ROCK STAR ATE MY HAMSTER (AMIGA)

Now that the Halloween season is over and the kitschy sweetness of the cardboard ghosts and jack o’lanterns has been put away until next year, we can take a look at something truly horrible: the music industry! That’s right, you can live out you rock band management fantasies with today’s game – the Amiga version of Codemaster’s 1989 talent-exploitation-em-up Rock Star Ate My Hamster!

Here’s the title screen, showing the late Michael Jackson wearing a space helmet. Jacko never went into outer space, did he? I’m fairly certain he didn’t, but honestly at this point no new revelation about Michael Jackson’s life would surprise me. Oh, it’s a reference to him sleeping in an oxygen tent, isn’t it? It says a lot about just how famous Jackson is / was that you can immediately recognise this image of him, even though his face looks like a low-res photo of the moon.
Also on the title screen is the game’s theme tune, which consists of some bleepy music and a squeaky voice intoning “a rock star ate my hamster” over and over again. You might think “Rock Star Ate My Hamster” is a title that was chosen just to be weird for weirdness’ sake, but it’s actually a reference to the time the awful British tabloid The Sun ran the headline “Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster.” Freddie Starr was a British comedian, who did not eat a hamster: the story was cooked up by publicist, convicted sex offender and all-round shitbag Max Clifford. The fake story of a late-night hamster sandwich was good for Freddie Starr’s career, however, and it should give you an idea of just how highly Rock Star Ate My Hamster thinks of those in the entertainment business.

And a business it certainly is: Rock Star Ate My Hamster is a management sim that tasks you with assembling a rock band that will set the charts alight and rake in the cash. Well, sort of. Making money is necessary but it’s not the main goal, and to call it a management sim is a little generous when perhaps “random event generator” might be more accurate.
The game begins with the player being introduced to their avatars and the creators of this musical empire: Cecil Pitt (it’s like “cesspit,” you see) and his young protégé Clive. I think Cecil is supposed to be based on the businessman, MP and poor swimmer Robert Maxwell, but to me he looks more like Bernard Matthews. As for Clive, he’s just some bloke called Clive, as far as I can tell.
First things first, choose how many members your band is going to have. I went with three, for no particular reason. Then you get to choose those band members, and suddenly you realise that the only reason RSAMH was created was as an excuse to draw caricatures of pop stars.

Here, for example, is Wacky Jacko, your Michael Jackson analogue. The strange thing is that RSAMH has you hiring artists that are already famous, famous enough to earn £18,000 a week in 1989 money, so it’s not the “bring up a struggling new band” exercise you might have been expecting.

RSAMH has a couple dozen stars for you to choose from, most of them rendered in an unflattering manner but some treated with slightly more respect: David Bowie and Freddie Mercury get off more lightly than most, as well they should. Also pictured above, to give you a general idea of what you’ll be seeing, are Alice Cooper, Cliff Richard, Elton John and Madonna. When combined with their “comedy” names – Cliff Richard is called “Stiff Pilchards,” for instance – they’re all pretty recognisable, and most of them are big enough stars that even in the future year of 2016 you’ll know who they are. There are a couple, like Tracy Chapman and Midge Ure, that have rather faded from the public consciousness and the decision to combine Salt ‘n Pepa into one two-headed siamese twin called Scratch N Sniffa might throw you off, but on the whole they’re bona fide superstars. The game also rather unfortunately features Gary Glitter. You can’t blame the developers for not knowing how that would look in 2016, but it’s still a grim inclusion.

I can’t leave the rock star selection screen without showing you the ghoulish visage of Phil Collins, a face that looks like someone put a ham sandwich on an anvil and then smashed a human skull into it. Imagine if you felt that thing coming in the air tonight. Oh lord, you’d need years of therapy afterwards.

In the end, I decided to commemorate those musical legends cruelly taken from us in the past year by assembling a supergroup composed of Bowie, Prince, and Lemmy. Unfortunately now I’ve upset myself because we’ll never know what such a collaboration would have sounded like. I’d say “amazing,” at a guess. The game suggested I name my band “The Dead Presidents” but I wouldn’t want to be thought of as ripping off the Dead Kennedys, so I called them “2016 Was A Terrible Year” instead. As soon as I picked that name I realised it sounds way more like a student union indie band circa 2004 than the glam-pop/metal/funk amalgam you’d expect from these three musicians, but I’m stuck with it now.
Before you begin, you also have to decide what kind of equipment you want: new, used, or stolen What’s the difference between each option, besides the price? I haven’t got a clue, and RSAMH wasn’t exactly forthcoming with the details.

