A rather popular PC/console game has arrived on Android in the form of what can pretty much be considered an unofficial port. The game in question is called Theme Hospital, originally developed by Bullfrog Productions before merging with EA back in 2004.
The game, called ThemeHospital but without the space between the two words, was ported over to Android by BarleyStudios who, as far as we know,, has no relation to either EA or Bullfrog Studios. For those of you unfamiliar with ThemeHospital, this is essentially a time management game similar to other titles like My Airport but based on levels. Each level consists of an empty hospital that you have to plan, design and build up to attract patients.
It isn’t all serious though as most patients have rather unusual and comical complaints that need to be addressed. You will also have financial goals to set and achieve, actually curing the patients, pulling in a profit and doing it all efficiently enough to increase your hospitals value. You will also be in charge of moving staff members around your hospital in order to treat patients. It can be a pretty hectic but fun game to play.
As you progress through the game completing each level, the new hospitals you are sent to become more and more elaborate with harder winning conditions to meet and tougher sicknesses to cure. There is a final level to this game as well but we will leave that for you to discover and enjoy. For the most part this is a full port of the original game with only a few items missing like the cut scenes.
There is a question of legalities when it comes to this game, if it is truly an unofficial port, since the developers are selling this unofficial port. As one of our freelancers (Chris Joyce) mentioned to us, hopefully EA does what Sega did with Sonic CD and hire the developers officially to work on this and other games for them instead of shutting them down. For now though you can pick up ThemeHospital off of the Google Play store for $1.49.
Update May 22nd, 2012 7:53am: We have removed the link for the ThemeHospital port from BarleyStudios due to it’s violation of the MIT license regarding open source coding.
Thanks to Chris and Lorenzo for the heads up!
Website Referenced: AndroidWorld.it
