Two Point Campus’ second major expansion pack is throwing things back to the first daft management game in the series, Two Point Hospital. Publishers Sega have announced that Two Point Campus: Medical School is coming on August 17th and it's shipping our students off to learn how to cure diseases, inject butts, and replace heads with lightbulbs. Seriously, check it out below.
]]>The only good Sonic game is Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, a fun kart racer which also featured tracks and characters from other Sega games. On PC, that included the unlikely mashup of a Total War shogunate and Football Manager's Manager Man.
I am therefore here for the similarly unlikely mashup of Sonic and Two Point Hospital, a free pack for the hospital management sim that lets you dress your staff as Sonic, Amy, Tails and Knuckles and pepper your hallway with Sonic statues. Watch the trailer below.
]]>Like many, Theme Hospital was a mainstay of my middle childhood. Bullfrog's appreciably wacky approach to a hospital management sim has ensured that, to this day, management sims are one of the only strategy-adjacent sort of strategy games that I really enjoy. And a few years ago, a new stuidio emerged to take up that odd torch, providing us with Two Point Hospital.
]]>Sega have announced Two Point Campus, the follow-up to Two Point Hospital, one of the best management games on PC. Chuck away those scrubs and don your mortarboard, because next year you'll be building universities, hiring teachers and teaching students to do useful things, like cooking and *checks notes* uh, jousting. Man, I wish I could've done jousting at uni.
]]>The last couple of years have been pretty good for management games, but only the select few have made the cut for our list of best management games you can play right now. If you're looking for something to sink into over the holidays, check out our picks below.
]]>As a nostalgia trip, Sonic Mania is impeccably precise. So, naturally, you'll want to really nail those throwback kicks by, uh, playing it through an unrelated publisher's digital subscription service. The blue blur and his grossly mutated twin-tailed fox friend are now sprinting through EA's Origin Access Premiere service, with Two Point Hospital and Endless Legend set to join them in the near future.
]]>I played 1997's weirdly named Theme Hospital a fair amount in my teen years, but despite my love of both management games and very silly things, I never got around to playing 2018's spiritual sequel, the equally weirdly named Two Point Hospital. With the game coming to consoles this week, however, I thought now would be a fine moment to dive in and see what I'd been missing. The answer is: a management game that's so silly, it makes me stop worrying about actually managing.
]]>Microsoft's subscription-based stable of games just keeps growing like some cursed alien creature in a sci-fi show. It won't stop till its giant, gelatinous self fills every corner of the ship, captain! Microsoft are adding five more games to the Xbox Game Pass on PC in the near future. Yakuza 0 and Two Point Hospital are on deck along with Wasteland Remastered, Reigns: Game Of Thrones, and Indivisible.
]]>I reckon that when I was growing up I spent longer reading the manuals for games than I did playing them. The thicker the better (as the someone said to the etc.), and if it were up to me every game would come with a chunky instruction booklet. The standard these days is the in-game tutorial, and many of them feel like afterthoughts. Either they’re too bare bones to properly teach you how to play, leaving you to scroll through Wikis, or they’re so boring that you rush through them and then forget everything you’re told.
]]>Sega have snapped up another PC strategy studio, today announcing they've bought Two Point Hospital developers Two Point Studios. They haven't stated the English studio's price, but I trust payment was made in the form of a giant novelty cheque. Sega note that Two Point have "several" unannounced projects in the pipeline, in a dry business-y way, while the studio themselves just shouted on Twitter that "You can bet your bottom this means new, exciting management sims coming from us!"
]]>John had the presence of mind to take today off, after flying back from San Francisco on Sunday. Young Matt and I got a red eye that took off on Friday night and landed on Saturday afternoon. I didn’t sleep for 30 hours, then slept for 12, was wired for the next 16, and then slept for another four. Which brings us to today, when I am writing these charts, unsure which meal I should be having next and shaking off a lingering dose of The Fear, which I get from long haul flying more than I ever did from hangovers.
With that in mind, it’s me, back once again with the ill behaviour, to fill in doing the Steam Charts. I’m very much flying by the seat of my pants here, so let’s see what I come up with, shall we?
]]>A calamitous crossing of worlds has occurred in Two Point Hospital, the spiritual successor to Bullfrog's Theme Hospital, with Half-Life headcrabs glomping onto heads and all manner of decorative doodads from Sega PC games scattering around hospitals. If you've not yet played the wacky hospital management sim, hey, you're invited to try the whole thing for free this weekend on Steam. The trial weekend has just started, so hop to it. Well, don't hop if you're suffering from Hurty Leg, Premature Mummification, Night Fever, Lazy Bones, or Mucky Feet, in which case the doctor will see you now.
]]>I spent a couple of evenings with Theme Hospital spiritual sequel Two Point Hospital last summer, and it was more or less what I expected: the calming pleasantry of a cruise ship full of ambiently holidaying retirees, as opposed to the wilderness backpacking experience of modern-day management sims (yer Banisheds and RimWorlds and Frostpunks). Nowt wrong with that, of course: choice is king.
After a successful launch, now the focus is on the long game, something its Bullfroggy predecessor didn't really have to think about. The new, free Interior Designer update feels like an important step there. With it, you can plaster walls and floors with any nightmarish design of your choice, and then share it with the Steam Workshop. I demand an image of Charlie from Casualty on every available surface, stat.
]]>While Big Foot would be a thematically appropriate ailment for Theme Hospital successor Two Point Hospital, they're playing it straight and just referring to the abominable snowman. In Bigfoot, a chunk of winter-themed DLC released today by Two Point Studios, you've been hired by local snow-ape-thing Bartholomew F. Yeti to renovate the hospitals up in The Pointy Mountains. The expansion adds a new snowy environment, three missions and thirty-four new illnesses to cure, including nine which are big daft sight-gags. An unsurprisingly silly trailer is below.