Here’s the main menu, where you can select which task you’re going to inflict on your band that day. You can send them to practise, organise a gig or a short tour, set up a publicity stunt, shower your stars with gifts in an attempt to reign in their primadonna tendencies or record some tracks.

I sent them into the practise room first. It felt like the most appropriate thing to do, you know? You wouldn’t think they’d need much practise, given that they’re all already famous rock stars, but it might help the disparate members of the band gel together into a tight live act. All that actually happens when you do this is that the number of days you sent them in for passes by, and at the end your band re-emerges and you’re sent back to the main menu with no indication as to what effect, if any, their practise session has had. Have they melded their disparate styles into an exciting new genre, or have they already descended into drug-fuelled punch-ups and “creative differences”? It is a mystery.

Okay, it’s time to give our adoring fans what they want. It’s gig time, and 2016 Was A Terrible Year are starting their assault on popular culture in the scabbiest, most flea-ridden pubs they can find. You get to choose your venues, from pubs and clubs to stadiums, and set the ticket price, but beyond that you don’t have any input on the gigs themselves. It should be an interesting experience, because as far as I’m aware the band don’t actually have any songs yet, but I’m sure people would pay good money just to see Bowie, Prince and Lemmy sit around on stage for two hours shooting the shit, especially in this reality where you wouldn’t have to hire a psychic medium for the experience. I know I’m excited to see what this concert looks like.

This is what I get for allowing myself to feel any excitement, huh? You don’t even get to see the gigs! Instead, you’re stuck in the tour bus, counting the ticket sales and dealing with the occasional whinging from your band members. I won’t lie, this is extremely disappointing: I was rather looking forward to seeing my band up on stage – or at least being thoroughly ignored by the regulars in the Dog and Duck – but instead you’re stuck looking at the inside of this bus. This amusingly tiny bus. Based on the proportions of the walls and the dashboard, the band are driving around in a cube.

Suddenly, disaster strikes! Prince – sorry, “Mince” - demands a £60,000 crate of caviar before the show or he’s going to quit the band. As a result, Prince quit the band. Look, I barely even have that much money and I’m sure as hell not spending it on fish eggs, so it looks like the band is down to being a duo. These events pop up fairly often when you’re out gigging (although thankfully not when you’re only got one band member) and rather annoyingly they’re never a bluff. You either pay  the money, or Cecil becomes so enraged by the artist’s temerity that he fires them on the spot. The ability to offer a compromise would have been nice, and if I could have haggled with Prince he might have stayed in the band in exchange for a box of fish fingers or something, but sadly it was not to be.

Suddenly, disaster strikes! Again! I finally got the band into the recording studio so they could lay down their first album, but I forgot that a) studio time is expensive, b) I was still paying wages and c) you can’t earn any money while recording, and so due to the drain on my finances I managed to go bankrupt and get a game over. I partly blame this on my trouble with reading the cash amounts for various things. I think it’s something about the font; I often found myself having to count the number of zeros in any given amount because I was struggling to get the number right at a glance.

Not to worry, I simply started again with three of the least expensive singers in the game: Lemmy (again,) personal VGJunk favourite Alice Cooper and flirts-with-racism, “human massacres are nothing compared to the horrors of KFC” indie tosspot Morrissey. This gives me a chance to resurrect the name Flesh Hammer, last used as a band name in the long-ago article about PS1 band management sim Popstar Maker.

An important part of managing a successful band is getting them noticed, and it’s clear that working hard, gigging a lot and writing good music is right out of the question, and so we turn to the “Publicity” option of the main menu. This randomly generates a news event featuring one of your band members, and they come in three flavours. Pictured above is the first kind, where rather than being headline news your star appears in the box-out at the bottom, accused of something terminally uncool like trainspotting or falling off a pavement. Presumably these stories actually reduce your star's popularity, but because RSAMH gives you no way of keeping track of any stats beyond your bank balance and the sales charts, there’s no way to tell.
Also note that I had to censor some pixellated boobs up there. “The Stun” is, of course, a parody of the previously-mentioned Sun newspaper, which for many years (until last year, even) had a topless model on page three. And they say us Brits are sexually repressed.

