![]() ![]() ![]() Specialists (surgeons and psychiatrists) always seem to be unable to perform their specific duties because they have volunteered to do the work of the general practitioners, while the general practitioners wander aimlessly through the halls. Handymen wander the empty halls of your medical facilities while patients stand up to their waists in trash in waiting room. The game's flawed AI routines seem designed to make sure your staff is never where it should be. But the tasks that aren't simple are aggravating in the extreme - to the point of making the game unbearable. Most of these tasks are easy to the point of not really mattering - when someone asks for raise you say "Yes," and when you have too many patients you build more rooms. Once you've mastered the basics, your day-to-day life within the Theme Hospital universe will revolve around keeping your staff happy (by keeping them warm and giving them raises), making sure your patients are happy (by keeping them warm and making sure they don't have to wait to long for a doctor), making sure your hospital looks nice (by hiring loads of maintenance men to water the plants and clean up trash), and fighting off emergencies (in the form of visiting dignitaries and epidemics). The idea is simple, the gameplay is simple, and all of it turns out to be addictive and entertaining. After healing enough people and earning enough money, you - and your hospital administration skills - will be praised by the Health Board, and you'll be invited to take over a new hospital with a greater set of challenges and rewards. Bad Hospitals won't manage to live up to the challenge, and will be shut down after killing off too many people. Good hospitals will include: the latest diagnostic tools, from the basic Cardiogram to more advanced choices like the X-ray and Scanner the most advanced treatment facilities, including pharmacies and operating theaters the latest specialized equipment - Inflater units for patients with Bloaty Heads, Fracture Clinics for those with Bandages, and so on and, of course, a staff to run, organize, and maintain all of this equipment. Using a pleasingly simple interface, players are asked to create a hospital that can stand up to a constant stream of patients inflicted with bizarre ailments. The follow-up to Theme Park, Theme Hospital is at heart a god-game in the vein of SimCity or Populous. Despite pleasing graphics and a heavy dose of imagination, Theme Hospital never manages to deliver the goods on any of its gameplay promises, proving instead to be a minefield of frustration and angst waiting to spring on an unsuspecting audience. The British development team first filed Gene Wars (a very disappointing game), followed it up with Syndicate Wars (a lifeless sequel to one of the company's big popular titles of yesteryear), and managed to not release its most eagerly-awaited game, Dungeon Keeper, at all. But as of yet, there is no time.It hasn't been a very good year for Bullfrog. It did result in speed boosts though.Īs may day job has less programming in it now (replaced with research & development) I probably will start to get the will to carry on with a programming project. It also meant we had all the 3D problems of clipping and such as well. It had many advantages, but just made the code so much more difficult. The idea was that we restricted angles and such enough to make it still appear like the original, despite in fact being 3D. ![]() The new user interface that was developed for OpenTH is actually really, really nice.Ĭorsix was definitely right though that we made a mistake being true 3D. Whilst CorsixTH is really like the original, which seems like a nice thing, it also means that it hasn’t really progressed. There is still a place for OpenTH I think. At the moment we are all too busy, but it’d be nice to keep it in mind. However, we did vaguely think about rewriting it in Scala, just because it would be fun to do a proper project in Scala. See the OpenTH blog for more information.Īs is probably fairly obvious, I have no time to work on OpenTH at the moment, and nor does Paul. Essentially at the moment it is Theme Hospital with a few features missing and a better screen resolution. Beta 8 is really quite close to a playable game. The latest version of CorsixTH is now out. ![]()
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