Retro Review: Theme Hospital

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, it’s time for a refreshing dose of Retro Review, the half-column blog-thing which takes the very best of the worst of computing history, regurgitates it a little bit, and spits it back out.

I’m pretty sure you’re all going to remember this one, today I’m taking a nostalgic look at Theme Hospital. For those who decided they preferred the shade of a large bolder during the late 1990′s, Theme Hospital was a simulation game that, as the title suggests, allowed the player to build and run their own hospital.

The game was developed by Bullfrog Entertainment, who had huge success with an earlier title, Theme Park. Creating and running your own theme park, of course, is a very appealing idea. Theme parks are, by their very nature, creative places. Bold, colourful, musical, loud, and in general, designing a theme park is quite a lot of fun. I’m sure we’ve all at one time or another caught ourselves daydreaming about an idea for a theme park ride that we’d like to create.

So, to build on the success of Theme Park, Bullfrog decided to create a new game in the same vain, and what better place to set your much anticipated sequel than…..in a hospital…. the one place nobody ever wants to go. I don’t think many people daydream about designing their own hospital ward, as a general rule of thumb, except perhaps Katie Price, but there wasn’t a “disastrous plastic surgery” ward in the game, so that doesn’t count.

Despite this initial setback, Theme Hospital does actually provide some fun, with it’s strange surreal humor. Patience who come to your hospital suffer from all sorts of strange illnesses, including Bloaty Head, Slack Tongue, Fractured Bones, Serious Radiation, Hairyitis and Baldness, something I’m suffering from quite badly at the moment.

The layout of this hospital is dumb.

Unfortunately the size and shape of the hospitals in the game are so bloody awkward, I often feel like killing the patients instead of trying to cure them.  All rooms have to be a certain size and shape, and invariably there’s either too much or too little room to fit everything in. The result is strange dead ends, blocked areas and passages that Bloaty Head sufferers get lost down, before they curl up into a ball, and die.

But never-mind, there are some other awesome aspects to this game. Did you know for example, all the competing hospitals in the game are named after famous computers, mostly fictional ones? There’s one called Deep Thought, from ‘ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, and then there’s ‘Colossus’, the British supercomputers used to break German codes during World War II. My favourites however are HAL, named after Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Holly, who is of course the computer in the British sitcom Red Dwarf.

There really isn’t a lot to say about this game. You basically just keep building rooms and treating people, with increasing difficulty, until you reach the final level, where you’re instantly swarmed with 20,000 patients, an earthquake, and have to build a hospital in a building shaped like a hideously deformed penis.

Just incase that isn’t enough hospital fun though, Codemasters and DR studios released their rip-off version, Hospital Tycoon, in 2007.  Basically a Theme Hospital for the 21st century, it features almost identical gameplay, but with fancy graphics, no sense of humor, and a lack of nostalga value. And that makes it worthless. And that’s why you’ve never heard of it before.

Danny’s Retro Rating:

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Virgin Media are idiots and trolls.

Branson Troll Face.

When we decided to go with Virgin for our telephone and internet connection, we thought it looked like a good deal.  I was hesitant for quite a while but the cost compared to other providers combined with a landline, phone service etc. was pretty good, plus they could install it quickly, and “going fibre” sounded like a good move.

So now we have a crackly phone line that won’t stop ringing random numbers on it’s own, an internet connection that constantly drops out, and I have to leave work early so an engineer can come and do nothing about the problem – otherwise they’ll charge me £10.

It’s funny really because my friend at work had – and still has – the exact same issue with his Virgin line. I should have listened to him and stayed clear, but for some reason I assumed his problems must have been a one-off. The chances of me experiencing the same problem were slim, right?

They are comics, but I'm not really laughing.

Skip foward to today. The engineer has been round, and disconnected our telephone line, because the cable was shorting out under the ground and causing the phone to dial out random numbers. He said someone would be round to “repull” the cable, but didn’t give a date or time, and nobody has rang to give me a date or time – probably because they can’t – we have no phone. The internet is still on but patchy at best, the modem requires a reset two or three times a day.

Yesterday Virgin decided to bill us for the pleasure of this. £78, of which, £54 is call charges for calls that lasted less than 50 seconds. I don’t make calls that last less than 50 seconds, infact I don’t often make calls off the landline at all. My theory? The phone has been dialing out to random people and we’re being charged for it.

Virgin Media have been a complete and total fuckup from day 1. If anyone is considering going with Virgin Media I strongly suggest you treat them like Asbestos and stay clear.

I’m about to ring them back to try and get the problems resolved. Ultimately I’m about to speek to Pooja Bhuttar in Mumbai, who will fail to do anything useful for me except baffle me with his strange accent. I’m not racist, I’ve got nothing agaisnt the fella, but he won’t be able to do anything  from there.

……Going to Sky as soon as we can get out of this contract. Murdoch, all is forgiven.