ER

Playing doctor at County General may try your patience

There are all manner of simulation games available. Some let you build cities, while others let you dabble in adult relationships, but there are very few that let you play doctor.

ER aims to redress this balance by letting you re-enact the popular television show of the same name.

Initially, players must create a doctor and customise their gender and skin colour. Then you'll have to fill out some statistics that determine your competency in cardiology, neurology, general surgery, toxicology, paediatrics and orthopaedics.

After that, you'll be assigned to triage where patients wander in with all manner of ailments. You can figure out what's wrong with a patient by clicking on them, which causes a diagnosis to appear in the bottom section of the screen alongside an injury rating that indicates the severity of their condition.

If the patient's sickness is beyond your capability, you can assign them to a higher-ranked doctor. If you feel you're up to the task you can assign them to a bed and enlist the help of a nurse. That's where the fun should begin, but it doesn't.

Treating a patient is as simple as clicking on them and hoping that their injury rating goes down. If it doesn't, you'll need to send the patient to the lab for additional tests, but when they return it's back to clicking and hoping again.

ER tries to emulate the character interaction elements of the TV show (between doctors only), and tries to inject a dose of humour by introducing unusual patients (we won't spoil the surprise, as there are so few).

However, these features are so poorly implemented that they feel like something of an afterthought. ER might appeal to very casual gamers with low expectations but, given its very basic gameplay and the lack of drama, fans of the show are bound to be disappointed.

System requirements:

• 800MHz processor
• 256MB Ram
• 2GB hard disk
• Windows 98SE/2000/ME/XP
• 32MB video card with T&L