Theme Hospital/CorsixTH - "Doctor required in Inflator roooooom!"

[Mandrake]

One of my favourite simulation games, Theme Hospital is a management sim by Bullfrog Productions that was released in 1997. Patients arrive at your hospital with funny diseases such as Bloaty Head (the patient's head swells up like a balloon), Slack Tongue (the patient has a giant tongue), King Complex (the patient thinks they're Elvis Presley) and it's up to you to design a hospital that can diagnose and cure them efficiently without them getting fed up, throwing up everywhere, or dropping dead. Excellent soundtrack and has great sense of dark humour. I enjoyed it as a kid, even though it gets really chaotic very quickly and I could never deal with the epidemics that kept breaking out on harder levels.

What's really cool is that there's a bunch of fans who've worked an open-source reimplementation called CorsixTH (to which I've contributed towards). Not only does it re-create the entire game so that you can easily play it on modern PCs in full-screen, but it adds so many quality-of-life improvements that make it hard for me to return to Theme Hospital. You can zoom in and out, you can build rooms while paused, you can delete rooms with exploded machinery, there's a new menu for managing your machines, and you can even play your own MP3 files in-game. All you need is to download the installer and provide the original graphics/sounds/level data from Theme Hospital (either by ripping the files from a physical CD or downloading the GOG version).

Elvis has entered the building

[Tiro]

Back when I played Theme Hospital as a kid I never understood why sending people to the auto-autopsy room was giving me such a bad score >.< Then I didn't think about the game for years, and it was only relatively recently when I started playing it again with CorsixTH that I realised what was going on ha.

[beeps]

Oh gosh I used to play Theme Hospital a ton. I wonder if it still holds up compared to Two Point...

[DarkOverord]

Oooooo interesting! I'll give that a go some time :3c

Oh gosh I used to play Theme Hospital a ton. I wonder if it still holds up compared to Two Point...

IMO it does! I think TPH is an improvement on TH but I could happily poke TH more :3

[Moot]

huh, i had no idea there was a source port/reverse engineer of theme hospital. that makes two bullfrog properties i know of now that have an easy way to play an old thing on a new thing and i think i need to look into this more

[Mandrake]

Back when I played Theme Hospital as a kid I never understood why sending people to the auto-autopsy room was giving me such a bad score >.< Then I didn't think about the game for years, and it was only relatively recently when I started playing it again with CorsixTH that I realised what was going on ha.

I definitely remember joking "When patients go in the machine, they never come out hahaha" as a kid without actually thinking about the implications of calling it the "Auto-Autopsy" machine. Let alone realising that comedy diseases aside, this is basically how healthcare is run in America.

huh, i had no idea there was a source port/reverse engineer of theme hospital. that makes two bullfrog properties i know of now that have an easy way to play an old thing on a new thing and i think i need to look into this more

The GOG version of Theme Hospital is set up to run out-of-the-box, except that the music sounds really bad because the MIDI drivers aren't configured properly. Fortunately, it's not too difficult to make it better.