Tue 22 Aug 2006
Giving gamers the chance to play doctors and nurses, Codemasters is working on a new title called Hospital Tycoon, an original PC title from development studio Deep Red Games, maker of such hit PC titles including Monopoly Tycoon, Vega$: Make it Big!, and Tycoon City: New York. Hospital Tycoon is a medical-themed game in which players are put in charge of hectic hospital facilities that are constantly on the verge of crisis and collapse. Players are challenged to run, maintain, enhance and expand the hospitals while turning any chaotic situation around using ingenious management techniques.
The most infectious thing about Hospital Tycoon is its humor as players experience how the game’s characters — the doctors, nurses, and patients — interact with each other and react to how well the player is running each hospital. The game’s high level of character interaction will create a living hospital that’s part soap opera and part comedy. A move away from micro-management life-simulation games, Hospital Tycoon will create emerging situations that are as entertaining as they are challenging. The manic medical teams have to deal with patients suffering from the most peculiar and sometimes bizarre ailments, such as the man afflicted with ‘Monkey Nuts’ and the office worker diagnosed with Stress Zombosis, and set about curing them with equally odd treatments.
Players will direct the hospital’s medical staff, ensure patients are cared for and have the treatment facilities required. There’s also the upkeep of each hospital to control and develop; dedicated areas can be built to support additional medical needs – surgery, diagnosis, physiotherapy and more. Get it right and patients will go home happy, get it wrong and armies of angry, sick people will make everyone’s life hell. The game’s rich visual design will deliver detailed, comedic representations of the patients’ bizarre diseases. The more patients that are cured, the more player’s medical empire can grow and flourish, but watch out for the spread of infectious conditions, or soon an epidemic could plunge the hospital into absolute chaos. The game is being developed only for PC and scheduled for spring 2007 release.