7 Days a Surgeon

(Alternative titles considered for this post: Dr Stiles Kills Funny Creatures; Bothering Savato; Thank The **** That's Over)

Diseases You Don't Want to Get: The Game

I've got to say that I was expecting some sort of more significant reward when I finally defeated the final final final mission of Trauma Center: Under the Knife (you fight the "last" boss once, then go through a set of special upgraded versions that end in you fighting it again, and if you get past those then you're presented with a bonus set of impossibly hard operations and have to do it yet again at the end). Instead, I was just given a pretentious Biblical speech from Mr. Dead over on the top screen and not even a special indication that I'd completed it on the operations list. However, the knowledge and boasting rights are probably reward enough - I don't think I've ever played a game that gave me such simultaneous feelings of achievement at winning it and being glad that it's over.

But true to real life, the paperwork was yet to come, because the fragment of a gestalt entity known as teogames asked me to do this when I finished it in comparison to his own list. Here's an ordered summary - hardest to easiest - of my perceived difficulty of each of the seven different GUILT strains in the game, named after the Greek days of the week, and their upgraded counterparts in the X-missions, with a divider line to separate easy from hard. Bear in mind that I went on rather longer than I'd intended for every single one - I wrote most of this when in the waiting room at the dentist, which is a bad idea, let me tell you.

Normal storyline

• Paraskevi - This one gave me a lot of trouble. But I should say right now I'm really not sure how to construct this list because my opinions of virtually all of them have completely changed now that I've completed the super-hard missions and can look back and compare them objectively rather than by how hard they seemed when I encountered them. I'm trying to remember back to first impressions as much as possible - it took me many tries to complete this one, and even then I think that I only just did it by a matter of seconds with the aid of the Healing Touch.


• Kyriaki - Again, I'm honestly not sure where to put this one. It's the first one that you encounter, and even though I thought I was getting quite good when I got to the mission where it was introduced, I was still totally inept by the game's lofty standards and had real trouble getting past it. Later on, once you've got past a couple of the X-missions, it's incredible how easy the normal Kyriaki operations seem, and I got past the special mission where you have to cure five people in ten minutes easily with fully two minutes to go and an operation score of 9999 even though I'd struggled to do three before.


• Triti - Theoretically this puzzley strain is an easy one because it's based on a logical procedure, but it really is a bit of a nightmare even when you know how it works.


• Savato - I don't remember having too much trouble with Savato in its first form - partly because it's a storyline-based operation with a lot of guidance as to what to do at every point, and you just have to keep ahead of it to do it. I think that it's rather harder than Pempti was, and I suppose this is a bit of a low position for the boss that's meant to be the final "perfect image of death", but I admit I came into the game already knowing the trick to finishing it off, so that probably skews my opinion.


• Pempti - I think that this is the most boss-like strain even compared to Savato, with three different attacks that you have to adapt to deal with, and a lack of cooperation in any waiting for you to clean up the first attack before starting another. Having it low on the list doesn't mean that I consider it easy - just not quite as hard as the others. Like the above, it's a storyline operation, so you're really guided through the procedure even if it isn't all that easy to actually perform. In fact the operations leading up to it were far harder for me, because one of them is a string of trying to stab and hold a blue wisp on a very slightly other blue background repeatedly.


• Deftera - As it consists of two and then four wisps swimming vaguely around, this one has a bit of a random element to it, which means that it can be very annoying sometimes and very easy at others. Trying to keep the like colours apart and the opposite colours together as instructed isn't really an exact science, and I think I rely on my luck a bit even now for this one. Oddly, even though I put it as low down as this, I did find myself avoiding this one when I went back over the missions again. I think it's best to say it's easy but somehow I don't like it.


• Tetarti - These are based on colour matching and injecting "lightish", "darkish" and "blue" (from my point of view) serums into the corresponding turbosquids, and only become anything approaching a problem if you make a mistake. I imagine they're even easier with colour vision.