Then there’s the good kind of headline, the kind that has your star doing something not necessarily pleasant but rock-star-ish enough to endear them to the general public, like revealing their life as a BDSM slave, trashing hotel rooms or, in this case, eating a house. A lot of the “good” headlines revolve around your star eating various things – bishops, wives, hands – but the one about eating houses seemed to come up far more often than any other during my playthroughs. By the time Flesh Hammer reached the end of the line, Morrissey had chewed his way through the equivalent of Milton Keynes, with so many three-bedroomed semi-detacheds rammed into his cavernous maw that you’d expect the papers to stop reporting on it. “Oh, that’s just Morrissey,” they’d say, “He’s so dedicated to not eating living things that he sates his terrible hunger with the odd Victorian terrace.”

Here’s the third type of news story. You know, the one where your rock star straight-up dies. Usually it’s because of a plane crash, but there are other eventualities, as seen here. I like that the headline is “Rock Star Dies In Nuclear War” and not “Holy Shit, There’s A Nuclear War Going On.” It has a pleasing absurdity to it.
So, that’s how the publicity stunts work. You either (one assumes) lose or gain some popularity, with a roughly one in ten chance that one of your band members will be suddenly killed. No word on whether their death affects your popularity, but if anything you’d think it’d give it a big push upwards. Nothing increases music sales like a fatality, after all.

Speaking of sales, it’s time to get Flesh Hammer into the recording studio and actually make a god-damn album this time. Like everything else in RSAMH, you don’t have much control over what’s going on. Some tracks are generated. You hear a five-second burst of random music when this happens, which I guess is meant to represent the song? There’s nothing so obvious as “genres” or “styles” in this one, it’s all bleep-bloop Amiga ditties. Then you pick a name for the song. Do this eight times until you’ve got an album’s worth of material and, erm, that’s it. I wouldn’t mind so much if the game was sticking more to the “management” side of being a management sim, but Cecil and Clive are right there at the mixing desk so they clearly have more input on the Flesh Hammer sound than they’re letting on and therefore so should I.

Once you’ve got your tracks, the next step is to release them onto an unsuspecting world. This is a simple process: pick which track you want to release (or put out the entire album) and, if you’re feeling fancy, make a video for it. As is probably obvious by now, RSAMH doesn’t let you do anything as fun as directing your own video. Instead, you chose a director, location and general theme – the themes including such potential attention grabbers as “leggy models with whips,” “Greasy Toy Boys Working Out” and “Boring Guitar Poses.” As has now become traditional in this game, you’d assume that hiring the most expensive director and the fanciest shooting location would result in a more popular video and thus more popular song, but there is precisely zero evidence that this is the case.

The weekly sales charts are in, and Flesh Hammer’s début single “Smiley the Rainbow Kitten” is straight in at number nine! Sadly that’s about where it stayed, and no amount of publicity stunts, gigging or band members dying in sexual experiments gone tragically wrong could seem to shift it. Okay, I thought, maybe it’s the song. I’ll release Flesh Hammer’s second single, get the album out, and surely reap the rewards of a sustained media blitz. However, I managed to bankrupt the band yet again, this time when making the video for the second single: I accidentally clicked on the most expensive director, a Steven Spielberg knock-off called Steven Cheeseburger. He wanted three million pounds for his participation, money that Flesh Hammer simply did not have because I imagine it’s resting in strippers’ underwear up and down the country. The problem is that you can’t back out of a decision once you’ve made it and there’s no option to confirm your choices, no “are you sure you want to bankrupt yourself, you big idiot?” button, so I was condemned to suffer the consequences of my mis-click. Annoyingly you can back out of your decision when you’re setting up a tour, but not in any other menus, which I think I’ll just have to put down as terrible UI design.

All right, let’s have one last attempt at reach the pinnacle of pop stardom with The Shitty Beatles. Originally a four-piece ensemble with a mix of established talent and cheapo garbage, a series of tragedies and Mariah Carey-esque diva strops whittled the band band down to just Rick Astley. Ahh, remember rickrolling? Truly that was a gentler time in the landscape of internet pranks. Anyway, The Shitty Beatles being just Rick Astley miraculously hasn’t scared away the sponsors, and he’s been picked up by Joka Cola. Go on, try to figure out what “Drink A Joke” is supposed to mean, I dare you. Like everything in RSAMH, being sponsored has the potential to backfire – in this case, it was later discovered that Joka Cola causes cancer which probably did not do Rick’s popularity any favours. You should have eaten a house, Rick. The common man loves that.

