Hospitals are horrible.

You can be superfluous with the language all you want, but hospitals are horrible. You can add dentists too; especially when they expect you to floss like an OCD sufferer. Thankfully, I’ve never had to visit one since the series finale of Quantum Leap. It was for an operation, an embarrassing one, concerning my bowel.

Fellow Dtoider Elsa (rightly) gets a lot of sympathy for her cancer woes. Hell, even that Lv99Ron guy nearly died recently!

For me, it’s pure laughter at my expense.

I became severely ill because nobody, not even my own doctor, would take me seriously; especially if it’s to do with your arse apparently. After a lazy misdiagnosis, somebody finally looked at my tests and thought, “My God! This guy is so blocked he’s going to explode in a shower of shit by next Wednesday!”

Suffice to say, things turned out well, despite the fact I felt severely depressed after Dr. Sam Beckett failed to leap home. Once I recovered though, I would cheerfully play nothing but Mario Kart to the point where the nurses would be concerned about my lack of exercise.

Hey, I was the Undisputed Mushroom Cup King of The Sick Kids!

I don’t remember much of my time there. Vividly just the SNES and a Gameboy I borrowed off a kid seemingly worse off than me. I could go on about sickly fluorescent lights or the harsh, cold glean of the ward floors. Maybe even mention the flat emptiness that permeated the halls at night, the distant look of the nurses or the how the scrambled egg was always cold before I awoke. Truthfully though, it’s all faded memories.

Except for crying at Quantum Leap.

Well, I’m pretty healthy nowadays and my arse is totally fine.



Still, every time I attempt Theme Hospital, I’m reminded of that outsider feeling of the Children’s Ward, solely by looking at the cartoon sprites visiting my poorly run hospital; which is remarkable since a majority of them are either invisible, have balloon sized head and huge tongues or pretend to be Elvis Presley. It’s shouldn’t be relatable, but it somehow resonates perfectly.

Theme Hospital is a videogame that haunts me from time to time. If you put any game down in front of me, I’ll finish it; just not this one.

After all these years, I wonder if there’s actually an end to Theme Hospital. Maybe it’s meant to be an endless slog of management positions that increasingly destroy your reputation as you progress, until you end up quitting with a decent pension plan but no direction in life.

As you can tell, I’m not management material and this is a videogame where you’re required to be ruthlessly efficient; hiring and firing staff, building new facilities and turning the heating up to Nuclear Meltdown Degrees Fahrenheit. Every second you’re not doing something, means you’re going to lose.

You’re so busy with building more toilets and x-rays that you forget about the huge waiting lines and a lack of GPs. So, this always leads to waves of puke sloshing around your wards. Then the realisation hits you; these people would like just two minutes of your time and you’re selfishly trying to figure out how many Kit-Kat machines you need to cover up the mouse holes.

That’s just before they suddenly start dying.

Thanks.



Sporadically, I’ve been trying to beat Theme Hospital since its release in 1997. Even on “Easy” mode, it’s unfair; you could go from winning to losing over nothing. Quite recently, I decided to dust off my third copy of the game and see if it could be beaten.

When you’re younger, you might miss the specific intricacies of videogames. There’s stuff out there that seems ridiculously hard because you didn’t grasp a developer’s concept and yet, years later, you pass though it with ease. Theme Hospital doesn’t care how much your IQ has naturally risen with age. It will destroy you regardless.

The main problem really lies with the way it teaches you the basics, like spending money, then forgets to tell you about properly arranging loans or manage the size of your workforce (also, the hint system is horribly broken). Even though I’ve dealt with budget sheets for the freaking Government of all organisations, to this day, I will still run my virtual hospital into the ground by Level Six.



After a while, the cute sympathy for patients wears off and I feel disdain towards them. All they do is come in to:

A) complain about the heating,

B) shit,

C) then die.

I turn them away in droves because I don’t want some guy with gut troubles ruining my reputation. Yet somehow, this is part of the winning formula!

As I sit there stressing out, I’m always drawn back to my time in the hospital and wonder if my embarrassing bowel operation was an inconvenience to hospital staff. It’s weird to feel both sympathy and disdain for either side of the doctor/patient relationship, but Theme Hospital indirectly does a great job of conveying this miserable aspect of “caring”.

So, yet again, I’ve given up on this stupid game. Like Dr. Sam Beckett, I can only hope my next play through will be that infamous “leap home” and like that series finale, I’ll probably never see the end result.

Oh boy.