People like doctorgs and lawyers, that's why there's so many TV shows about them - but if that's so, why aren't there more medical/legal-themed computer games? The tide is slowly beginning to turn with the release of two point-and-poke adventures for the Nintendo DS...

The Prize Attorney

One of the surprise early successes pf the Nintendo DS was Phoneix Wright: Ace Attorney, a remake of the first of a trilogy of Game Boy Advance games which, in their original form, were only ever released in Japan. With microphone and touchscreen support added, the remake proved a smash hit in the US and Europe, prompting Capcom to produce remakes of the two other GBA games, as well as a DS-only relaunch of the series with a new protagonist. The success of the Ace Attorney series not only proved that the DS was a viable platform for point-and-click adventures; it also showed that there was a market in the US and Europe for Japanese "visual novel"-style games such as Hotel Dusk outside of the dating sim and hentai game markets.

But is Phoenix Wright actually any good?

The answer is "yes, especially in the later stages". Phoenix Wright follows an episodic format, in which each "episode" concerns a single case; once you've completed a particular episode, you can go back and replay it whenever you like. You may also save in the middle of playing through an Episode, both at specified save points between "chapters" and smack in the middle of a chapter. The game comes with five episodes; the first four are remakes of the cases from the original Game Boy Advance game, while the fifth is a brand-new episode with extra, DS-exclusive features - I'll get onto those in a while.

Each episode is based on the same premise: as recently-qualified defence lawyer Phoenix Wright, you have to defend your client against a charge of murder. Invariably, your client will turn out to be innocent (although in one memorable case the client claims otherwise), and it will transpire that one of the witnesses you cross-examine in court is in fact the real killer. Thus, even though you're playing a defence lawyer (and so technically your only concern is getting your client found innocent) you still get the thrill of hunting down the real killer and making them squeal in court.

The first episode is reasonably short, covering a single day in court - Wright's first trial, during which he is mentored by Mia Fey, his startlingly-proportioned employer who dies at the start of the first real case. It's essentially a tutorial, showing how you can point out contradictions in a witness's testimony using the evidence available to you. It is quick and simple, and goes away soon afterwards.

The second episode establishes the pattern the others will hold to. In the fictional 2016 legal system that Phoenix Wright inhabits, all legal cases must go through a three-day preliminary trial (with no jury) before they are sent to a higher court for the proper trial; it is these preliminary trials which Phoenix struts his stuff in. The advocates for the prosecution and the defence are both charged with investigating the facts of the case and presenting them in court; thus, the four main episodes hold to an investigation then trial, investigation then trial, investigation then trial structure, with each phase providing fodder for the other - the evidence you turn up in your investigations provide fodder for your arguments in court, and the facts that emerge during the trial allow you to better target your investigation the next day.

The investigation segments are reasonably laid-back, and consist basically of walking around, examining crime scenes, talking to people and showing them bits of evidence to see what they think. You don't progress to the trial segment of the game until you've found all the evidence the game wants you to find, so there's no way you can get into an unwinnable situation by going into court without all the information you need - on the other hand, I sometimes found myself in a situation where I was walking around talking to everyone and showing them every piece of evidence in my possession in order to get the final clue, but that only happened a couple of times; it's normally fairly obvious what you need to be doing, and I was never stuck for so long that it got frustrating.

In contrast to the laid-back point-and-click exploration of the investigative phases, the trials are intense, exciting, and have high stakes. Unlike in the investigative phases, it's possible to lose the game during the trial - if you bungle your argument too much, the judge loses patience with you and declares the defendant guilty. Normally, you have five strikes (enough to avoid solving the trials by the same brute force methods you can deploy on the investigations, but not so much that it isn't tense), but there's very rare situations (it's usually quite obvious when they appear) where you have to choose between two or three options, and the incorrect one will lose the game for you. Similarly, it's usually safe to ask the witness for further explanation on points in their testimony (in order to work out what you need to do), except for one situation where you get penalised for doing so (but again, not without warning). The trial sequences are almost entirely taken up with finding inconsistencies in witnesses' testimony and pressing them onto it until they're nervous wrecks, and nothing is more empowering than causing virtual human beings to have mental breakdowns through persistent questioning and pedantry. Most witnesses who appear either a) are accused of wrongdoing and exonerated or b) are apparently innocent, but aren't, and have their lives completely wrecked by their run-in with Wright, or c) are completely wrong about what they saw, and need the truth coaxed out of them by Wright. The most fun and least functional aspect of the trial sequence is the microphone capabilities. You always have the option of pushing the "objection" button on the touch screen, but why would you when you can hold down the Y button to activate the microphone and yell Objection!!!?

