In the case of Trauma Center: Second Opinion, playing doctor is a lot of fun.
In Trauma Center you play as Dr. Derek Stiles. A young inexperienced doctor who finds out that he may have more than what medical school was able to give him. Dr. Stiles is a bit unusual in a good way. He has a "power" called the healing touch. By using the Wii-mote to draw a star on the TV while operating on the patient you will be able to slow down time to better your chances at a better operation. Drawing the star can be a bit of a pain in the neck, but once you practice enough you'll have no problem using it. The game has a great cast of characters. And by great I mean the characters have great and unique personalities, and I also mean that there are a lot of characters in the game. You start the game off at "Hope Hospital" where you must perform a surgery on a patient who had a motorcycle accident. The first couple of surgeries are really nothing more than practice surgeries. Surgeries to get you used to the controls, selecting your tools, using your tools, etc... The surgeries all have time limits and become much more difficult as time goes on. Surgeries aren't as simple as remove this, remove that, and bandage that. You'll be injecting different fluids, restructuring broken bones, draining fluid, and destroying viruses that require more strategy than you might think. Each surgery is also timed. Usually when a patient comes in with something minor such as glass fragments in their forearm you will have up to 4 minutes. But when a patient that has been hit by a car comes in you may have a little over a minute or two. The amount of time you have to complete the surgery in the upper right hand corner isn't the only thing that could make you lose. The patient has vitals and depending on their condition they will either be low, stable, or well when starting the operation. What makes Trauma Center: Second Opinion so tense is you could be performing a seemingly smooth operation one moment, but then something will go terribly wrong and the next thing you know you find yourself shocking the patient to try and revive them. As I said earlier Trauma Center: Second Opinion is more deeper than one may think. The game is pretty much a puzzle game but it disguises its true identity without having a bunch of blocks and insane high scores and such. The game is pretty much centered around the Wii mote's motion sensitive controls. You will make incisions, suture wounds, remove tumors, and kill strange deadly viruses with tools such as "the laser." You will use the nun-chuck controller to select your tools. The tools are shown on the bottom left of your screen on a little octagonal shaped chart. The knife is on the left and the stitches are on the right. There are plenty of tools that come and go as the game progresses, but I am trying to give you an example of how you select your tools. To select the knife you would simply tilt the analog to the left. To select the stitches you would simply tilt the analog to the right. As the game goes on you will have to pretty much know what tool is where and know how to select it in a hurry. You may have to use one tool and to keep whatever it is from getting worse or from regenerating, you may have to select another tool and do what you have to with it within a few seconds. The game goes by "chapters". When you complete one operation you move on to the next one. You will watch a lot of cut scenes in between them as well, which is not a bad thing despite the outdated presentation.
Trauma Center has a very unique story, and it does well with its cast of characters. It's just something we love to see how the relationships of these doctors will be affected, or what they will encounter next as a team. The cut scenes have no full voice acting. They're really just pictures of what ever character is speaking, with some form of emotion on their face pending the situation or what is being said, and with the text of what they're saying displayed below them. Graphically Trauma Center does not look that great. The 2d pictures of the characters are very sharp, but they're just what they are, pictures! There are backgrounds of the location when the characters are speaking, but they don't look too nice. In one cut scene Dr. Stiles is standing outside and suddenly it begins to rain. You can certainly hear the rain but see none at all. The background is just cars in the city, no rain. I mean come on, how hard would it have been to put up some animated rain or stiff rain even? Trauma Center has some nice catchy tunes. The problem is that there are not a lot of tunes in the game. Throughout the game you will hear the same tunes repeating over and over and over. But for some odd reason they don't get all that tiring to hear. The music is nice, and I guess once you get used to hearing the same music played when a certain something happens you sort of associate that music with that, and without it it just would not feel right. Trauma Center: Second Opinion is a single player experience. The story mode is pretty long actually. I would predict 15-20 hours to finish it perhaps? That's just on easy mode, and even then the game is pretty challenging. If you dare to go beat the game and up your surgeon ranking on normal or hard mode this game will keep you busy for quite some time. The game can now be found brand new for $29.99 in most places from what I have seen. Believe me, it's a great deal. The game has great puzzle like game play, a great story, a good cast of characters. That alone makes it worth the $30 you'll pay for it. It does lack in some areas but it's easily over looked. In the case of Trauma Center: Second Opinion, playing doctor is a lot of fun.