Haven't had time for writing on here for ages, still write but articles and content for websites, es...
Haven't had time for writing on here for ages, still write but articles and content for websites, especially my own!
Member since:28.03.2002
Reviews:112
Members who trust:158
For 7 weeks I have spent - some might say wasted - many hours glued to my computer playing this game. I first heard about it by reading an opinion on this site and a few days later saw it in my local branch of Dixons. It was priced at £9.99 but there was an offer on of 3 games for the price of 2. As I bought 3 games for £19.98 the cost for each one worked out at just short of £6.67. Was it worth the money – we’ll find out!!
I counted 13 levels to Theme Hospital, which gets more difficult as it progresses. On each level you start off with a blueprint and some money $40,000 in the first round graduating to $70,000 in the final round. With each level you have goalposts to reach that you can check on by clicking on the progress report icon at the bottom of your screen. In the first round you have to have a reputation level of 300, a bank balance of $1000, treat 40% of the visitors, cure 10 people and increase your hospital value to $55,000 to be able to advance to the next level. These goalposts increase, as you get further into the game.
There are 3 build icons at the bottom of the screen. The first enables you to buy and build a selection of rooms, the second allows you to buy corridor furniture and the third allows you to alter or delete your rooms.
The rooms that you can buy and build initially on the first level are GPs Offices, General Diagnosis, Pharmacies, Psychiatrists, Wards, Operating Theatres, Research rooms, Inflation and Fracture Clinics, Toilets and Staff Rooms. More different types of clinics are available as the game advances. You can equip the rooms at further cost with furniture, radiators, plants and fire extinguishers.
You need GPs offices and General diagnosis first to be able to have your patients diagnosed and forwarded to treatment rooms and you should build a ward close to your operating theatre for pre ops. A staff room is also important to rest your employers and keep them happy. If you delay too long your staff will demand pay rises, walk out on you or go loopy through overwork.
You can buy as much corridor furniture as you can fit in to help keep the patients happy, seats, plants, radiators, reception desks and drinks machines that have Kit Kat blazoned across them – maybe chocolate drinks. I found that the patients didn’t start to come in until I’d bought a reception desk but you need to build some rooms first and staff them or the patients will either get fed up and go home or die on you.
You have to hire staff to work in the hospital and doctors, nurses, receptionists and cleaners are available through clicking on another icon at the bottom of the screen. Before you hire them you can check out their skill levels and varying rates of pay and learn something of their characters. No point in hiring staff that are bone idle and useless at the job unless you are desperate. You can see what your staff are up to and control them to a certain extent by clicking on the Staff Management icon. You can assess their happiness and tiredness levels, move them, zoom in on them, give them pay rises and bonuses or fire them if you want.
With all of this spending going on you have to be careful not to overspend. You can borrow money from the bank but if you go too far into the red you can lose the game or are unable to buy anything else or hire staff that you may need to help you earn money or stop patients from dying. It’s quite easy learning
how to balance the books in the first round but it gets harder as you go along. Patients pay for diagnosis and treatment; they even pay the extortionate sum of $20 for a Kit Kat drink. If you can get the money rolling in the game gets easier.
Cleaners work in every room and in the corridors. Apart from cleaning they maintain and repair machinery and water the plants. You can alter their priority levels for each separate job. Nurses can only work in the pharmacy, ward and the fracture clinic. Doctors work in the GPs office, General Diagnosis and most of the clinics. Only doctors with research skills can work in the Research room, which needs to be built fairly quickly to enable you to research new equipment and ailments. You need 2 doctors with surgical skills to work in the operating theatre and only a trained psychiatrist can treat psychiatric patients.
There is a training room for you to build where juniors can become doctors or doctors can be trained to specialise in other areas but only higher paid Consultants can do the training.
Trouble is the doctors with the skills that you need aren’t always available and you have to decide whether to keep the patients waiting or send them home, risking your reputation. I found that by experimenting with building rooms in different places I could improve my selection of available doctors. Even if the correctly trained doctors are available they won't always stay put when you move them to treat patients when there is a queue or an emergency, that can become very frustrating unless there is another suitably trained doctor available to hire quickly.
When a patient has visited a GPs office, they are either automatically sent on their way for treatment or you see a question mark above their head and get a prompt. You might be told that the patient has Bloaty Head and there is varying degrees of a chance of a cure. You are given choices of try to cure, wait until you build more diagnosis rooms or send home. If for instance the chance of a cure is 90% you try to cure, but if the chance is 10% you select one of the other 2 alternatives. Even if there is a high chance of a cure it isn’t guaranteed and the more patients who die on you the more your reputation will suffer and lesson your chances of winning the game.
