As indicated by the previous articles, a couple of weeks ago i purchased a Wii. A thread on Cheap Ass Gamer stated that Wal*mart was holding on their shipment of Wii to be released on that coming Sunday. So, that sunday, i woke up at stupid o'clock in the morning, put on my jacket and drove over to Wal*mart. It was only 5 minutes away from my house anyways.

I got their 15 minutes before they opened, and received the number 17 to indicate my place in line. Apparently, this was more well known than i thought. They had plenty of Wii machines to go around, though. I got home and went back to bed for a little while. Later on that day, we hooked it up and started messing around with Wii Sports, but got bored of it. I wanted something fun to play that took advantage of the Wii-mote's capabilities.

I went out and picked up Trauma Center as my first Wii title. I thought this was rather nostalgic since Trauma Center was also the first title i purchased for my DS. I got home, put it in, and started to play.

For some reason, i thought this was a brand new game. Since the full title of the game is "Trauma Center: Second Opinion", i thought that meant this was Trauma Center 2. They couldn't really make a sequel of Trauma Center DS, but they could've had more doctors in other parts of the Trauma Center universe.

Unfortunately, Trauma Center Wii is a port of the DS title. The story, characters and surgeries are the same fun missions you tackled on the portable venue. How disappointing..

They did add another character at the last minute. When you complete a story arc, you unlock another story with another character. These missions take full advantage of the Wii controller. In the first mission, you twist the Wii-mote to place a shattered broken bone back together.

On its' own, Trauma Center really starves the player. The gameplay really lends itself to an Arcade setting, but the bulk of time spent in game is reading character dialogue. The player sits through boring text until they finally get to experience the action and fast-paced setting of the surgery gameplay. As far as i know, you can't skip this dialogue.. i should look into that. Unfortunately, if they removed all story and just had a bunch of surgeries, the game wouldn't have any depth.

The gameplay is where Trauma Center really shines. You have several different tools that you switch back and forth through while performing the surgery as outlined in the dialogue.

I'm not really sure which version of Trauma Center i prefer. In the DS version, you have the extra precision of pinpoint pen strokes on the touch screen, but with the Wii version you have the speed and agility of an extra controller to switch between instruments.

There are other little differences as well. On the Wii version, you actually use the defibrillators rather than the nurse automatically doing it for you. Using the healing touch i've found to be much more difficult, but i think i just need to get used to the timing.

Anywho, i do love Trauma Center, but there are many downfalls that make it difficult to recommend to people.