There are a couple of other random events that pop up from time to time, the most frequent being the invitation to perform a charity gig. However, you don’t find out until after you’ve said yes whether you’ll be performing in aid of a genuine charity or something horrible like the Campaign for Public Executions or whatever the next Band Aid is going to be. You can also have your music stolen by pirates – the game is unclear on whether they’re the tape-copying kind or genuine eye-patch-and-peg-leg types – and you can decide how to deal with them. Every outcome costs you money, but buying them out always seemed to be less expensive than sending the boys round, because the boys always get kidnapped and then you have to pay a ransom.

Here we are, then. The Shitty Beatles, chart toppers. I have no idea how or why this happened, because I didn’t do much different from last time I released a single. This is no cause to celebrate, though. You might think that getting to number one is the goal of the game, but it’s far harsher than that: you need to release four platinum records in the course of one in-game year and frankly that was never going to happen for me.

The game ends on December 31, as Cecil and Clive decide to pack in their music management careers. I have only one question about this: why? You were making literally millions of pounds a year with very little effort! Did I read their intentions wrong, and where I thought they were in it for the money they were actually in it for the thrill of artistic expression and the adoration of the record-buying public? Why only one year? Was this all some kind of Around the World in 80 Days style bet between gentlemen? Like so much of RSAMH, it’s utterly opaque and makes no sense.
Even if you do somehow finish the game – it is possible, apparently – all that happens is that Cecil fires Clive. That’s it. You don’t even get invited to an awards ceremony where you can interrupt Wacky Jacko’s performance by waving your arse at him, making the whole exercise pointless.

Rock Star Ate My Hamster is a brisk and pretty enjoyable experience with an interesting concept and the odd funny moment, but as a game it’s pretty terrible. It’s a management sim where you don’t really manage anything, picking options that generally lead to a random result – a result with an impact that you have very little way of gauging. Well, unless a band member dies in a nuclear war, that’s fairly clear cut. Too much of the game remains unexplained: what difference do the different recording studios or starting equipment make? Is there any point to practising? What determines how happy your band members are? Why the hell did you draw Phil Collins’ face like that? That said, a lot of this only matters if you want to “beat” the game, and that’s not really what it’s about. It’s quick to play through, it’s dumb fun and it’s certainly not meant to be taken seriously, so if it sounds interesting to you I’d recommend you’d give one of the many computer version of Rock Star Ate My Hamster a try – just don’t expect it to fulfil any desires you might have for a “proper” band management sim. It’s definitely better than Popstar Maker, I’ll give it that much.

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IMAGINE: DOCTOR (NINTENDO DS)

I'd like to begin this article by apologising to my mother, because this is probably the closest I'm ever going to get to having a decent, respectable career. Sorry, ma. Perhaps today's game will offer me a window into another existence, one where I didn't waste my life playing videogames - it's Ubisoft's 2009 Nintendo DS General-Practicioner-em-up Imagine: Doctor!

Imagine: Doctor: that's what I'd have to do when I'm ill if it wasn't for the NHS, so three cheers for public healthcare. Ubisoft's Imagine games are a series of around fifty-or-so simulation titles, as long as you're willing to accept the loosest possible definition of the word "simulation," primarily aimed at girls and covering such topics as babies, wedding design and fashion. I'm told that those are things young girls like their videogames to be based around, which came as some surprise to me - when I was a nipper, girls liked playing Sonic the Hedgehog and Zelda. You know, actual games. Funny how times change.
The Imagine games are probably best-known to a certain section of the gaming public thanks to the time IGN gave Imagine: Party Babyz a much higher review score than the wonderful God Hand, this providing the most concrete evidence yet for the total irrelevance of all human endeavour. If Imagine: Doctor turns out to be better than God Hand, I will eat my own hands. That seems incredibly unlikely, however. There's a decent chance that eating my own hands would be better than Imagine: Doctor.

