Reviews// Trauma Center: Second Opinion (Wii)

The only way to start the non-gamer to play is, well, to get them playing. Nintendo knows this and Trauma Center: Second Opinion is a startling example of how it intends to make it happen. So what are these two 'ultimate' videogame goals I referred to? I am alluding to that rare and special place, that pure experience of simple gaming nirvana often spoken about yet rarely achieved, when rock solid gameplay meets smoothly intuitive control.

So yes, I was impressed, beguiled and generally ‘sold in’ as the PR types are so fond of saying. This reviewer left the Wii House a better man, having finally experienced Nintendo’s glorious vision of gaming for all. The one thing on my mind, embarrassingly enough, was that I couldn’t wait to show the game to my wife, my sisters and all my other non-gaming (mainly female) friends and family-members when I finally get the Wii this coming Christmas.

While Zelda and the rest will remain as private, solitary pleasures (for the time being at least, until the ladies and the lapsed gamers are finally converted to the cause); Wii Sports will be fun, but only for a while (i.e. until it goes back on the shelf on the 28th December till next Christmas), Trauma Center: Second Opinion will be regularly pulled out to entertain those who previously would not have given videogames a first look or a second thought.

Let’s look more closely at the game’s hilariously melodramatic storyline, which is pretty much in line with the DS version. The year is 2018 and there are loads of new (killer) strains of viruses and bio-terror diseases that you, playing as the seemingly-gullible Dr. Stiles, are charged with fighting.

The game is broken down into six chapters, each in turn made up of increasingly harder - just-one-more-go - operations on an array of genuinely tragic patients. Each operation requires you to make use of up to eight different bits of medical equipment, including your trusty scalpel, a laser (to take out unwelcome growths), antibiotic gel (to make sure those gaping wounds don’t go septic!), an ultrasound (to search for malignant growths), forceps (to remove various ‘foreign bodies’), a defibrillator, a magnification tool and more.

The basic aim, fairly obviously, is to heal your patient. You do this by first selecting the required tool/item from a circular panel in the bottom left of the screen using the nunchuk’s analogue stick. You then use the Wii-mote in your right hand as a scalpel/lazer pointer; antibiotic gel applicator; hypodermic syringe or (careful now, steady hands!) forceps to remove all kinds of wrongness from your patient’s weakened body.

The controls are almost perfect and take only a short time to master fully. Within less than half and hour you find yourself deftly using both hands to select and quickly use the relevant tools, syringes, lasers and other items to heal the disease-ridden body of your patient. The understated in-game audio and rumble feature top off the feeling off actually making incisions into skin, removing malignant growths and so on.

You need steady hands and the patience of a saint to get beyond the first few chapters of the game, but you will do it, trust me. There is just no way you’ll want to stop trying that failed last operation again… and again. As each time you fail, you learn a little more about what you need to do to succeed.

This is the genius of the game’s design. It’s Rubik Cube stuff. You just find yourself doing each operation over and over, almost obsessively, until you crack it. Never mind the fact that you’ve just killed a man thirty times in a row by failing to remove multiple cancerous growths from his lower bowel.


SPOnG Score: B++

[i]Trauma Center: Under the Knife is both delightfully innovative and frustratingly difficult. But in the best possible sense. It’s a game that you will want to show your non-gaming friends and family in order to entice them into your funny little hobby. It’s the best example to date of Nintendo’s much hyped ‘new ways to play’ marketing guff made real.

The game is fundamentally a joy to play, solidly designed and more addictive than [insert name of non-branded narcotic for comic effect here]. It sets up a fun puzzle for you to crack and makes you want to try over and over and over and over until you solve it. It does all this in the guise of a fun little cartoony story about being a trainee doctor who has crushes on his nurses and, it transpires, turns out to be some kind of ninja uber-surgeon.[/i]