![]() ![]() At first, there’s something incredibly fulfilling about hovering your benevolent cursor over high-priority admissions and whisking them to the front of the queue, and conducting vital research into curing more complicated diseases like The Squits the whole hospital operating like a satisfyingly well-oiled machine. Initially, the goal of Theme Hospital is simple enough – players buy chairs for waiting rooms, hire a competent medical team, and build enough facilities to cure the local community of fictional ailments such as bloaty head, the uncommon cold, broken wind, and King Complex (a narcissistic condition which causes people to impersonate Elvis Presley). And out of the whole lot, Theme Hospital was the pinnacle – the perfect blend of dark humour and sheer silliness. Ruling over entire metropolises on SimCity gave me a giddying God complex, and tinkering to find the ideal recipe on Lemonade Stand was weirdly meditative. I’d spend hours shooting fictional feature films on studio management game The Movies, and painstakingly crafting death-defying rides for RollerCoaster Tycoon. Instead, I was obsessed with anything that mimicked real life. ![]() READ MORE: Grant Kirkhope on ‘Banjo Kazooie Re-Jiggyed’: “I look back and I go, how the bloody hell did that happen?”Īs a kid, I was too much of a gigantic wimp to play games with feral zombies and rabid wolves.And yet, instead, I spent an unhealthy proportion of my childhood moving potted plants around waiting rooms, hiring and firing doctors with Alan Sugar levels of abandon, and monitoring the flow of little pixelated blobs through my lovingly constructed triage system. Surely games should be about escapism, not filling in endless patient risk assessments while a middle-manager called Sandra honks her coffee-breath down your neck? Given the choice between shooting at mutant aliens with a laser bazooka or running an efficient healthcare system in a business simulation game, you’d expect the space-adventuring to win out every single time. ![]() Zombies.On paper at least, Theme Hospital feels like the most dreary concept imaginable. Previous titles in the EA promotion have included Dragon Age: Origins, Dead Space, Peggle and Plants vs. Truly, the first time you see someone enter the re-inflation clinic is a beautiful thing. Developed by the now-defunct Dungeon Keeper developer Bullfrog, it mixes management and business aspects with the need to cure queues of patients struggling from bizarre diseases. Theme Hospital remains one of the best simulation games of the '90s. Once downloaded, the game is yours to keep forever. Got an Origin account? Simply head to Theme Hospital's download page and nab it for free. It's the latest title in EA's regular 'On the House' promotion, which gifts freebies to Origin members every month or so. ORIGINAL STORY 21/1/15 1.35pm: Medically dubious simulation classic Theme Hospital is now available to download for free via Origin. Patients are reminded not to die in the corridors. UPDATE 21/1/15 1.35pm: In celebration of today's Origin freebie (and because H1Z1 is still down) Ian "Greetings" Higton will be live-streaming Theme Hospital tonight from 4pm GMT. ![]()
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