Growing up, I was always fond of cracked out toys such as alien autopsy and most importantly, Operation, the entertaining (and really cool) "board game" in which you must remove bones from some poor guy without touching the edges of the incision. But Trauma Center: Under the Knife? Now that's a game! Atlus's innovative DS title plunged me into the soap opera life of a doctor with the weight of the world on his shoulders. Furthermore, it built off the simplistic Operation mechanic and took it to the next level. We're talking tumor removal, glass extraction, and plenty of good old fashion suturing. It's gross, but not in an operation TV show kind of way.

The game works almost perfectly on the DS because Atlus did an excellent job utilizing the system's touch screen. If you need to make an incision, you cut. If you need to bandage someone up, you select the bandage with the stylus and then unroll a small portion of it across the wound. So with that being said, I had some reservations about the upcoming Wii remake, Trauma Center: Second Opinion, mostly because it lacks true contact. The DS game is easy to grasp because I can press the stylus against the touch screen and see the cut that I'm making, but with the Wii, there's nothing but wide-open space. Atlus is forcing me to cut, yank, and stitch by maneuvering a remote through the air. The developers were bound to fail. I was convinced. But thankfully, this is one of those rare times that I'm happy to be wrong.

I basically went into Nintendo's recent Wii event convinced that Second Opinion was going to be disappointingly lackluster and left with a huge grin because the game's a potential sleeper hit and a must buy. I stepped up to the plate and used (in combination) the nunchuk and remote to select one of several tools, carefully removed glass from a patient's arm, disinfected the wound with the always useful antibiotic gel, sutured up the cuts and bandaged them. Never once did I find myself unable to get a clean grasp of where I had to cut. I just aimed the cursor and slowly moved the remote in the desired direction. That's not to say there isn't a learning curve. It took me a couple of minutes to adjust to the new control scheme as well as figure out how to select the desired instruments (all grouped on the bottom left corner of the screen), but after I got the hang of it I was ready for action. Tumors, bugs, and internal bleeding? Bring it on baby!

It was cool to discover that the game's turned out all right, especially since, much like many Wii games, it attracts a crowd. Scores of people stopped to watch would be surgeons try their hand at life saving, and many wanted in on the action. The game got a fantastic response. But unfortunately, it revisits a lot of familiar territory, which is both a good and bad thing. You see, this version of Trauma Center is what Atlus is calling a "Wii-make", which means that it contains all of the same operations that exist in the original Trauma Center, except there's also an entirely new chapter to play through, a new character to play as, some new instruments, and some new music. There will be different types of operations to perform, but by and large, it appears to be the same content.

On the positive side, this is great for people that never played the original. They're getting all of the good stuff and then some and that's totally cool. It's even a sweet deal for Trauma Center veterans, mostly because this is a well-polished game that includes a brand new control scheme, so in theory, the Wii's controller will make Second Opinion feel like a fresh experience. But it's still the same old operations, and that'll probably mean fewer surprises.

Regardless of how much new and old content is in the game, I'm definitely going to purchase this the second it comes out, not only because I love the first game, but also because it makes excellent use of the technology. It's also been given a slight face-lift, with sharper graphics and improved animations. I'll have more on Trauma Center: Second Opinion as soon as I can dig up some new info from Atlus.