 |
Home | News | Reviews | Gallery | Videos | Calendar | Blogs | Cheats | Demos | Contact Us |  |
I don’t know about anyone else, but when I hear about a game based on a hospital television series, I get skeptical. I mean, if I play a detective, like in Legacy Interactive’s and Vivendi Universal’s other computer game series, I’m fine. I’ve watched enough cop dramas and read enough mystery books that I know the drill: take fingerprints, talk to witnesses, and break out the luminol! But what if I’m playing a doctor, like in the upcoming game ER? If a patient walks up to me and says he has a rash and a sore throat, I have no idea. Nobody is going to confuse me with a doctor named House. I suspect there are many like me who don’t know much about medicine but who are interested in playing the game anyway, so how can it work? Let’s find out.
 
In ER you play an intern fresh out of medical school. When creating your character, you get to make a few choices about your appearance, and you also get to distribute some personality points. I thought personalities might include things like “bedside manner” and “hand warmth” but instead ER uses some pretty standard role-playing game attributes: intelligence, constitution, dexterity, and charm. All those things are important, because not only will you be treating patients in the game, you’ll also be making friends and enemies in the hospital. If there’s a doctor you don’t like, you might steal one of his patients. If there’s a doctor you do like, you might build up a relationship and even share a kiss (and I noticed there are some seemingly extraneous storage rooms and linen closets scattered about, so maybe you’ll even be able to have a quickie during office hours -- or maybe not). Gameplay mostly consists of diagnosing and treating patients. Patients wander into the waiting room of the hospital, and then you click on them to diagnose them. If you discover that they have something you can treat, then you assign them to a bed and try to heal them. If you can’t treat their problem, or if you attempt to heal them but fail, then you can “curbside” the patient to another doctor and move on to a new patient. If you can’t even determine what the problem with the patient is, then you might send the patient to the lab to have some tests run on them.
 
Meanwhile, you have to keep your hygiene, energy, and composure scores all high. So you might need to wash your hands or take a shower, visit the cafeteria to eat some yummy hospital food, or catch a nap on a cot in the lounge. Talking to fellow employees of the hospital also helps, and there are nurses, techs, and rent-a-cops for you to deal with as well as other doctors. You can even talk to Dr. Carter, Dr. Lewis, and Dr. Pratt, who are voice-acted by the people who play them in the television series. The press build of ER that I played only came with the first “episode” of the game. In that episode I got to treat a grandmother, a karate master, and a movie star, and the grandmother gave me cookies, so I liked her the best. I also got to treat a couple dozen random patients. It’s hard to tell at this point if ER will be fun, or if treating patients will get repetitive, but at least the game should be different than anything you might have played before. Look for ER to hit store shelves on May 31.
|
Copyright (c) 1998-2009 ~ Game Over Online Incorporated ~ All Rights Reserved
Game Over Online Privacy Policy
