Trauma Team [Wii]

[Hipolito]

I just finished this Wii game in which you play six doctors, each with his or her own specialty, storyline, and game. Set at a hospital in Portland, Maine, the game has you go through each doctor's storyline, allowing you to jump from one to the another as you please, until you reach a linear endgame storyline that unites them all. The easiest way for me to explain how the game plays and what I liked and disliked about it is to describe each doctor separately.

CR-S01: That's the prisoner code for this brilliant general surgeon who is in solitary confinement for a bioterrorism attack that he can't even remember due to amnesia. He is allowed to perform lifesaving surgery to knock a few years off of his very long sentence. His game is about selecting the appropriate medical tool like scalpel or suture, placing them in the right places on the patient, and using the Wii's motion sensing controls to making the right cutting motions. You have to be quick and efficient at switching between tools and managing multiple crises. Some of CR-S01's segments were very engaging challenges in keeping the all the plates spinning.

Maria Torres: A hyper-aggressive Latina first responder who wants to be a hero and abuses everyone who isn't as smart as her (i.e., everyone). She arrives at the scene of major accidents or outbreaks and keeps victims alive until they can be taken to the hospital. Her game mechanics are similar CR-S01's, but involve juggling multiple patients. You have to decide when to pause in treating one person and switch to another to keep them all from dying. It's not as fun as CR-S01, and the character's farcical hostility is a turnoff.

Hank Freebird: A gentle, life-loving Native American giant, he's an orthopedic surgeon with a crimefighting alter ego. His game is about making precise, extensive cuts and inserting pins and screws just right. It's similar to Irritating Stick, that PS1 game we all played and loved, in that you keep a dot (the cutting point) moving along a defined path. It's a simple and boring segment that doesn't feel realistic. The only interesting thing about the character is his budding friendship with an emotionally troubled young patient, but the game doesn't explore this enough.

Tomoe Tachibana: A soft-spoken daughter of Japanese royalty who practices endoscopic surgery and has an elderly ninja butler. Her game puts you in the camera eye of the endoscope, moving through the innards of patients and using the scope's tools to treat hemorrhages, ulcers, and tumors. Though it's a neat demonstration of what an endoscope can do, moving around in first-person perspective using the Wii motion controls is awkward and tedious. This, combined with how stupid the character is, makes Tomoe's segments my least favorite. Also, there's a completely ridiculous segment in which you use the endoscope to search for survivors trapped under rubble.

Gabriel Cunningham: A diagnostic specialist who is similar to House both in what he does and how he behaves. With the help of an AI named RONI who greatly annoys him, he builds a list of a patient's symptoms through patient interviews, stethoscope, diagnostic charts, and lab results such as CT scans and X-rays. Then he compares the symptoms to RONI's database of diseases to figure out which disease the patient has. This is by far my favorite part of the game. It's fun to "collect" symptoms and narrow down the disease candidates, and Gabe's sarcasm makes it even more entertaining. It feels authentic and scientific; all the complex medical terminology you might find in your own patient file at the doctor's office is here, and it can be quite difficult to find the tiny but critical anomalies hiding in an X-ray image. In my youth, I briefly considered taking up medicine, and Gabriel's segments make me wonder if maybe I should have taken that path!

Naomi Kimishima: a depressed, emasculating, and slightly psychic medical examiner who works at a forensic research institute. With the assistance of an FBI agent she calls "Little Guy," she solves murder cases by examining the victim's body, finding clues at the crime scene, and putting them all together. Naomi's different from the other doctors in that she doesn't treat patients. Her game is similar to Phoenix Wright, and has the same problem in that it won't let you act on deductions you've already made until it's ready for you to do so. You have to read the game designer's mind a bit. It's kind of fun, though. Her second case, "Wandering Girl," is one of the best parts of the game, a masterfully told story that's both gruesome and sad.

As you go through this mixed bag of doctors and scenarios, you encounter hints of a mysterious illness that results in black bruises and rapidly changing symptoms. The linear endgame storyline has the whole team working together to figure out why this is happening. Though it involves science fiction, supernatural phenomena, and unlikely thriller movie physics, it had enough scientific grounding and human drama to keep me interested.

There's too much annoying stuff in the game for me to strongly recommend it. The instructions for the first four doctors' medical procedures are sometimes so misleading that I had to look up walkthroughs to figure out what I was supposed to do. The manga art looks cheap, the writing is hit and miss, and it's all rather twee. But if you have any curiosity about the medical profession that goes beyond watching bad medical dramas on TV, you might get something out of this game and may even be inspired to live more cautiously after seeing what an endoscope might find inside you.

[Lordnine]

I’ve always liked the Trauma Team games up until the point where the bio terrorism stuff gets added. I enjoy them when I can mostly take my time to complete the procedures but once they add the action elements I lose interest fast.