Of course, you're not the only lawyer in the courtroom; the prosecution obviously has a lot to contribute. In most of the episodes the prosecution lawyer is Miles Edgeworth, Phoenix's former school buddy turned hotshot prosecutor. Arguably the most interesting character in the game, Edgeworth's frequent appearances (only Phoenix and his teenage psychic sidekick appear as much as Edgeworth does) in each episode allow the writers to develop his character to a great degree; as you trounce him again and again in court, Edgeworth begins to question his calling as a prosecutor, not least because the people he prosecutes pretty much all turn out to be innocent. Other characters are not explored to quite the same degree, and tend to be stereotypes, although that's probably appropriate for the frequently-comedic tone of the game. The writing is quite good - not as moving as Hotel Dusk, perhaps, but certainly good enough to keep me glued to the game to the very end.

The fifth, DS-only episode shows an enormous amount of improvement, both in terms of gameplay and writing; in the intervening years the designers have clearly learned what does and does not work in Phoneix Wright. The writing improves a lot - the plot is a convoluted story of corruption and intrigue on a par with Hotel Dusk, and which manages to fit into the series perfectly; it doesn't feel extraneous or unnecessary in the slightest. Furthermore, the gameplay benefits greatly both from an excellent understanding of what people enjoy about the series and from the new DS-only features added. Realising that people find the trial segments more interesting than the investigative parts, the designers doubled the length of the trial segments (they now run for 2 chapters rather than 1) and set about coming up with improvements to the investigative parts, most of them involving the DS's touch screen and microphone. You can spray areas with luminol to look for bloodstains. You can watch, rewind, fast forward and pause videotaped evidence. You can spread fingerprint powder on the touch screen and then blow into the microphone to blow away the excess, revealing incriminating fingerprints. It's excellent.

Phoenix Wright has a few problems, of course. It's a very linear game, which somewhat makes sense in the trial (when you want to wait until the correct moment to bring out your evidence) but gets frustrating in the investigative segments; like Hotel Dusk, there's a few instances where it would make perfect sense to be able to do something in a slightly different order, but the game doesn't allow you. Furthermore, the in-game legal system is a bit wonky - a 15 year statute of limitations on murder, and people who were 9 years old at the time of the crime can be held legally accountable for their actions, and tried as an adult for what was effectively involuntary manslaughter, for example. Arguably, this is realistic; many real-world legal systems are a bit odd, after all. However, because we learn about the legal quirks of the Phoenix Wright universe in a piecemeal fashion, it sometimes feels like they're making it up as they go along. Lastly, it is very occasionally possible to get into a situation where you've established that your client must be innocent, but they get found guilty anyway because you fail to expose the true culprit; I would rather the game had provided a "neutral" ending for each chapter where your client is freed but has a cloud of suspicion over them for the rest of their lives because you didn't manage to expose the true story in court.

The original Phoenix Wright game is difficult to find currently in the UK (I got mine during a visit to the States), but the sequel, Justice for All, is widely available. Once I've played the sequel, I'll let you know if it maintains the original's high standards.

The Little Doctor Who Couldn't

Lifesigns: Surgical Unit (known in Europe as Lifesigns: Hospital Affairs) has a complicated history, so pay attention carefully. Here goes:

• Once upon a time in Japan there was a couple of visual novels released for the DS which took the novel idea of combining the visual novel/adventure game format with a surgery simulation. This series was known as Kenshuui Tendo Dokuta.
• The two games in this series received a certain amount of attention, and inspired a more involved and complex surgery simulation game called Trauma Center, which soon had versions on the Nintendo DS and Wii.
• In October 2005, both Trauma Center and Phoenix Wright were released in the US, to a surprising amount of success.
• Witnessing the runaway success of both games, the folks behind Kenshuui Tendo Dokuta decided that there was a market for a rerelease of their series in the US and Europe, thus producing Lifesigns.
• Lifesigns is a translation of the second game in the series.

Yes, the second game, not the first. This is slightly problematic, because a hell of a lot of significant plot events happened in the first game (as far as I can tell), and many of them sound significantly more interesting than the events of this game, leaving the player thinking "wow! That sounds interesting... if only I could have played through that instead of this nonsense".