]]>Take last week's Steam Charts, give them a little shuffle, and then breathe out a long, despondent sigh. Oh, and then entirely randomly add an Early Access racing sim. And then start sighing again, and never, ever stop.
]]>Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: steam Charts will PAY $2 for evry time u forwad this Article.#
If you do not fwrard this article to TEN of you're Friens YOU WILL DEFINITELY DIE!!!!!!!11
]]>I imagine in direct response to all my moaning insightful criticism, everyone in the world has upped their game and started buying some more interesting games from Steam. Such that this week's Steam Charts, with an extraordinary four new entries, barely resembles those of the last couple of months! Hurrah! And you clickbait won't believe clickbait where Playerunknown's Battlegrounds falls this week! CLICKBAIT!
One of the many malicious maladies that can befall your patients in Two Point Hospital is ‘8-bitten’. You’ll know when you’ve got an epidemic on your hands, because you’ll start to notice dozens of low-res, pixel-stricken ill flickering about your corridors. To treat them, you’ll need to research and build a Resolution Lab complete with Debugger. As with many of your accomplishments, the local radio will inform the people of Two Point County of the new advancement. “Patients are promised” drones a pitch-perfect parody of every radio host ever smushed up together in a partridge-esque, play-doh monstrosity “they’ll feel totally next-gen”
There’s a subtle, almost sarcastic reluctance in these words. A weary, wry sigh from the Bullfrog and Lionhead vets heading up Two Point Studios. Good natured, but with just a hint of sardonic self-awareness at the oddness of strapping down a twenty year old comatose classic for a thorough defibrillation. If it is reluctance, though, you wouldn’t know it from playing Two Point Hospital. It’s been given a fresh coat of paint in most of the places that count, but as someone who grew up with Theme Hospital, sitting down with this excellent game (viewed by many as a spiritual successor to Theme Hospital) was just like reuniting with an old friend. Who I then infected with flu, killed during treatment, sucked their ghost up with a Hoover, and charged them a few grand for the privilege.
]]>Do no harm, goes the Hippocratic Oath. So it’s with trepidation that I approach Two Point Hospital, a spiritual successor to Theme Hospital that could all too easily do harm to fond childhood memories of Bullfrog’s heal ‘em up. Thankfully, Alec’s recent visit to these shiny new wards have put my mind at rest - it sounds like the team has successfully transplanted the heart of that game, but grafted on smart quality of life improvements (to muddle my medical metaphors). And now you can see it all in action in one handy video.
]]>The main thing I thought as I began to play Two Point Hospital, spiritual sequel to 90s medical management hit Theme Hospital, is that I barely had to think at all. Some alchemy of 90s sim game muscle memory and slick, thoroughly 21st century building assists meant I hit the ground running, immediately in my happy place of dragging out room sizes, rotating machinery and the time-honored architectural Tetris of making all this fit inside a finite space. It felt good - but how much of this was this the placebo effect of nostalgia?
]]>Let's not beat around the bush here: Two Point Hospital is Theme Hospital 2 in all but name, and that's okay, because I miss Theme Hospital and having a polished spiritual successor developed by a team of ex-Lionhead folk who understand exactly what made the original so consistently endearing is an incredibly enticing proposition.
It's still relatively early days for Two Point Hospital, but here's a full eight minutes of developer-narrated gameplay footage, showing the very start of the game, opening up a small-town clinic and treating what ails the locals. Premature mummification seems worryingly common in rural England as of late.
]]>The news that Bullfrog & Lionhead veterans Gary Carr and Mark Webley were leading the development of a spiritual sequel to beloved 90s manage'em-up Theme Hospital seemed to go down rather well last week. So much of PC gaming's past has been revisited in recent years, but the design'n'build'n'simulate'n'giggle formula used so successfully in Theme Park, Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper hasn't enjoyed anything like the degree of 21st century resurrection that, say, pre-2000 RPGs have. Two Point Hospital is planned to rekindle that flame whilst doing a few things of its own, as well as being the first part of a wider universe of Two Point sims.
But while I coaxed plenty of detail about the whys and wherefores out of Carr and Webley, we didn't get to see all that much of the game itself. This new video shows off a fair bit more, along with chatter from the devs about their plans for it.
]]>As you may already have spotted, Theme Hospital joins the legions of 90s PC games being blessed with 21st century spiritual sequels. The Sega-published Two Point Hospital is the first game from Two Point Studios, the new endeavour from Bullfrog and Lionhead alumni Gary Carr and Mark Webley, Their plan, ultimately, is to follow-up Hospital with a clutch of other theme/sim/management games set in the same world - picking up, perhaps, where the Peter Molyneux-founded Bullfrog left off when EA closed them down.
I chatted to Carr, Webley and Two Point technical director Ben Hymers (himself an ex-Lionheader) about why they're returning to Theme Hospital, why now, the importance of humour to it, what's the same and what's different, how the audience has changed since 1997, how they've been inspired by Prison Architect, Planet Coaster and Twin Peaks, and their plans for that world of sim games.
]]>The Simpsons, Aardman Animations, Twin Peaks, Prison Architect and, quite naturally, Theme Hospital - these are the major inspirations behind Two Point Hospital, an upcoming sim/management game from some of the folk responsible for Bullfrog's Theme glory years. Two Point Hospital, a combination of management and comedy in a fantasy healthcare centre, is due for release - via publishers Sega - later this year, and the first trailer is below. I also had a big chat with lead devs and Bullfrog/Lionhead veterans Gary Carr and Mark Webley about the game over here.
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