You can click on patients and see their case histories. Sometimes you can send them to be cured before a visit to the GPs office, useful to keep the queues down. Sometimes a cure isn’t available – the ailment or equipment might not have been researched yet, or if the patient needs operating on and you haven’t got 2 surgeons you can’t cure the patient. You can choose to send them home, or once your research room is up and running and staffed by a doctor with research skills you can sometimes send them there. Once the ailment and equipment has been researched you are given a message by a little guy at the bottom of the screen and can build the correct treatment room.
The first 2 clinics are Fracture and Inflation. You see the patients with bandages on various parts of their body. A nurse closes them in a machine where only their heads are showing, the bandages miraculously come off and drop into a bucket and the nurse releases the patient. If they are cured a cheer goes up, if not they walk out of the room and keel over – sometimes into a fiery hole with a devilish looking bloke in a black cloak waiting for them. Sometimes an angel is waiting.
Bloaty head is cured in the Inflation Clinic. I thought this ailment sexist. Only men get bloaty head, but both sexes get most of the other ailments. You see blokes with enormous heads put underneath something that looks like one of those drips on stands. Their heads are burst leaving only jagged skin above their shoulders and then their heads are blown up again to a normal size.
Once your research room has had a few Slack Tongue patients you can buy and build a Slack Tongue clinic. The poor beggars have enormously swollen red tongues that look really odd waggling up and down as they consult the doctors. Their tongues are put into something that looks like a big ironing press - whoosh their extra length of tongue is chopped off.
Once you have met the criteria of each round you are sent a letter inviting you to run another, bigger and better hospital with more pay. After the first round you can buy increasing amounts of land to build more rooms, land that you will need as more patients visit you and lots of extra weird and wonderful ailments are added and different clinics are needed. I won’t go into all of the illnesses but will mention a few that amused me.
BALDNESS Just men again and the cause is telling lies and making up stories to be popular. For that you build a Hair Restorer clinic and your patients sit under what looks like an hairdryer. A few seconds and a lot of dollars later if the treatment is a success they emerge with a full head of hair.
JELLYITIS I thought that there was something wrong with my computer when the patients with this problem first appeared half way through the game. All of the other patients have solid bodies but these have wavy vague outlines that look as if your patients are going to disappear on you. This affliction is caused by a gelatine rich diet and too much exercise. The symptoms are falling down a lot and excessive wobbliness, the cure a machine that looks like a helter skelter. They climb up to the top and dive in head first, feet kicking. They reappear as a skeleton standing at the bottom and their body and clothes gradually appear from the bottom up.
RUPTURED NOODLES The cause is bungee jumping in cold weather and the symptom is an inability to sit down. Those patients are sent to the operating theatre for treatment.
HAIRYITIS Patients completely covered with hair that makes them look like mini yetis. They are treated in an Electrolysis clinic by being placed in a machine that send what looks like electrical volts through them while their extra hair falls off to reveal their clothes.
Some of the other ailments are sleeping illness, broken wind, sweaty palms, chronic nosehair, heaped piles, spare ribs, TV personalities, discrete itching, radiation contamination, corrugated ankles and alien DNA which appears in the next to last round. These patients have had their DNA mixed with aliens have bright green wrinkly bodies with feet and a big nose, soon sorted if you can afford $20,000 for a DNA clinic when they appear during emergencies.
EMERGENCIES To make the game less straightforward you get emergencies to deal with in a specified amount of time. If you choose to deal with the emergencies you need to have the right treatment rooms and specialists. I found it useful to leave enough space to quickly add another room close enough to where the helicopter which brings the patient in lands. If you don’t cure all of the emergency patients you lose part or all of a bonus and your reputation suffers. You can choose not to deal with the emergencies but they are part of the challenge.
EPIDEMICS If one of your patients has a contagious disease they can pass it on to all of the others that they have been in contact with. You can either bottle out and declare an epidemic and pay a fine and take a reputation hit to have your patients vaccinated or you can attempt a cover up. When that happens the contagious patients are highlighted with a green icon above their heads and you have a set amount of time to cure them. If you don’t you get a higher fine and reputation hit, if you do you get a compensation award for false rumours.
