I played through tonight’s game thinking that it was a fresh new game that MobyGames had never heard of. Turns out I was wrong. I figured it out after I had written a new game description and tried to enter the game. It’s an easy mistake to make when MobyGames returns 181 game matches for ‘operation’; I didn’t find the game until I manually typed in the URL based on the site’s friendly URL scheme. I still submitted my new, lengthier description for Operation anyway. Good thing I’m good enough at writing these by now that the authoring didn’t take me that long.

Operation is a computer game adaptation of the classic board game. You remember the one– use a pair of tweezers to remove any number of objects from an unfortunate patient. If you touched anything other than the object, the buzzer would go off. This game offers 5 different hospitals in 5 different locales catering to the needs of 5 different types of patients — Haunted Hospital (monsters), Rainforest (be a vet doc), Space Hospital (operate on aliens), Main Hospital (boring humans), and Dinosaur Hospital (help dinosaurs, perhaps to survive extinction). Each hospital is more or less a conveyor belt of patients. You can treat each patient either via the classical Operation extraction game technique or with a game unique to that level. The classical Operation mode (seen in the screenshots below) allows you to guide a pair of tweezers into the patient and remove the foreign object, while dodging everything else. There are 4 objects per patient (as seen in Disco Wolfman above).

Alternatively, you can cure the patient using the special game for that level. For example, the special game in the Rainforest level is Musical Melodies. I guess your doctor colleague in this level is kind of a new age hippie. The healing process works by her first playing the melodies of a various body parts on the patient, and then you need to replay the sequence; i.e., game of memory.

Other special games include an Asteroids clone where you have to descend into a dinosaur’s upset stomach to break up the rising burp bubbles; and a game where you must guide a frog up and out of a patient’s throat while your doctor colleague for the level inexplicably tosses food down the chute in an effort to thwart the amphibian.