![]() I don’t suffer from paranoia, the shakes or any other Ozzy Osborne-related condition, so I consider myself a fairly decent representation of the average Joe who’s going to play New Blood. Good luck, the incision will be all over the shop. ![]() The clock ticks, vitals fall, and you frantically draw a simple incision with the scalpel along a straight vertical line. The console simply isn’t designed to facilitate the kind of precision Trauma Center demands. This is as much a symptom of the motion sensing technology as it is anything else. One, it’s impossible not to stop the little dot that appears on screen from shaking, even when you hold the Wii Remote still. That’s because New Blood, like its predecessor, its brutally difficult, right from the off. Here, a second player can use a second Wii Remote/Nunchuck pair and assist in the operation, which, you quickly discover, is absolutely essential for success, especially on the medium difficulty and above. Gameplay wise, the headline new feature is the implementation of a fun cooperative mode. Imagine The Andromeda Strain spliced with Dallas. Quite brilliantly, the plot, which is full of dramatic twists and turns, evolves into part sci-fi thriller part daytime soap. The two docs begin the game in a remote hospital in Alaska, but eventually return to Concordia Medical Institute in sunny Los Angeles and combat a mysterious disease called Stigma. Healing Touch is kind of like a mystical super power brought about through spiritual meditation, although Val learns it through a different process: “It wasn’t the technique that was important for the Healing Touch it was the opening of my heart.” But to trigger it you need to perform the same action for both: draw a five-point star. Val gets Anesthesia, which temporarily stabilises the patient’s vitals. For Markus, this triggers Slow Time, allowing him to cope with multiple problems easier. Set seven years after the events of DS game Trauma Center: Under the Knife 2, which hasn’t been released in Europe, New Blood follows the story of doctors Markus Vaughn and Valerie Blaylock, two world-class surgeons (you’re able to pick which one you want to play as during each operation) who share the same astonishing surgical technique known as the “Healing Touch”. In between operations a fully fleshed out, and quite silly story plays out, told through full voice over and still cartoon images of the characters. Trauma Center truly is one of the weirdest games on the planet, and quintessentially Japanese. You’re a surgeon, saving people’s lives, cutting out tumours, repairing broken bones, pulling bullets out of hearts, replacing little girls’ pacemakers, it’s all incredibly grim, and yet funny. The characters, the dialogue, the sexual innuendo, the wonderful cliff hangers, “…except the patient… is me…”, the entire game is impossible to take seriously, which is an incredible contradiction, since the actual gameplay on offer deals with some of the most sombre themes of any game series around. New Blood is absolutely hilarious, fiendishly difficult and, somehow, hideously addictive. Vaughn, the super-powered surgeon at the remote Montgomery Memorial Hospital in Alaska, a country described by Trauma Center New Blood, the latest in the Atlus-developed video game operation sim series, as “the frigid northern extremity of America”. So says Elena Salazar, the 20-year-old nurse who also happens to be a former patient of Dr. “It’s the pump unit you implanted in my pancreas seven years ago…”
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