Theme Hospital 1.0

Theme Hospital is an excellent time-management game. It was originally released in 1997 for the PC. Developed by BullFrog Productions and published by Electronic Arts, the game was a commercial hit.

This year, the folks at gog.com released a great port for the Mac. The game is still a DOS game, so you will see the DOS prompt before you start playing. The game is identical to the 1997 release, with the same graphics, gameplay mechanics and challenges. For those of you who have not played the game, let me briefly describe it. In Theme Hospital, you are in charge of building, operating and maintaining a hospital. You deal with research and treatment, staffing considerations and even the cleaning of the hospital.

The first thing that you want to purchase when you start playing is a reception desk. All the patients will stop here and they will be sent to different parts of your hospital. So it is often a good idea to build more than one desk. After that, you can build the General Practitioner's office, perhaps the most important office in the game. Your patients will have different ailments, which you have to diagnose and treat by building and staffing different types of offices and rooms. There are diagnosis rooms, wards, psychiatric offices, etc. Some of the diseases that your patients have are quite original and funny. The two most common cases are Invisibility and Bloated Head.

Theme Hospital is a game that you just want to keep playing until the power goes out. It is that addictive, even today, 15 years after its release. I probably spent a good hour playing the game when I decided to run it to take some screenshots. And I will definitely try to complete the game when I get a chance. It only costs $5.99, and I think those are the best 6 dollars I spent in a video game lately.