Game Review: Theme Hospital

Back when video game magazines were a real thing that came every month, when they were the only real source of gaming news other than your friend's uncle who worked at Nintendo, one of my favorite magazines was PC Gamer. Not for the news contained within, necessarily, but for the demo disks that came with it. I got probably thousands of gaming hours of those demos--I remember waking up early every morning for a week while I was in middle school to play the demo of Master of Magic, Merlin against Kali--and one of the ones my sister and I both loved to play was Theme Hospital. There were only a couple levels and a small complement of the full list of diseases, but we extracted all the fun it had and then some. My sister can still quote lines from the game's announcer now, almost twenty years after she first played the game.

So when I saw that GOG had it available and that it was on sale, I snapped it up. I had never played the full game for any length of time and now was my chance, now that all the gaming wealth of the world is available to us. I was deciding between Frozen Synapse and Theme Hospital and did a bit of research on the internet. After finding a few comments about Frozen Synapse's more annoying levels, I decided to go with Theme Hospital. HLTB says it's about 24 hours, which is longish for a non-RPG but not a bad length of time, and about the same as Frozen Synapse. And playing it was so much fun when I was a child, right?

Well, dear reader, let me tell you--sometimes you should let a happy memory remain a memory.

The Gut Rot drug is certainly not 75% alcohol by volume.

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Only Japan-living kids will get this...

Thanks to ping816, I found a gif that perfectly encapsulates my feelings about the deer on Miyajima:

It's from the anime Nichijō (日常, "ordinary, everyday"), which I've never seen, but I recognize that building in the background. It's Miyarikyu, where schoolpsychnerd and I went for our fourth wedding anniversary. You can see the building here on Google street view.

You know, this makes me want to watch Nichijō.