15.2.2014

... But I finally completed Theme Hospital. It's one of those games you can keep going back to, and you can learn new things from each time you play. Although I never discovered how to stop all my machines blowing up at once, with about 5 fire extinguishers in each room. Pick them up and USE them people!!!I have been playing this game since I was in my teens and right through my twenties, and I was so overjoyed when I completed it, I recorded it on my phone to "commemorate" the occasion. Saying that, it's the most frustrating game I've ever played, along with James Pond: Robocod.Theme Hospital is one of those enjoyable and hilarious games, as previous reviewers have mentioned. However,it is still a game with a lot of faults. As I mentioned previously, the items in the rooms are useless, especially the fire extinguishers. There's no point if the staff will not physically pick them up and stop the machine from blowing up and killing the people in the room in the process. You know as soon as that happens, you may as well restart the level, as you will be on a downward spiral from there. There's also an issue with the numerous rats running around. If you have particularly narrow corridors (which I did frequently), there was no way of blocking off the rat hole without either blocking the corridor, or deleting the room. That could have been a bit inventive, especially with multiple handymen walking around. If they could have dealt with the rats too, that would have been terrific. Or there needs to be some kind of alert to show where the rat hole is, as most of the time I saw the rats running about , but couldn't pinpoint the exact hole. Heaven forbid you had a rat hole inside the door as well (particularly on the Ward or Operating Theatre) as there was no way of blocking those off, without physically removing the room.The various characters walking in and out of the hospital were the best I have seen in a game yet. My favourites will always be Bloaty Head or Hairyitis, simply due to the weird and wonderful ways the patients were "cured". They do get a bit repetitive after a while, as you ideally need to wait until you get a new level for new characters, and if you're stuck on a level, you will be fed up of seeing the same faces and the same symptoms coming in. In the later levels, you do get patients who are aliens coming in, but you only get these with emergencies, which is disappointing.Also the epidemics - what I discovered is that if you remove the reception desk(s), you do not get any epidemics. However, you don't get any patients either. This proved quite useful during the really busy periods, when I had queues upon queues of people waiting to be seen. When your receptionist is a lazy cow, it's always useful to build a second reception desk. (Why did the receptionists never get to go to the staffroom? They were there manning their desks 24/7!!!) Also, the other issue I had with the epidemics was as soon as the patient "left" the hospital - even if it was just to walk the short way to another part of your hospital - bam, the epidemic is over, and the Health Inspector is on his merry way to rid you of some of your hard earned money. You can sometimes help this by booting everyone with an epidemic out your hospital, however they're quite often walking out the door as the Health Inspector is walking in.And when you get a sickness epidemic, there's no stopping your patients. It's like a never ending pile of vomit on your floor, and the handymen will just walk straight over it, no matter how often you pick them up and put them directly on top of it. You will get ridiculous and constant notifications as well, advising that you need to change your handymen priorities, so they can water the plants more. It was so bad at one point, that I could not see the hospital floor for those men walking around in their brown overalls, yet I still got the irritating notification. I think I must have had 60+ of them walking around too.It would be nice to see a more updated version of this game. In the days of HD graphics and your Playstations and Xboxes of the world, this game is sorely lacking, with its little tinny music, and 64bit graphics. A nice glossy, HD version of this game would be terrific with all the kinks worked out, and more variety of characters. And maybe more availability on different platforms. I had this PC CD-ROM version for years, and I had to update it with some patch in order to get it play on Vista. I know it was available on the Playstation at one point, but I've never seen how good the graphics were (so cannot compare). I always wanted it on my DS but this is one game that seems destined to never be on any other platform.There are similar games to this out there - I have played