Here's my understanding of the plot, then: at the beginning of Lifesigns, Dr Tendo is a second year intern at some big teaching hospital in Tokyo (his first year being covered in the first, untranslated game). His dad is a hotshot professor there studying a dodgy cancer medicine called SPX which keeps being alluded to in a manner which makes it sound highly interesting, but we're never really allowed to interact with it beyond convincing some patient that they don't really want to consent to the trial of the next generation of SPX, and that they are much better off going home to die of cancer. Almost every other member of staff at the hospital is a hot chick that flirts with Tendo on occasion, prompting me to wonder at points whether I'd accidentally bought a dating sim. (I needn't have worried; dating sims offer you more choice and non-linearity). Naturally, Tendo is a hollow void, his personality entirely absent, and is therefore entirely capable of falling for any, all, or none of these girls; which one you end up with is apparently resolved in the game's multiple endings, which (according to the FAQs I have found) are determined partially by how well you do in the Trauma Center-inspiring surgery sequences, and how well you do in the ridiculous minigames.

Ah yes, the minigames. Whacking snakes. Catching fish. Picking up apples as they gently roll down a hill. Cooking dumplings. Playing air hockey. All good fun, of course, but what the fuck has any of this got do with being a doctor? Pretty much all of the minigames are awkwardly crowbared into the game, presumably to provide relief from all of the tedious wandering around and talking to people between the surgery. Did I not mention? The vast majority of the game consists of Tendo walking around and talking to people, in conversations which are occasionally translated badly, or are missing words, or have messed-up spelling, punctuation and grammar, or have bits of dialogue attributed to the wrong character. Yes, this game was clearly a rush job, but it's not possible to rush through this game. Time cannot progress until you have jumped through every trivial and uninspiringly-written conversation, and there's the same resistance to letting you do things in a slightly different order that I ran up against in Hotel Dusk and Phoenix Wright. I was much more tolerant of all of the wandering about in those games, because it at least seemed to have a purpose and was always relevant to the plot, and was generally more interesting. In Lifesigns all you have to talk to are idiots and caricatures. Ha ha! That cancer patient is a randy old man! He's pinching the female patients and doctors on the bum! Hilarious! Oh look! The sexy supervisor doctor is wearing a cat bell on a collar for no goddamn reason! How kooky! The nurse who hands me my surgical implements is a giggling psychopath! Zany! That nurse is dressed as a nun and talks dirty all the time! MY PRECONCEPTIONS ARE THWARTED! Oh look, doctors are stressed and don't get enough sleep! That's so insightful and meaningful! Well done, Lifesigns writers! Why, Hemingway and Dickens could learn a lot from you! If this is not the perfect fusion of computer game and art, what is?

Ahem.

As I punched through the dumb dialogue to get to the surgery sequences I began to wonder whether it was worth it. The surgery bits aren't as good as what I've seen of Trauma Center; rather than being able to puzzle your way through the operation by yourself, you're just about always given the tool you need for the job and instructions on what bits of the touch screen you need to tap, rub, and slide your stylus across in order to get the job done; the surgery sequences are therefore exercises in following instructions, and in manual dexterity. This is fair enough when you receive adequate instructions for the task at hand, but I got stuck in the penultimate operation (open heart surgery) by the maddeningly vague instructions. Yes, I know I need to pick up the strip and put it on the heart. Oh dear, I seem to have placed it a micrometer in the wrong direction (shame that you won't indicate exactly where I'm meant to place it isn't it, Lifesigns). Oh shit, the patient's lost half their life. Oh dear, I made the same mistake again because you aren't giving me a clue what I'm meant to be doing and even when I try to do it correctly you penalise me anyway because you've decided to be really pedantic. Well, that's enough of you. Your story is not good enough for me to bother suffering through your gameplay any longer.

The big problem with Lifesigns is that it makes me want to play the first game, because the hints that are dropped about it sound so much more interesting than the situations that Lifesigns presents you with. I think the designers were just plain tired of the series by this installment; they seem to be running out of stories to tell about the hospital, as witnessed by them shunting Tendo off to some holiday island where Tendo's sister goes off to play with the fairies (yes, fairies) and a middle-aged housewife tries to convince Tendo to marry her possibly-underage daughter. Perhaps the southern islands of Japan are their equivalent of Alabama or something. (Fun fact: while googling for walkthroughs, I found forum conversations on the Gamespot forums where Internet People were complaining that you couldn't get an ending where Tendo gets together with Kaori, the possibly-underaged girl. What the fuck are you thinking, Internet People?) Anyway, this excursion takes up about half the game, and then is promptly forgotten about and not mentioned again; you can't meaningfully choose to pack it all in to go and be a doctor in a quiet rural village.

At the end of the day, Lifesigns is frustratingly average and emotionally hollow, a bit like its protagonist. Phoenix Wright got it right in tightly focusing on legal work; Hotel Dusk kept the spotlight on the main character's investigations. Lifesigns meanders about the place like a drunk doctor's clumsy incision, and like said doctor manages to fuck up horribly. Avoid.