Steele and a babe nurse are featured in posters all over examination rooms. The glass-walled hospital looks more like the famous Sydney Opera than the usual pile of bricks that passes for houses of healing in most metropolitan centers these days. Everything here is certainly more fantasy than reality. In addition to the usual tycoon-game management chores, you get to follow the escapades of heartthrob doc Rick Steele and the rest of the staff at Sapphire Beach Hospital. Whereas the decade-old Bullfrog game was a straight god game, the story mode of play here drops you into a soap opera with all the angst and twice the cheese of a TV show like ER or the late, great St. Oddly enough, the biggest difference between Theme Hospital and Hospital Tycoon is that the latter has a more developed theme. Unsurprisingly, this copy of a copy of a copy is bland and derivative, with only a halfhearted attempt at establishing a Sims-style ambiance to make it stand apart from all the other shovelware out there with the word "tycoon" crammed somewhere into their titles. The British developer's Hospital Tycoon is like a reheated version of Bullfrog's ancient hospital-management sim, which was actually a cheap copy of the company's Theme Park. So it's hard to understand what DR Studios was thinking when it decided to essentially remake the 1997 bomb Theme Hospital. If you're going to rip off a game, it's a good idea to make sure that you pick one that's both current and successful.
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