24.1.2005

Theme Hospital, released in 1997 by Bullfrog, is a relatively simple but addictively fun game that truly stands the test of time. It puts you in complete control of a series of hospitals, working your way up from one larger institution to another. The job gets harder as you move up the ladder, as greater crises and burdens lie in wait to bring you down. It all starts fairly simple. At your first hospital, you just need to set up a general practitioner's office or two, a general diagnostics room, a pharmacy, a psychiatric office, and get your researchers working on new diseases and ways to go about combating them. You've got to hire doctors, nurses, handymen,and a receptionist - and you get a wide range of folks to choose from. Will you pay top dollar for the efficient GP's and specialists, or will you settle for abrasive, lazy types who smell of cabbage? Cure enough patients, make enough money, and establish a good enough reputation, and job offers for bigger and better assignments will come your way.As you progress, you'll get access to an assortment of fancy diagnostic equipment and treatment clinics. For those hard-to-diagnose cases, there are X-ray rooms, cardiology exams, high-dollar scanners, and the like, and before long you're even ready to build an operating theater and put scalpels in the hands of those crazy doctors of yours. As for the diseases and conditions, they aren't your typical fare: alongside gastrointestinal-type ailments such as the squibs, you have folks with Elvis Complex (who do indeed show up in Elvis leisure suits), invisibility, Bloaty Head (just pop their head and reinflate it), Slack Tongue (chop chop), Baldness (wait'll you see how to cure that), and an assortment of silly afflictions. Of course, you have your basic fractures and uncommon cold cases, as well. Each condition is more funny than serious (especially in terms of how it is contracted), but keeping your hospital up and working efficiently gets to be pretty serious when you've got patients queued up in the aisles, tired doctors recuperating in the staff lounge, diagnostic machines temporarily down for repair, emergencies bringing in a number of new patients who must be cured quickly if your reputation isn't to suffer, earthquakes shaking things up, and epidemics popping up and wreaking havoc. Patients can be pretty messy, as many of them tend to throw up all over the place. If you don't have enough dependable handymen around to clean up the mess, the Ministry of Health will be all over you.The graphics look surprisingly good even today - although 1997 graphics certainly don't compare to those of recent games. There is a decent variety of looks among patients, and it's almost worth killing a few of them just to watch them ascend to heaven (or, on occasion, drop through the floor on their way to an alternate destination). The game is simple enough for anyone to play and enjoy, although things get pretty challenging as you progress deeper into the game. A lot of games today sacrifice fancy graphics for actual gameplay, but Theme Hospital is the kind of game you enjoy playing years and years after its release.

6.1.2005

Firstly, why the hell hasn't anyone reinvented this fantastic idea cos i'd go and buy it straight away! With the new, higher level of graphics available nowadays, this type of game would be amazing and i'm sure i'd be as addicted to it as i've always been with this little gem! Theme Hospital is basically as simple as it sounds- its a game where you are incharge of running your own hospital! Building a wide variety of rooms to cater for your little sick people, hiring lots of doctors and nurses and ultimately trying to make sure your not caught in a cupboard getting jiggy with your trousers round your ankles! Anyway, one of the main elements of this game is obviously the patients who come in with a variety of weird and wonderful problems!An early person you will meet is a gentleman with a huge head who i like to call Ernie! Ernie is very nice but suffers from Bloaty Head syndrome and you'll need to search your way through lots of interesting and unusual appliances to find the Inflator to insure that he toddles off home to his wife Mildred, in better proportion! Mildred, however, has a few problems of her own as she's acquired an unusually large tongue, which strangely enough hasn't stopped her being able to breathe comfortably! By building a Slack Tongue clinic she too can enjoy the benefits of using your hospital and return home to Ernie with no more worries about getting her tongue caught in his zipper! Many other people will crop up in your hospital and its your job to sort them out and make everybody well and happy! However, though this may sound all fun and entertaining there is a downside! If you don't manage to cure your patients it can be fatal, and can lead to them either ascending beautifully up into heaven with lovely accompanying music or being summoned by satan himself into the dark and horrifying pits of hell!!! On a lighter note, there is great fun to be had booting your lazy doctors out of the staff room (i'll warn you that if you put in a computer game then you won't be able to pull them away) and every doctors dreams will be fulfilled when you hire identical quintuplet nurses to strut around your hospital in their short skirts! Wonderful! Gordon and a few of his mates are bound to turn up every so often and although it looks like they have all been off trekking around Antartica for 9 months, they all actually suffer from Hairyitis (coincidence or what!) so send them straight to the Electrolysis Clinic to have it all taken care of! Having seen the results of this i personally think they should have stuck with the "i'm gonna mug ya!" look they had before as with all the hair gone they're definately no oil-paintings! Anyway, you've got to build toilets so they can all do their thing in the privacy of their own company, hire handymen to clear up the mess especially if you havn't done what i just told ya, and every so often you have the option of taking on emergencies... if you can handle it that is!! Theme Hospital is a fantasic game which will keep you addicted for hours on end! But if you happen to get bored take advice from the doctor and go jump in a cupboard!

