Metachronos overall score = 8.3 / 10
Positive
- Fast-paced puzzle action gameplay shows off a lot of what the Wii Remote can do
- Surprisingly engaging storyline rife with the best kind of anime melodrama
- Multiple difficulty settings make the high level of challenge more manageable
- Controls do a great job of simulating some surgical procedures
Negative
- While the presentation looks good, it feels dated--no support for widescreen 480p displays
- Some scenarios demand trial and error or punishing degrees of precision
Those who've played the first Trauma Center game will already know Dr. Derek Stiles, a young surgeon who is fresh from having completed his residency. The game identifies Dr. Stiles as the story's main character, but Trauma Center turns out to have a lot of great characters in it, even though all the story sequences are told in a simple, rather old-fashioned way, using still images and text dialogue. Nevertheless, the story is engrossing, and broaches some surprisingly intense and serious material, from patients with suicidal tendencies to doctors who are morally predisposed to euthanasia--and that's just the beginning. The story goes way over the top as Dr. Stiles discovers he has the Healing Touch, an ability inherited from ancient Greek times. Meanwhile, a world-threatening epidemic is discovered and believed to be a work of bioterrorism. There's a lot of intrigue to this story, and the dialogue is well written to drive it forward plausibly enough.
When you're not experiencing the melodramatic storyline, you'll be in surgery, viewing the patient from a first-person perspective. Typically, you'll need to make an incision, fix the patient on the inside, and then close him up. As you might expect, though, operations can be quite different from one to the next. You'll have access to a wide variety of tools for getting the job done, including a scalpel, a drainage hose, sutures, a precision laser, an ultrasound machine, forceps, and more. On the Nintendo DS, you selected these by touching the edges of the screen, which resulted in a lot of back-and-forth tapping (unless you were crazy enough to try to play with two styluses). On the Wii, you use the nunchuk attachment's analog stick to access tools from a radial menu while keeping your other hand steady, concentrating on the operation. This is a significant reinvention of the Trauma Center control scheme; by requiring you to use both hands, it seems like a better simulation of the surgical process. Some well-placed rumble effects make the control scheme even more convincing.
This is about as unorthodox of a launch title for a new game system as they come, but then again, the Wii is pretty unorthodox too. So maybe it shouldn't come as any surprise that the game and the console make a great match. Trauma Center: Second Opinion isn't going to wow anybody with its presentation, yet it's got so much inventive gameplay and takes such a spirited approach to its subject matter that it still stands out from the crowd.
Subject: Trauma Center: Second Opinion 
Sun Mar 30, 2008 3:04 am
