E3 impressions - Zoo Hospital

Well, here’s one of the pleasant surprises of E3. Zoo Hospital is actually a fun game…from my playtime, I might say it was very fun! I picked up the Wiimote/Nunchuk because, surprise surprise, no one was playing the game. I’m really happy I did though. We have a lot of preconceived notions about games like this. I know that there are many of you that don’t even care about this game…and I was one of them. Thankfully, the game was on the show floor and I am in a situation where I had to play. Now, all I have to do is convince you that you may actually want to play.

Did you like Trauma Center on the Wii? Well, take that style of gameplay, remove people and put in animals. Welcome to Zoo Hospital! It really is the exact same type of game. There are sick animals, you operate on them, and then you get to see them running around their cages happy and healthy…so long as you perform your job well! There are all types of animals at the zoo, and they all have some type of illness. Someone must not be cleaning these cages properly.

Today, I had to take care of some sort of monkey. It had some fancy name, but for the sake of this article, it was a monkey. This poor little guy had some sort of rash going on under his hair, and it needed to be cleared up. First off, you start out with a camera view of the entire monkey. You rotate the camera around to get a good look, and then you move onto the magnifying glass. This will auto-rotate the camera, and you have to line up the magnifying glass icon with targets that light up on the monkey. Once a meter is filled, you’ve completely the medical analysis. Now it’s time to get this guy feeling better.

You are given a set of tools just like you have in Trauma Center. You can point to each tool to use them, or you can select them via the Nunchuk. There’s all sorts of stuff…like razors to cut away hair/fur, needles to inject medicine, and so on. To clear up this rash, I had to first shave away some hair until I could see the infected area. After that, I had to rub some gel on the rash to clear away some of the ‘angry’ nature of the rash. Once I had a better look at the situation, I had to use the needle to inject medicine into the rash. There are three colors of medicine, and you have to match the color to the target color that sits over the rash. After that, we were all done. You get a grade, and Mr. Monkey goes back to greet all his friends.

Also worth noting, you can pet any and all of the pets. They all have special areas that, when rubbed/pat/scratched, will cause them to become a lot more friendly, and warm up to you. Of course, feel free to poke animals in the butt to have them kick or slap at you. Yes, I poked the monkey’s butt…and it was fun.

I am seriously considering picking up Zoo Hospital now. I love the Trauma Center series, and Zoo Hospital takes that gameplay and moves it in another direction. I can’t believe how much I enjoyed this title…and now I realize that I have to be far less judgmental when going into games.