This is the doctor that we'll be imagining throughout the game, our very thoughts and daydreams giving her agency and purpose. Her name is Katie, but you can call her Doctor Katie. Don't be mislead by her supermodel looks and cheerful demeanour - aside from a few unusual quirks, Doctor Katie is a competent and well-liked physician. She's Medically Blonde, if you will, and as Imagine: Doctor begins Doctor Katie is excited for her first day working at her very own practise. I'm excited, too. We're all excited. I can't wait to get in there and start identifying weeping sores and hacking off infected limbs.

The day gets off to an inauspicious start when, before a single patient has even walked through the door, Katie's assistant Helena manages to give herself a paper cut. Oh, Helena, I spent the whole game half-expecting you to take off your glasses and let your hair down, shocking everyone with the revelation that you really are beautiful enough to be prom queen / the popular kid's girlfriend / a semi-successful catalogue model. That never happened, though, or at least as not as far as I saw.
Because she's such a nice person, Doctor Katie restrains herself from shouting "just put a plaster on it, you dope," at Helena, and instead offers her medical expertise to help Helena with this savage wound. Don't worry, Helena, she'll just take the bill out of your wages.

Here's our first experience of hands-on doctoring, and as expected - and as I'm sure you guessed - it takes the form of an incredibly simple bit of touch-screen manipulation. Using the DS' stylus, you grab the cotton wool ball, dip it in that small bowl of taramasalata and then smear it all over the cut on Helena's... hold on, what part of Helena's body is that? I assumed that this paper cut was going to be on her finger, but that does not look like a finger. It looks far too large. Did you manage to give yourself a paper cut on the thigh, Helena? What the hell were you doing in the filing room? C'mon, Helena, get it together. Don't make me regret hiring you before we've even reached lunch on the first day of work.
That brief introduction to the absorbing world of wound disinfection is enough to solve Helena's problems, and with her out of the way Doctor Katie can see to some patients with actual medical issues. First up: a lady who has to go to the toilet a lot.

See? This is how 95% of Imagine: Doctor works: patients come in and explain their symptoms, almost always in the categories of "feeling generally unwell" and "I fell down like a big clumsy oaf and now my leg hurts." You run a few tests via incredibly basic touch-screen mini-"games" and then give them some pills, next patient, repeat.

For example, here we start by taking the patients's temperature by grabbing the thermometer and moving it slightly to the left until it's stuck under the patient's lip in a graphical display of how lips don't work. That's it, congratulations, task accomplished.

Ye Gods, according to the readings on this Fisher-Price My First Thermometer, this woman is on fire! I'm sorry, love, but I think you're beyond my help. Write down this number and then call the fire brigade for help. It's nine, nine, nine. Got that? Good. Now get out of my office before you singe my tongue depressors.

After getting the patient's temperature, Doctor Katie needs their heart rate, and there's only one way to get it - by going through possibly the most tedious task ever included in what you might generously call a videogame! The little pulse dot travels along the screen, and when it reaches the top of a beat - indicated by a red dot and a beeping noise - you tap the button to count it. This takes about thirty seconds. It's amazing how much regret about the direction your life has taken you can pack into thirty seconds. Turns out it's a lot.
Once you've suffered through this digital equivalent of disinterestedly clicking a ball-point pen in and out  for a while, you're given the patient's heart rate and told to write it down. Thankfully, Imagine: Doctor's handwriting detection worked rather well, although I did have a lot of trouble getting it to register the number eight. I can't blame the game for that, though, because I write my eights with a strong leftward slant. It's just a shame that the patients heart rate seemed to end in eight every single bloody time.

This poor lady has gastroenteritis, so Doctor Katie is prescribing her some Bellyden Sir. I think I just realised that's probably supposed to be a pun on "belly dancer" and I wish I hadn't. Maybe they gave it a jokey name to distract from the fact it says "Heavy DIGESTIVE PROBLEM" right there for everyone to see, as if the patient doesn't feel bad enough already.

Once you've filled out the prescription by laboriously dragging the correct number of pills into the appropriate places on a daily chart, all that's left is to sign the prescription to make it legal. This time I signed it as though I were Doctor Katie herself, but any old scribble will be accepted by the game, so if you want to sign your prescriptions Dr. Dumbass or Josef Mengele or simply by drawing an obscene cartoon of a penis, then have at it. Not that I ever did anything so immature, of course.

