Gamers Can Play Lawyer or Surgeon on Nintendo DS

Posted on October 17, 2005

A Wired article discusses a couple Nintendo DS games that offer gamers the opportunity to experience different professions. In Trauma Center: Under the Knife you play the role of a surgeon battling an epidemic and in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney you take the role of a defense lawyer. Here is what Wired said about Trauma Center.

The entire game is played with the DS' stylus input. The patient's chest appears on screen, and you select your different instruments -- scalpel, forceps, sutures and more -- using small icons on the left and right side of the screen.
As you perform each task, you're graded on your surgical precision. The difficulty level of Trauma Center skyrockets after the first few operations.
By way of advice, common-sense notions about the human body do not apply. Example: One patient's aneurysms kept bursting (game over) until they were just sliced away, leaving arteries ripped in half. Not a drop of blood came out.

The Wired article says it is a "bit disappointing that neither provides an especially realistic take on the subject matter" but to be an enjoyable game it probably requires stripping some of the realism away. Better to go straight to the action of the surgery or the trial than to deal with the minutiae of surgery prep or reading legal briefs.