Kevin and I were lucky enough to be invited to watch an online presentation, through WebEx, of the new Trauma Team game. Below are some details that I gathered from their presentation.

Trauma Team has the same feeling and look as the last one—maybe a little crisper graphics. The game displays in 480p progressive scan and 16:9 widescreen. The game also features the same manga style cut scenes, but don’t worry, they pull off the cut scenes and make up for any pitfalls with fantastic voice acting.

There are a few added gameplay modes along with the ones from the first game: Diagnosis, First Response, Surgery, Endoscopy, Orthopedics, and Forensics.  Diagnosis and Forensics offer very “adventure” style experiences. Four out of six of these modes will be available in co-op, but there will be no online modes unfortunately.

The demo we saw mainly focused on the Diagnosis gameplay, which is new to this version of Trauma Center.

Basically, Diagnosis is what it sounds like. The player spends the whole time finding out the symptoms by asking questions, taking blood pressure and so on. After all the symptoms are accounted for, the player goes back to his/her office and compares the symptoms with a list of solutions.

This may seem pretty straight forward, but there are a few twists. In the demo that was shown to us, the patient was not very cooperative. The patient refused some tests while also holding back on their symptoms.  The fun part was finding a way to convince him of his problems.

Once the patients finally started to cooperate, the fun really started by comparing the patient’s X-ray, CT Scan, and other tests with a healthy example.  All the while looking for any abnormalities. Let me explain. In the demo, the patient complained about some liver pain.  We were shown a cross section of his liver, and a cross section view of a working liver. After a long pause and a few wrong guesses from everyone watching, the presenter of the game finally pointed out to us a little inflation in the poor guy’s kidney. Yes, we all decided that we should stick to video games and not become doctors.

Each part of the game is about 6-7 hours long, with the Diagnosis part having about 40 different scenarios full of patients with different personalities.  We were told that there are some weird cases, like in the TV show “House”, but nothing too far-fetched.

The last thing I have to share is the ability to adjust the difficulty level. The difference between the difficulty levels was not explained, but I am sure I will be using the easiest one.  Trauma Team Wii is currently set for a May 18 release in North America—No word yet on a European date.