Aside from illness, the other thing you'll be dealing with is physical injury. I said that Doctor Katie has some quirks, and one of them is that she apparently does not believe the evidence of her own eyes, her faith in medical science being so absolute that she will not make a judgement on an injury or infection before she takes a photograph of it and then cross-references that photograph with her Big Book of Painful Things until she finds a match. In this example, a man comes in and tells Katie he burned his leg. She then photographs the burn and finds a matching picture of a burn before proceeding. She's either extremely thorough or has zero self-confidence.

"Red Blotch"? That a medical term, is it? C'mon, Doctor Katie, get your head in the game!

Maybe a little makeover will give Katie the self-belief she needs, I thought to myself, and so I stopped by to let her chose a new lab coat. Yes, there's a (very minor) dressing-up element to this doctor simulator. I went with the classic white lab coat over the soothing sea-green blouse. It looks the most professional, after all. I can't have her in a blue lab coat, she'd look like she was there to check the gas meter or something. Hey, Ubisoft, there's a free one for you - Imagine: Gas Technician! Take meter readings, repair boilers, say you'll be there at nine a.m. but don't show up until some time around four-thirty, little girls the world over will love it.

I am not a religious man, but I definitely offered up a silent prayer that this monkey scratch was going to play out like the start of Brain Dead and soon Doctor Katie would be slicing through hordes of bloodthirsty zombies with a lawnmower. Sadly, it was not to be and Imagine: Doctor remained as resolutely dull as always. That is a huge problem with this game - if you'll permit me a moment of crudeness, it's boring as fuck. It's the same amoeba-brained set of tasks repeated over and over again, and because the patients are randomly generated it's often the same set of tasks in a row as you get a run of patients all coming in with sprained ankles as though it had suddenly become mandatory for the entire population to wear ten-inch stiletto heels at all times. I mean, I know this is a kid's game and I didn't expect to be telling people they had terminal illnesses or anything, but mixing things up a little would definitely have helped.

It's also insultingly easy. There is literally no challenge to the game, and no way to fail: I tried wiggling splinters around in patients bodies instead of pulling them out, I tried prescribing the wrong drugs, but you just keep getting another chance to try again. Even when things were impossible I still couldn't fail. Here, for example, you have to say "aahhh" into the DS's microphone to get the patient to open their mouth, and for a long time I could not get the game to register my "aahhh" thanks to the deep, manly timbre of my voice. It doesn't matter, though, because after a while Helena comes in, says "you seem tired" and does it for you. Let's keep that between us, Helena, I don't think our insurers would be pleased if they found out I was letting the receptionist perform some the examinations, no matter how tired Doctor Katie is getting.
So, what I'm saying is this: if you want a medical game that has a difficulty level higher than "it essentially plays itself" then buy a copy of the board game Operation. If you're a big fan of pointless videogame busy work that feels slightly insulting to girls, then play this. No, don't play this, even if that is what you're after, you weirdo.

Imagine: Doctor isn't all about the crushing monotony of running a medical practise, mind you. A small part of it is about the crushing monotony of maintaining personal relationships, mostly focussed around Doctor Katie's non-Doctor friend Sophie. Here's Sophie now, and she's terribly excited because she just opened her new shop! Then she immediately starts feeling ill and has to close the shop the day after she's opened it, and guess who has to get Sophie back on the road to wellness?

Doctor Muggins here, of course. Katie gives Sophie a check-up in scenes so overflowing with dramatic tension that they make The Soprano look like absolute shite, but she cannot complete the tests because she suspects Sophie may have eye problems but she doesn't have access to any optometrist's equipment. Rather than helping her friend out by directing her to an optician, Doctor Katie decides that if she's going to be a doctor then by god she's going to be all the doctors, a veritable Voltron of different medical specialities combined to create the ultimate healer. It's Sophie that suffers though all this, losing money as her shop stays closed due to her poor health, while Katie must level up enough to be allowed to use an eye-testing kit.

Yup, there's a sort-of RPG experience system in Imagine: Doctor, and each time you perform a task as simple as applying a cutesy heart-shaped plaster to a cut you gain more experience. You'd think that after placing one or two plaster on cuts you'd be familiar enough with the procedure that further repetitions would do little to further your knowledge of medical techniques, but I guess there's always something new to learn. And who are we sticking a plaster on today?

