Life Signs: Surgical Unit = ;_;

Maybe some of you have played Trauma Center, the challenging and exciting game of surgery, with your stylus as a scalpel. It's the kind of thing that made me want to get a DS – in fact, it was the first game I bought for it. It was innovative, it was unique, and it was ambitious (video game characters have been to college, apparently, since the arcade days of Root Beer Tapper and Burger Time). Also, it was wicked fun, the most important factor of all.

So naturally, when I found out about "Life Signs: Surgical Unit," I was antsy to get my hands on it. Surgery! Right in the game's title. Hello.

Maybe not so much, title of game! There's surgery, maybe 20 percent of the time. The rest of the game is as dullsville and confusing as the worst old-style text adventure games. The order of operations (hur hur) has as much logic as a drawing colored by a three-year old.

I guess I should have been warned by the absolutely guano loco opening tableau. Title doctor (I can't even remember his name) has a picnic with a female hospital admin so hyper-sexy that she makes House M.D.'s Dr. Cuddy look like Nurse Ratched. Other, even sexier (and super teenaged-looking) hospital employees show up one by one to complain THEY were supposed to be the romantic picnicker. And, of course, it was all a dream...

Even during waking hours, the patients and employees are stupid sexy. Just ridic sexy. (Exception: babushka-looking, gossip-crazed head nurse. lol fattey!) When examining patients, you can 'accidentally' touch their barely-clothed boobs. ("Doctor, that's not where it hurts!")

Not an O-face

So the game has a lot of "fan service," executed in a really silly fashion. Not my thing, but not an obstacle to being a good game either. But, like everything else in the game, it takes forever to figure out where it is and how to achieve it.

The game mainly consists of getting handed things by various people, and trying to figure out who needs to get one of your random goods in order to tell you what's happening next. You'd think a surgery would be top priority start if someone's dying. No, it appears to be more important walking from room to room trying to find something (you aren't told what, you just hope you happen upon it).

That or trying to find someone, a person invariably impossible to find. Everyone you meet who isn't your sought target has wicked juicy gossip about employees two-timing or having crushes! zomg! It's like some bad junior high dream where you can't find your locker, but with the added element of a bunch of really boring, chatty people with eye-popping decolletage.

Trauma Center delivers the goods in fast, generous doses. You have a few soap-operatic asides, but they're truncated by operations. Trauma Center had me shouting the game's boldly delivered catchphrase, "Let's being the operation!" at my dog. The only thing Life Signs has me shouting is "What the crap is this for crap?" (Not at my dog, though, which I'm sure he appreciates.)

Summary: if you want to play a surgery game, there's two Trauma Centers, though I would love if some other, quality ones came out. If you want to look at drawings of semi-naked women, I'm sure you can be imaginative enough to find that without having to sludge through this game. If you want to be vexed most sore, there's always Life Signs: Surgical Unit.