2.10.2003

This really is a piece of mindless fun. The diseases that people start with, and the graphics to illustrate these diseases, are hilarious. There's Bloaty Head Syndrome, where the patients all have massive heads that need to be popped like a balloon, then reinflated to a more head-shaped size. Slack Tongue Syndrome, where the patients all have tongues hanging down to their knees. This time the doctor has to slice off the excess tongue, to return it to a normal size. There are hairy people (like cousin It from the Addams Family), bald people (who are given wigs like the vicar in the Simpsons from some kind of machine that you sit in which comes down over your head),invisible people (you just see a hat and a walking stick wandering around the pharmacy until they take the right medicine), radioactive people (who glow bright green until they have been put in a machine that returns them to the right colour), and floppy people (who have no bones in their body and need to be stiffened up in the Jelly Vat). There are also psychiatric conditions, like people who are suffering from The King Syndrome, who wander around your hospital in a white Las Vegas jump suit, wearing sunglasses and sporting an Elvis haircut. A quick visit to the shrink, and they turn back into a normal person.The Operating Theatre, which deals with Broken Hearts and Spare Ribs, is just like in a real hospital, where the little gown they make you wear that ties up at the back doesn't quite fit properly, so all the patients are mooning everybody while waiting to be treated. The odd vomit epidemic is quite good fun as well.It starts off pretty easy - hire some doctors, a nurse, a receptionist and some maintenance men. Build surgeries, operating theatres, specialist treatment rooms, diagnosis rooms, a staff room and plenty of toilets for the patients. Stick some benches, radiators and drinks machines in the corridors and waiting rooms, and start treating patients.Once you're onto hospital four or five, things start to get tough. For starters, you'll need to buy far more land than the building you originally started with, because there won't be enough room to fit everything in. Once you've got more than one building the patients have to wander outside to get from one building to another, and if there's a virus attack and somebody with the virus steps outside, then the Hospital Inspector comes to issue you with a fine or shut you down. The patients are pretty dim too. They can be at the front of a queue to see a specialist, and just before they are called in for diagnosis they wander off to get a drink or go to the toilet. Then they come back, join the end of the queue, and start complaining because they've been waiting for ages. It all gets very very complicated...There's really only one annoying bit. Every once in a while, you stop controlling the doctors, and have intermediate levels where you have to shoot rats that have infested your hospital. Okay for about two minutes, then it gets boring. Let's face it, the game is a management game, not a shoot-em-up. Other than that, it's great.

5.9.2004

I love this game! The number of utterly hilarious jokes they manage to fit in while at the same time providing an engaging and addictive game is truly commendable. No matter where you look there is a laugh to be found somewhere; the staff CVs include descriptions such as 'Plays Theme Park a lot' 'Smuggles fake watches' and 'Terrible at the job, a possible liabilty', the diseases and their descriptions are plain ridiculous at times, and announcements on the intercom are anything but serious. Even after all this time playing I still burst into hysterics at times when I recall a particularly funny moment.The idea is, of course, to run a hospital - building rooms, hiring staff, etc.

25.7.2007

Bullfrog's first attempt in the Theme series was back in '94, with their PC game 'Theme Park'. Like Sim City (Named Populous) back then, it was the begining of a generation, yet I look back now and play it, and wonder how I could ever be so absorbed by its cartoonish graphics, and inability to.. well.. personalise the park in any way!However, you could say they developed the idea with this game, Theme Hospital. No more do you place an object on the map and not be able to even rotate it - Theme Hospital offers just about the best fun you could imagine in terms of PC simulation away from theme parks.Its a gamr to just ypick up and playy too. A brief tutorial tells you what the tabs mean etc,

15.2.2015

Theme hospital in its day, was a great title, that badly needs upgrading, rather like Airport inc made By Bullfrog / Take2, I dont know why developers dont get there lazy bums off there chairs and upgrade these to windows 7 status at least. Theme Hospital was made when we all used 800 x600 resolution CRT monitors, there is no way to change it to 1920 x 1080 like my monitor is, hence its almost unplayable. However Theme Hospital has elements of DOS in it, Im reliably told by Origin, That there version is used in a DOS box, for windows 7, I have tried this, and it hasnt crashed yet. but due to my wide screen monitor I use for FlightSX, The graphics are so bad its impossible to use with any satisfaction.