Well, now we know what happened to James Sunderland after the events of Silent Hill 2: he managed to escape the nightmarish prison of his own guilt brought to life by the town's supernatural power, he changed his name to Jason and gained a few pounds.

After many plastered affixed and thermometers jammed into mouths, Doctor Katie has become skilled enough that she can collect the eye-testing kit from Doctor Nakamura. Doctor Nakamura believes spiritual exercise is the best way to cure most health problems, so don't visit him if there's something actually medically wrong with you. Zen meditation ain't going to reattach a severed finger.

With the ability to test eyes firmly under her command, Doctor Katie can now find out what's wrong with Sophie in a thrilling minigame where you tap the letters on the sight chart until Sophie gets one wrong. Then you change the corrective lens and do it again until you have the correct prescription. Ghouls 'n' Ghosts it most certainly is not. I've always suspected that opticians aren't real doctors, and this just confirms it. All that training just to say "is it better with lens one or lens two?", I knew it had to be a scam.

But what's this? A new friend? I detect a potential love interest for Doctor Katie. No, not Sophie, the douchebag with the bad facial hair and the strange neck problem where the back of his neck is much taller than the front. You should get a doctor to take a look at that, pal. If only we knew of one...

Tony here may look like an ass, but he doesn't seem so bad. He has the good manners not to hassle Katie into looking at his injured arm while she's on her lunch break, which is nice of him. Having people forever asking you to check out their minor ailments while you're not on the clock must be the number one worst thing about being a doctor. That and all the death and misery, I mean.

"Then I had to rescue a puppy from a burning orphanage, and then I went out for a trip on my private yacht." This is some Mills and Boon level storytelling, only without the proclamations of dewy bosoms and turgid yearnings, because Imagine: Doctor is meant for children.
I'm sorry if this article has left you captivated by Imagine: Doctor's romantic possibilities, but I will never know what becomes of Katie and Tony's fledgling relationship unless there's someone even dumber than me out there who's willing to play through to the end of the game and tell the world what happens. I couldn't take much more of Imagine: Doctor and I only made it to the end of chapter three, but I'd be willing to bet that Katie and Tony end up together in the end, Katie bestrides the medical profession as an implacable colossus of medical knowledge, and Sophie's shop becomes a massive success despite being closed eighty percent of the time thus far. Actually, now that Sophie's got her contact lenses, her shop should be open, right? Let's go check it out!

Forty hearts for a plain pillow!? What a rip-off! I had to see twelve patients to get those hearts which for some reason we use as currency here in Bizarro-Town! Maybe Doctor Katie should have charged money for her service. Oh well, it confirms that Imagine: Doctor doesn't take place in the USA. I should have know after I treated all those people but never had to turn anyone away because they didn't have medical insurance. What a wonderful Socialist paradise Bizarro-Town is, where everything runs on hugs! Okay, as I'm such a good mood, I'll buy a square lamp and an astonishingly ugly clock, which Doctor Katie can use to decorate her apartment.

You know, I wish I hadn't bothered.
It was around this point I had to stop playing Imagine: Doctor. Progress was tectonically slow, and while I know that later on you can gain access to such medical marvels as allergy testing kits and an x-ray machine, the prospect of adding yet more searingly dull minigames to the roster was ironically giving me a headache.

Rarely have I played a game that has so thoroughly matched my expectations of it. I was certain going in that Imagine: Doctor was going to be be a collection of extremely weak click-n-drag minigames presented in the lowest of low-effort ways, with graphics better suited to a Poundland beauty product and music so bland I think it might be literally unmemorable, and that's exactly what it is. It is repetitive to the extreme, the non-medicine bits are somehow, against the seemingly insurmountable odds, even more boring than the rest and there's not even a sense of humour or fun about it. For example, some tasks require you to breath into the DS's microphone, but they didn't make you breath into it to warm up the stethoscope before you put it on someone's back? C'mon, you really missed a trick there, Ubisoft - it's little things like that which can give a game some sparkle.

"But it's a game for kids," some people will say. Yeah, a game for kids you don't like or who have not been good enough to have any fun in their lives. I've said it before, but kids don't want shit games any more than you do, and the target audience is no excuse for badness.
In conclusion, Imagine: Doctor is a terrible game, it is definitely not as good as God Hand and the person who left an Amazon review of it that reads "gives you and (sic) insight to what it might be like to be a real doctor" is either a liar or a fool.

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