing it and intend to spend however more longer it takes me to complete the remaining two levels.