Original Release: reLINE Software, 1995, MS-DOS / Amiga
It’s a hospital management sim, but with nudity and organized crime.
Biing: Sex, Intrigue and Scalpels (Amiga, reLINE, 1995)
Where to Buy: GOG.com
Biing is in the general genre of hospital management sims, i.e. Theme Hospital and such, but it’s easily the weirdest example of them I can think of.
Part of it is simply throwing big doses of satire and gratuitous nudity in the mix, but part of it is also the design team spending strangely large amounts of money on odd things. The first example is the lengthy swerve sci-fi intro, complete with CG animations and voice acting, which just turns out to be an extended joke before launching you into the actual game. And then there’s the solid 10 minutes of video tutorial narrated by a busty German nurse, complete with its own credits and outtakes sequence afterward! And once in-game you can eventually buy a completely gratuitous mini-golf game that allows you to play nine holes.
The developers had already done at least a couple of these gonzo business sims in Germany in the years prior to this game’s release; this particular one is obviously inspired by Monty Python, most notably the hospital birth scene from the beginning of The Meaning of Life (and I’m guessing a certain other scene made a strong impression on these young men in their formative years). MAD Magazine also looks like it was a major influence on the art and humor.
To describe the gameplay, it’s basically “fussy micromanagement of a hospital and a gang’s daily operations, sprinkled liberally with gratuitous nudity.” Not a bad idea at all really, but unfortunately it’s tied together with a really clumsy interface and extremely difficult to boot.
The game guides you through the initial steps needed to get your new hospital up and running – buying plots of land, setting up a waiting and treatment room, and hiring the necessary staff. However, those necessary steps eat up nearly all of your starting money, and the game is running in real time. Each day brings new expenses, and if you go even $1 into the negative it’s game over. You’re competing against about a dozen other hospitals, and the goal is to be the most prosperous (though I’m not sure if the game ever actually ends after a certain amount of days or a certain dollar threshold).
The thing is, your initial success ends up being kind of random. The game doesn’t tell you this, but you need to spend on at least a little advertising to get patients flowing. That will get you perilously close to bankruptcy, and it’s up to the random draw of patients you get plus the quality of respondents you get to your job listings to determine if you’ll actually climb out of the hole or not.
The overall flow of the game is to first build out all the other hospital departments, so that you can bounce patients around between them and rack up their bill. Eventually, you also get a private goon army going – by day they can roam the streets creating new patients for you, by night they can be dispatched to sabotage the competing hospitals.
The game is certainly a challenging management sim and has some fun qualities to it, but really suffers from the needlessly confusing interface that prioritizes the art and jokes over function. And horses for courses and all that, but it doesn’t really work as an erotic game either with the MAD Magazine cartoonish art style.
Links
German manual
Hex editor cheats
Videos
Oddly soothing tutorial / really slow striptease