Triptych - Volume 8: Suture Self
By Brenna Hillier - Thu Jun 4, 2009 6:34pm
It’s E3, the week when Triptych feels simultaneously completely redundant and utterly necessary. Despite dozens of excellent conventions and conferences, and year-long hype-splosion, E3 remains an especially media-heavy time of the year in the games industry, and as such you’d think that for this week alone, games needed no further attention than they already get. If you’re wallowing in the depressing swamps of cynicism like almost everyone professionally connected to the industry, though, this time of year is just another reminder of the power, the glory, and the terribly irresponsible usage of games media as the great bastions of our profession grind away at gamers’ independence, working towards their complete and hopeless dependence on the hype machine, to the detriment of all.
Not Triptych, oh no! Triptych shuns the limelight in favour of garnering attention – positive and negative – on a group of three lesser-known titles. This week’s theme results directly from my ongoing illness and preoccupation with medical practitioners as we check out hospital games.
What is it with hospital dramas? I’m thinking of the reverent hush cast over my childhood neighbourhood each week when the timeslot of A Country Practice came around, the reinvigoration of the genre by ER in the nineties that made doctors sexy again – and no list is complete without mentioning House, which appears on my weekly schedule in a sacrosanct space not even interplanetary disaster could pull me away from. Lifesigns: Hospital Affairs (also known as Lifesigns: Surgical Unit) enjoyed success in Japan and to some extent North America, but has taken its sweet time in reaching PAL territories earlier this year, probably because publishers and distributors were understandably concerned for the success of a largely visual novel-style game interspersed with surgical procedures and billed as the ultimate soap opera for your DS.
Actually the second in a series, the first of which we shall likely never see, the foam is certainly evident as the title places as much if not more emphasis on your personal life as the medical events in the continuing storyline. With 40,000 text lines, apparently a nightmare for translators, Lifesigns is certainly not going to sit well with those who prefer a purely action-orientated experience, and much angsting over heartbreak and so on is necessary to progress between stylus-driven surgical scenes. You won’t have to read all of that in one hit, though – there are multiple solving paths and endings to experience, assuming you want to go through it all again and again.
In the post-Phoenix Wright world, Lifesigns: Hospital Affairs is selling reasonably well, so it can’t be all bad… What am I saying? Of course it can, but if you’re hankering for some doctors-and-nurses drama, or to scan through a ridiculous amount of text, and the usual outlets of TV and non-visual novels are closed to you, Lifesigns could be your next secret purchase.
Oh, Flo, your legacy will never die. Time management is a genre of its own now, with aficionados able to argue for days over the merits of various implementations of the familiar mechanics, just like every other genre ever. It’s not that shocking that time management doesn’t make much of an airing on consoles – no matter how terrific the strategy side of things is, and it is often surprisingly deep, at the end of the day the speed at which you can scoot your avatar from place to place is gosh darned essential, and control pads, bless them, do not satisfy in this department. Hysteria Hospital is betting that the WiiMote – or stylus, on the DS – will, ensuring the console releases stand up to the PC version.
If you’re aiming for frantic action, why start off slow? All of Hysteria Hospital’s 60+ levels take place in “the busiest emergency room in America”, at General Hospital in New York. Immediately you’ll be juggling a ridiculous number of tasks at once, from designing the emergency room to avoid crowding to running triage to fiddling with the waiting list – and that’s putting the actual medical procedures aside.
Peppered with the sort of humour hospital games ought to be required by law to include, Hysteria Hospital looks set to be quite entertaining. There’s no hiding the fact that it’s the sort of game normally labelled as casual, but some aspects smack nostalgically of other humorous hospital management simulations and hint at something deeper than Diner Dash in scrubs. Given the addictive nature of this kind of thing, and the reasonably weighty amount of game they seem to have packed in, Hysteria Hospital could well be worth a look in when it releases on DS, PC and Wii towards the end of June.
Hospitals are white, right? When I think hospital, I think white sheets, stainless steel, maybe blue or green uniforms and scrubs – but definitely not anything to get excited about, visually. Hospital games, ergo, are usually pretty bland on the eye (surgery aside; organs come in many exciting colours) as fascinating as they me be otherwise. That’s why Trauma Team’s screenshots nearly knocked me off my chair. The description “inspired by Japanese animation and comics” doesn’t do anything like justice to the hand-drawn graphics which, assuming you didn’t look at them rather than reading the text (I live in self delusional hope) will surprise you with their lack of corridors, surgical masks, and menus.
What actually goes on in the title remains to be seen, although presumably it involves waggling the WiiMote to perform a variety of different medical procedures, depending on which professional stream - general surgeon, diagnostician, E.M.T., orthopaedic surgeon, endoscope technician, or medical examiner – you choose to specialise in, the separation of which suggests a strive for realism not often found in medical games; admittedly, six to twelve years of study and a constant stream of everyday ailments around the two or three really exciting cases of your career do not make for stimulating gameplay. In place of that we apparently get a dramatic storyline split into stylistically discrete chapters complete with quality voice acting – this last being filed under “highly suspicious”.