EARTHQUAKES Every now and then there are earthquakes that damage your machinery in the operating theatre, diagnosis rooms and clinics. The more you have the harder it is to get round them all and either repair or buy new machinery before it blows up killing your patient and doctor using it and destroying a room – you can’t build another there. You can click on every piece of machinery and a panel appears. It tells you how many times the machine has been used and gives you a choice of sending for a cleaner for maintenance or buying new machinery.
VISITORS Every now and then you get asked if a visitor can look around. You can say yes or put them off. If you say yes and they like what they see you get varying cash awards. If they don’t like your hospital your reputation can suffer.
SOUND & GRAPHICS I thought the graphics were excellent. The little people look cute and not realistic enough to make the game too serious. I laughed when the patients went to the toilet. Some of the men pull newspapers out and sit and read them and you can hear grunts and groans and toilets flushing. Other background sounds come from the machinery when it’s being used or a siren to warn you that a machine needs repairing before it blows up.
Every now and then you hear a nasal tannoy message asking doctors or nurses to report to the treatment rooms. Or what made me laugh was announcements asking patients not to be sick or not to die in the corridors.
Sometimes you get a vomit virus and patients spewing out brown sick to the accompaniment of retching noises. The poor cleaners get fed up with cleaning the mess up and demand pay rises or quit on you. Then at odd times patients get the squits and squat and squirt brown puddles – good job they aren't wearing undies or you would need a laundry! If you are managing everything well it doesn’t happen too often but it does tend to happen when you are trying to deal with another emergency so you need to be quick and get the cleaners moved or hire more.
MUSIC I found the background music a bit monotonous despite being able to select from 8 different tunes or turn the ones off that I didn’t want to listen to. For the last few rounds I turned the sound down and played the game in semi silence.
INFORMATION There are lots of different panels giving you information on the games progress. You can find out your monetary status and where the money is going. You can find out if ailments are curable and increase or lower charges made for treatment. You can turn the heating up and see how happy, how thirsty or how warm your patients are. Another panel shows you how much you have earned, how high your reputation is, how much your hospital is worth and how many and what percentage of patients you have treated.
After patients have been in your hospital a while they get an icon above their heads. They start off with a face with a down turned mouth that gradually turns into a skull. You need to get those patients treated as quickly as possible before they die and your reputation suffers.
COMPETITION You are supposed to be competing against 3 other hospitals but the competition isn’t that hot and didn’t really mean anything to me. You can also play Theme Hospital online with others but I haven’t tried that yet.
DOWNSIDE I got my copy in a DVD case, but was disappointed that there was no tutorial. I found that on the CD and had to print off 18 A4 pages to learn how to play the game.
PLAYABILITY I found Theme Hospital easy to learn how to play and very addictive. The challenges were enough not to find the game too easy and to keep me playing without boredom for many hours. I liked being able to save the game when I wanted or being able to restart a round if it wasn't going too well for me.
WAS IT WORTH IT? Absolutely, I would have been quite happy to pay a lot more for Theme Hospital. As you might already have gathered I loved playing this game. So much that I got withdrawal symptoms and missed it when I had completed it. The good news is that I’ve just found a download to enable me to add a pregnancy clinic at http://www.eudoxus.demon.co.uk/thc/ and now I can play it again with this free extra.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS Windows 95/98 (Apparently there are problems with ME that require a patch) Intel Pentium Processor 25MB Hard Disk Space 4x CD Rom Drive DirectX 3.0 Compatible 1MB Videocard DirectX 3.0 Compatible Soundcard
Theme Hospital was released in 1997 by Bullfrog and is available on Amazon for £6.99
Demo downloadable from http://www.medsvr.co.uk/th/demo.zip
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Brilliant Game and a brilliant review!!! its such a good game, it came free with our PC but crashed after about the 8th level and hasn't worked since, might check out the demo and maybe even buy it now!!! good times well spent!!!!!
Slayerette 15.01.2005 23:19
Fab review - I just heard about this and will have to check it out as I love this kinda sim type game
Theme Hospital's creators Bullfrog will always be synonymous with God sims--Theme ... more
Park,PopulousandDungeon Keeperbeing the cream of the crop--but this has got to be one of their quirkiest and most bizarre concepts so far.You are a hospital administrator...
Postage & Packaging: £1.94 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Bullfrog will always be synonymous with God Sims,Theme Park,PopulousandDungeon Keeperbeing ... more
the cream of the crop, but one of the quirkiest and most bizarre concepts has got to be their hospital management simTheme Hospital.You are a hospital administra...
Postage & Packaging: £1.94 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Feb 23rd, 2003
(Feb 24th, 2003)
very helpful by (100%):