18.4.2009

Theme Hospital was originally released in 1997 as part of Bullfrog, which was part of Electronic Arts which is now part of EA Games.The game hasn't dated too much at all. Yes it'll look incredibly huge and a little blocky on today's 22" LCD flatscreen monitors but do remember in 1997 we were all using 12" and 14" CRT monitors and the headaches that went with them.On today's hardware, it still runs. Compatibility mode is not needed under XP or Vista. Disable anti-virus software. Some computer configurations may have issues such as lock-ups, freezes or the odd glitch. This is due to the age of the game. Unlike Theme Park,

1.10.2014

It took a while to set up this game as I had to search through various advice online to get it to work with windows 8.To get it to work: from the disc copy the file 'HOSP' onto your C drive, then on 'winmain' right click, select properties then compatibility tab and select reduce colour option. Then play the game by double clicking winmain.The Theme Hospital website has a version you can download for different modern operating systems however the Windows 8 version DOES NOT WORK, don't download it. Also it does not work when you try playing the game in compatibility mode for Windows Vista/Windows 98 (an option Windows 8 gives you)The game play is a bit buggy,

4.7.2003

I originally purchased this game back in the golden days when it first come out and I still love it, every so often I will reinstall it and play it again, Bullfrog really outdid themselves in this game, in the game you control a hospital (self-explanatory) or maybe not! Especially the cases you have to deal with, to start with you must set up a general practice (more like a doctors surgery) but it slowly will get harder and harder soon you will get an Operating room and an X-ray machine along with loads of amusing imaginary machines to cure people from silly (but still funny) conditions, when you diagnose a new condition you will receive a short informative piece of literature explaining how the condition is created,

23.2.2009

I bought this game years ago when I had my old 98 PC and I absolutely loved it. After I bought my Vista computer I couldn't get it to work so after a while I just gave up. When I saw this listing I decided to buy it and give it one more try.While it doesn't say it here on the page on the back of box it actually says that the game is compatible with Vista. But they shouldn't really have put it on there cause it isn't really. It installed fine on my Vista Laptop but when I went to play it all the graphics were all weird. So I used the compatibility wizard and played the game in XP mode and changed a couple of settings and it works okay.

22.6.2007

Ok it's old. The graphics are nothing close to being on par with the games that we've all grown used to and okay it's probably been done a million times since.But I still claim that this is possibly the best family PC game of all time. I've been playing it since I first got my first PC way back when it first came out.The gameplay is fantastic and purely addictive and yes, okay after a level or so can become a little repetative, but after a break it's appeal is back in full-form.The controls are easy as is the concept and it's packed with innocent humor and sarcy little jibes which are brilliant. The objectives in the levels are varied and every level tends to add something new.Somebody compared it to the Sims 1 & 2 and I don't see how that can be done.

17.12.2004

Great game, recommended for most ages. And great value considering it is only £4.99!! Anyway, the game like all others does have great things, and then the bad things, this is just to give you an idea.It is a great game, and like most others very addictive as well, the aim of the game is to build the perfect hospital having considerate money restrictions. Different patients come in with different diseases, and you aim is to obviously cure them, but thats not always as easy as it sounds!! The patients die if you dont treat them quick enough, and if you kill to many, you loose the level.The game has strange faults, sometimes the colours go funny, and the whole game can vary from green to red.

28.7.2013

I bought a copy of this for my son after he had a new laptop and he used to enjoy playing it on his mum's old computer. The problem is that due to the age of this game it won't install on newer operating systems (even with compatibility mode settings that windows has to offer)After some digging around I found the following link that seemed to work (partially)[...](just in case amazon filter out web links, just do a search for: "how-to-install-and-play-theme-hospital-under-windows-7-64-bit")When you get to step 9 instead of trusting the patch to copy the files it needs, I would suggest going into the folder and copying them manually as depending on where you place the files on your computer's

15.3.2009

I got this back when I was younger and I really, really loved it. The game made me laugh and I just played for fun. Pity the disk got scratched up then broke...I was very sad.when I got my second copy, I started playing it properly (trying to get right through it). That was a couple of years ago when I had a surge of nostalgia playing Worms (another classic!).I'm buying my third copy soon and is the only reason I'm keeping XP on my old computer instead of changing it to Ubuntu.despite a few bugs, the game plays well, and will amuse you for hours. It's often been the cause of my coursework being temporarily abandoned!Each level you are given a new hospital, in which you have to build a successful facility,

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