By the time my prose reaches you, we may actually know a great deal more about Trauma Team (not to be confused with Trauma Centre), which is expected on Wii around the third quarter next year, because it forms part of publisher Atlus’ E3 line up. However, since it looks thoroughly beautiful and contains very few explosions, which I am informed is all we gamers care about, there’s a fair to good chance we won’t see this one headlining any time soon.
Ever since Bullfrog’s excellent line of simulation games (which seems to have dried up into endless ports of the same two or three titles) including the delightful Theme Hospital (which still occasionally gets an airing in this household), I have been fascinated with the depiction of healthcare in video games. Probably because sick people, at a distance, are quietly fascinating, in the same way that descriptions of deadly foreign insects are, or maybe because when one actually is sick, doctors and nurses take on a hallowed glow of respect, usually followed by rapid disillusionment when your ministering angel starts force-feeding you laxatives or stabbing you repeatedly with a badly-aimed drip. Viewing it all through the pleasant barriers of virtualisation, the monitor, and with any luck, humour, makes the state of the world’s equanimity to the state of our health care systems somewhat bearable.
Not Triptych, oh no! Triptych shuns the limelight in favour of garnering attention – positive and negative – on a group of three lesser-known titles. This week’s theme results directly from my ongoing illness and preoccupation with medical practitioners as we check out hospital games.
Lifesigns: Hospital Affairs
) I was beat up for my uniform, too. |
Actually the second in a series, the first of which we shall likely never see, the foam is certainly evident as the title places as much if not more emphasis on your personal life as the medical events in the continuing storyline. With 40,000 text lines, apparently a nightmare for translators, Lifesigns is certainly not going to sit well with those who prefer a purely action-orientated experience, and much angsting over heartbreak and so on is necessary to progress between stylus-driven surgical scenes. You won’t have to read all of that in one hit, though – there are multiple solving paths and endings to experience, assuming you want to go through it all again and again.
In the post-Phoenix Wright world, Lifesigns: Hospital Affairs is selling reasonably well, so it can’t be all bad… What am I saying? Of course it can, but if you’re hankering for some doctors-and-nurses drama, or to scan through a ridiculous amount of text, and the usual outlets of TV and non-visual novels are closed to you, Lifesigns could be your next secret purchase.
) I'm taking her pulse! |
) Doctor! This man's been chopped in half! |
) And this girl has grown a second head! |
) And this one's been decapitated! ...Enough already. |
Hysteria Hospital: Emergency Ward
) Two desserts coming right... oh, wrong game. |
If you’re aiming for frantic action, why start off slow? All of Hysteria Hospital’s 60+ levels take place in “the busiest emergency room in America”, at General Hospital in New York. Immediately you’ll be juggling a ridiculous number of tasks at once, from designing the emergency room to avoid crowding to running triage to fiddling with the waiting list – and that’s putting the actual medical procedures aside.
Peppered with the sort of humour hospital games ought to be required by law to include, Hysteria Hospital looks set to be quite entertaining. There’s no hiding the fact that it’s the sort of game normally labelled as casual, but some aspects smack nostalgically of other humorous hospital management simulations and hint at something deeper than Diner Dash in scrubs. Given the addictive nature of this kind of thing, and the reasonably weighty amount of game they seem to have packed in, Hysteria Hospital could well be worth a look in when it releases on DS, PC and Wii towards the end of June.
) I would have popped in some privacy screens, personally. |
) One patient five staff? HA! |
Trauma Team
) I don't know, I didn't go to medical school. |
What actually goes on in the title remains to be seen, although presumably it involves waggling the WiiMote to perform a variety of different medical procedures, depending on which professional stream - general surgeon, diagnostician, E.M.T., orthopaedic surgeon, endoscope technician, or medical examiner – you choose to specialise in, the separation of which suggests a strive for realism not often found in medical games; admittedly, six to twelve years of study and a constant stream of everyday ailments around the two or three really exciting cases of your career do not make for stimulating gameplay. In place of that we apparently get a dramatic storyline split into stylistically discrete chapters complete with quality voice acting – this last being filed under “highly suspicious”.
) What is the clap about? Is this Reiki? |
) The thigh bone's connected to the hip bone. |
By the time my prose reaches you, we may actually know a great deal more about Trauma Team (not to be confused with Trauma Centre), which is expected on Wii around the third quarter next year, because it forms part of publisher Atlus’ E3 line up. However, since it looks thoroughly beautiful and contains very few explosions, which I am informed is all we gamers care about, there’s a fair to good chance we won’t see this one headlining any time soon.
Ever since Bullfrog’s excellent line of simulation games (which seems to have dried up into endless ports of the same two or three titles) including the delightful Theme Hospital (which still occasionally gets an airing in this household), I have been fascinated with the depiction of healthcare in video games. Probably because sick people, at a distance, are quietly fascinating, in the same way that descriptions of deadly foreign insects are, or maybe because when one actually is sick, doctors and nurses take on a hallowed glow of respect, usually followed by rapid disillusionment when your ministering angel starts force-feeding you laxatives or stabbing you repeatedly with a badly-aimed drip. Viewing it all through the pleasant barriers of virtualisation, the monitor, and with any luck, humour, makes the state of the world’s equanimity to the state of our health care systems somewhat bearable.
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