Turning The Spigot - Year 2: Week 40 - Trauma Team

It's time to revive yourself as this week's edition of Turning The Spigot takes a look at an awesome surgical sim that was lost in the flood of releases last month.

Trauma Team



Year: 2010
Platform: Wii
Rating: Code Blue!
# of Players: 1-2

A fantastic game came out in May for the Wii and, like many a third party release on the system, was promptly overlooked. Trauma Team is ostensibly part of the Trauma Center series that has been around on the DS and Wii for about 4-5 years now, but unlike the Trauma Center games, Trauma Team has stretched beyond the pseudo-surgery of the previous games and now encompasses a variety of medical specialties and a plethora of gameplay types.

Previous games in the Trauma Center series have revolved around one or two doctors who battle crazy cancer cells and virii that have a mind of their own. They are also notoriously difficult. Trauma Team is a much more forgiving game than the rest of the Trauma Center series and, in my opinion, is the game that I've had pictured in my head since I first heard about the Trauma Center games back in 2005. Yes, veterans of the series. That means there is no GUILT or Stigma in Trauma Team.

Trauma Team takes a much more realistic approach to surgery and the medical field in general, at least when compared to the crazy bioweapon outbreaks and magical 'healing touches' found in the other games in the Trauma Center series.

That is not to say that Trauma Team doesn't ooze that special Japanese weirdness when it needs to. Your crack team of specialists consists of a chain-smoking diagnostician who looks a lot like Spike Seigel from Cowboy Bebop, a hulking Native American orthopedist who moonlights as a superhero, a crazy paramedic who thinks she sees ghosts, a medical examiner who can hear the dead, an incarcerated, amnesiac master surgeon and a ninja who performs colonoscopies with wooden instruments. As surreal and crazy as the characters are, they ooze personality and really grow on you as the game progresses. And while the game is strange in its own way, the procedures you perform are, for the most part, grounded in something resembling reality.

The surgery and first response styles of gameplay are remarkably similar. In both instances you'll be cutting open patients, bandaging wounds and extracting shards of glass. The surgical side of things has a wider array of tools to use while the first responder is forced to deal with multiple victims and a selection of only 4 or 5 tools.


The endoscopy section involves 'piloting' and endoscopic camera through the twisting passages of the patient's lungs, intestines and other tight spots. This tends to be the section of the game that has garnered the most criticism as you have to 'push' the wiimote forward to move the camera forward and if you're not careful, you can easily bump into the walls of the organs which sends your patient's stats plummeting. I actually enjoyed these parts of the game and it was only near the end that I found myself having difficulty navigating through some of the trickier sections.

Orthopedics is based on keeping a steady hand as you guide your laser or scalpel through a predetermined path to carve out bone or withdraw a tumour. You also have to get a feel for just how deep you can screw in plates onto bones as it is very easy to overshoot the mark and get a 'bad' score.


Both Diagnosis and Forensics operate closer to a traditional point and click adventure, or a surgical version of the Ace Attorney games. Diagnostics has you listening for abnormal heartbeats, cross-checking lab results and squinting at MRI and X-Ray images until you go mad. Forensics will have you reconstructing skeletons, spraying luminol over crime scenes and unravelling clues to determine the identity and motive of the killers.


The visuals in Trauma Team are very stylized during the surgical segments (the patients could very well be crash-test dummies) but the abstract visuals keep the game family friendly. The cutscenes are all done in a manga-style with high colour characters popping around from frame to frame. Fans of other Atlus games will get a kick seeing character art done by the same artist as the Persona series. On the audio front, the music is a very interesting mix of pumping synth-rock and down-tempo jazz riffs. There is an option to listen to either Japanese or English voices and while the English VO is cheesy at times, it grows on you as you get to know the characters and fits the campy style of the story.


Normally a game like Trauma Team would get noticed given how unique and interesting it is compared to many of the games on the Wii. Unfortunately, it came out at the same time as Red Dead Revolver, Alan Wake and Super Mario Galaxy 2 and was lost in the flood. That said, Trauma Team had me hooked despite all of the aforementioned games. You should still be able to find it on sale anywhere for $40 or so.