Those are, as far as I remember, the difficulty that I thought of them when I was first going through the main storyline. I've spent a while going back through the missions to see how well I could do now that I've reached a higher plane of awareness and speed by finishing the whole game, and the non-upgraded forms of Kyriaki and Triti seem like a complete walk in the cake compared to what you have to put up with in the bonus missions. Speaking of which:

3xtr3m3 missions

• X1 Kyriaki - Undoubtedly. This is a major shock after coming from the main game's Sin missions (the slightly upgraded varieties) - the speed at which you're expected to work and deal with everything is suddenly kicked up to unbelievable levels. I suppose that now that I've finished the game and gone back to it it seems slightly easier than it did before, but it's not something I can pass easily or anything - it's still a matter of luck whether everything goes smoothly or not. It's immensely frustrating that they hide again so quickly after you find them unless you scalpel them out within half a second. Spiky little bastards.


• X5 Pempti - With them all fresh in my mind I'm trying to order these by "mission that I'd least like to try and complete again", and this one has a firm place near the top of that list. Pempti has been upgraded so much by this point that the attacks that it randomly chooses have a huge bearing on whether it's possible to complete or not - if it hadn't taken me a week to brush myself up to the standards that X1 Kyriaki expected, and then got past this one in no more than several tries, then this would be on the top, because it's not actually up to your skill whether you get past it.


• X7 Savato - A firm place among the nasty varieties. The first stage of it, where you have to cut a web, is easy enough if you keep calm about it, and realize that lasering the spider-babies seems to actually put you at a disadvantage. Once that procedure's over it becomes an enormously tense balancing act between keeping the laser on Savato to keep its speed up, suturing up the cuts that it makes when you hit it, healing using the stabilizer, and just hoping that it doesn't attack all that often. I've no idea how I managed to complete this because when I finally got past that stage, my hand was shaking like a pneumatic drill operator who had overdone it on the coffee, and I had to pause the game for a couple of minutes while I tried to remember what I was meant to do to finish it off. I promise you that this game gets your heart going much faster than a session on the treadmill (with a velociraptor on the other end).


• X3 Triti - The start of the non-nightmares, I think. This one's annoying in the X-missions, but not insurmountable - provided not too many thorns vaporize (or you're quick at grabbing them - and if you weren't before, you will be once you pass this). It's actually easier to ignore all tactics and just let it grow, taking it out in one direction across the screen systematically. If you use the Healing Touch when you're on your way, you can get a heap of it out at once - time is really the greatest enemy here.


• X2 Deftera - Placed right after X1 Kyriaki, this seemed like an absolute gift, and I was very confused that I didn't have to give myself wrist strain zipping the stylus around at the rate that I had for the previous mission. Yes, I failed it multiple times and it's still annoying that you don't really have a lot of control over it, but then I remembered about the Healing Touch and got past it instantly.


• X6 Paraskevi - Surprisingly uneventful. I'm not sure what actually changed about this mission compared to the normal varieties, but I imagine that it just does slightly more damage and is a bit faster. I counteracted this by finally realizing you only had to laser the worm-carrot-things' heads to stop them rather than dragging it all along them, which made things more efficient than before and balanced everything out again - I think that I got past this one in fewer tries than it took me for the first encounter with it.


• X4 Tetarti - Has no place being an "Extreme" mission! Yes, they go a bit faster than before, but this would be better classified under a set of missions entitled "Mildly Irritating". There aren't any real changes that lead to them being any more difficult than they ever were - if you find yourself without enough time during the quickest section you can just Healing Touch them and it's dead easy.

There's actually something bothering me about Savato, and has been since kjorteo mentioned in passing the difficulty levels of each stage and the "three webs". In this video that I got the screenshot from (which I'm fairly sure is tool-assisted) the heart-spider wanders around reconstructing its web as you pull it apart, and when you've cleared it all it puts a few strands back - doing this twice, giving you three webs to deal with. I only ever had to deal with two of them, with it reconstructing only once - and even then the number of strands it put back seemed to be random, with as few as four one time. On top of that, one time it didn't reconstruct anything at all - though I'm fairly sure that wasn't intentional, as it got a bit... twitchy after that and it looked like an oversight in the game. Not that all this makes a real difference to the difficulty except taking rather more time, but I'm now fearful that I've somehow got a watered-down version!

There is a mosquito bite on the knuckle of my left hand. The instinct to draw round it with a pen so that I can lift it away to remove it is really quite difficult to resist now.


================ <- Divider line. Anything above is "hard", anything below is "easy"