Theme Hospital: Living in the good old days.

When I was young one of my earliest PC gaming memories was entering a competition to win a new game that had just been released. The premise was awesome; design and run your own hospital, but an environment laced with humour. I didn’t win a copy of Theme Hospital, but I still got it as a birthday present or similar. This left me with two long standing memories, the fun of playing the game and the knowledge that I never completed it. As technology moved on I would occasionally pop back and play it on my subsequent PCs until the time that it would no longer install let alone run. There the dream would have died were it not for my girlfriend and Corsix.

Just like the real NHS you can try to make the working conditions as crampt as possible.

Having finally completed Tropico 5 we were looking for our next game to play together and discuss whether layout or functionality were more important (seriously not everyone needs to live in a posh house!). I had recently found my old Theme Hospital disc and we had lamented the fact that it would no longer run, so I decided to explore CorsixTH which I had heard would allow me to run Theme Hospital on a modern system. After a relatively simple install we were ready to face vomit waves, VIP visits and to be reminded that ‘patients are not to die in the corridors!’

The first level eased us back in quite nicely, curing a few people of the squits before they redecorated the carpet and reminding us that all the staff needing a break at the same time is a bad thing. I had forgotten some of the interesting diseases that your patients could come in with and was pleased to see someone in full Elvis get-up ready to be cured of the King Complex.

From these humbled beginnings our hospital management skills have flourished as we have needed to build research departments, operating theatres and training rooms. We have dealt with outbreaks of heaped piles, slack tongue and bloaty head. We have laughed at the brilliant cures for some of the diseases (the popping and re-inflation of a bloaty head being a particular highlight!). This game is everything we remembered it to be and we are well on the road to completing it.

I spot a King Complex sufferer!

That being said the game has obviously aged (being near 20 years old!) and the Corsix mod has had to make some sacrifices (the loading screens are all gone and there are no rats at present). Also for all it’s fun there often comes a point in the level where you have met all the objectives except numbers of patients cured. This results in setting the game to its fastest speed and waiting for the number of cures to be reached. That being said, the process of reaching this point more than makes up for the eventual wait.

If you are interested in trying this out the game can be bought from Good Old Games and the Corsix mod can be found here. In the mean time I have to sort out an incoming slack tongue emergency!

Wasteland 2 versus Take That

Back in the old days it was all isometrics, random encounters and big choices!

Nostalgia, ‘the good ol days’, the ‘when I was young’ time, call it what you will, no matter who you are I reckon that there are some days or periods in your life that you would love to revisit and relive, but with all that you know now. It seems that for a number of us this would include playing some of the old computer games we used to love because ‘they don’t make ‘em like that anymore’ and now thanks to kickstarter it looks like they might start ‘making ‘em like that’ again, but where will this road take us? 

I am nostalgic, one of the strongest memories I have to this day is the first time I booted up Fallout 2 and heard those epic words ‘war, war never changes’, I can also clearly remember marvelling the sheer number of discs that the original Baldur’s Gate came on. It’s therefore no surprise that I own the Baldur’s Gate enhanced edition and was excited to see the progress being made on Wasteland 2, in many ways the precursor to the fallout series. However as I watched the latest video on the game, which looks brilliant by the way, and heard them talk about the exciting features of the game I found myself asking ‘well what’s actually new’? Don’t get me wrong, in many ways a big part of my craves a new top down RPG to be that new fallout 2 with up to date graphics and will almost certainly buy it on that basis alone, however part of me wants something more.

It is around this point that the analogy that titles this piece began to form within my head and yeah at first glance it looks a bit weird, particularly if you hate Take That! Now when they were first formed Take That were THE boy band in many ways and were incredibly successful. So the distress caused by Robbie leaving and then the splitting of the band were only to be expected, for the sake proving a point we are ignoring boyzone here! When the band reformed, they did not do it in order to do a greatest hits tour of their old material, they had become a new entity. Yes they did perform a lot of old favourites, but the focus was on the new material which reflected the change within the band themselves from a boy band to a man band. The new songs they performed resonated with old and new fans alike, building on what each of them had learned from their time apart. It would have been easier to just do that greatest hits tour and give the public exactly what it wanted, however they chose to give fans something they didn’t even realise they were lacking.

I guess that’s my one concern with Wasteland 2, I don’t just want a greatest hits of their previous material. Yes, I do want it to have that feel which satisfies my nostalgia, but I want them to show me something different (although I’ll admit it I am not sure exactly what I want). In their kickstarter video they mention that there will be weighty moral choices, well that’s cool but sort of par for the post-apocalyptic course (see the decision about megaton in fallout 3). I am particularly interested to see how they execute this, I want to have to agonise over the ‘correct’ choice (and those who it will affect) and want to see constant reminders of my choice and its impact.

So that’s the gauntlet in front of Wasteland 2, don’t just give us an updated fallout 2, surprise us, amaze us and show us something new that will have a future generation looking back and saying ‘they don’t make ‘em’ like that anymore!’