KMGR of "House M.D."

Image via Wikipedia

House M.D. is about a cranky but very good doctor in a hospital saving patients, giving life's lessons and learning a few at the same time. So does it translate into a game? Sort of. You may think this is a medical diagnosis game, but in reality, this is a puzzle in the vein of Clue or Inspector Parker.

The game has four difficulty levels: Clinic, Intern, Resident, and Doctor, which gives you

Clinic: 2 x 2 blocks with 2 choices per square

Intern: 3 x 3 blocks with 3 choices per square

Resident: 3 x 4 blocks with 3 choices per square

Doctor: 4 x 4 blocks with 4 choices per square



Dr. House has three junior doctors doing research for him. There are five areas to do research on... Some of the categories take longer time (120 seconds), but gives better "clues", while others take very short time (25 seconds?), but gives clues that are not that useful. Assign the three doctors to various areas you want research for clues. As the Dr. House's protege, you need to assemble the clues given so that each block has ONE icon in each. If you do it wrong, Dr. House will yell at you "You idiot! You're doing it all wrong!" If you got the correct solution, you go to the case end, where Dr. House annoys the heck out of other doctors with his brilliant crankiness.

The clues you get are positional, like Icon X is above Icon Y, or Icon W is 2 space left of Icon Y, or block 2,3 is Icon A, and so on, but all given visually. The not-so-useful clues would say like block 2,1 is NOT Icon B, or Icon C is NOT above Icon D. The clues are rated in usefulness, from 4 bars to 1 bar only. You can "organize" the clues in the "chart" screen, where the clue can be used, displayed, or hidden.

So the trick is manage your research so you get a steady flow of clues, while you try to assemble the logic pieces together to form the solution, in the least amount of time. As Dr. House will berate you if you mess up, you can't really FAIL, but just wastes time.

The controls are a bit weird. There are three screens you need to control when you're doing a case: the "whiteboard", where you control which doctors are doing what research; the X-ray, where you assemble the clues and "solve" the case; and finally, the "chart", where you can "organize" the clues, and see which clues have been used and which ones have not been.

You can mark clues as "used" at the X-ray screen, so if you don't mess up, you should rarely if ever touch the "chart" screen to "organize" yoru clues. You'll switch back and forth between research and X-ray screens. However, this adds a bit of complexity to the controls.

While there's nothing wrong with a logic game, the problem is putting it in a medical diagnosis context. You got a game that barely had anything to do with medicine, or any of the plot. You may as well leave out the medical context, and it'd be still a decent game.

The top 5 scores are kept for each difficulty level, but no "initials" are saved. You just have the satisfaction that you did pretty good.

All in all, this is a logic game with the House M.D. name tacked on. It's not a bad game, but it's not a good "House M.D." game.

Overall rating: 7 out of 10
Pros: a pretty good logic game with additional time contraints as challenge
Cons: doesn't really have much to to with the TV show at all, icons a bit small
Verdict: a good logic game, just not a very good "House M.D." game