Avernian: That's a tough call because both games are very good, but I'd start with Theme Hospital. Its relatively more advanced graphics make it easier to get into for a modern gamer and it also runs without a hitch on my Win7 platform.

With Theme Park, I remember having some speed and freezing issues in Hi-Res mode back when trying to set it up on DosBox myself, though that wasn't the GoG version. GoG probably fixed these but with games as old as Theme Park, you never know.

Avernian: I don't know about the reviewers but in my experience, messing up the design so badly that you had to restart from scratch was extremely rare. I went through 95% of the scenarios with the initial design that I started with.

Granted, you may have to resize or remove a room or two along the way because you researched a new technology and need the space or just thought of a more efficient layout, but having to scrap everything was very rare.

I think the game handles that pretty nicely in fact. It starts you out slow with relatively few rooms and little traffic and lets you monitor the effectiveness of this simple system (which gradually becomes more complex) and see how it manages the discovery of new illnesses, emergencies, epidemics and the steadily growing number of patients that start giving your hospital a shot as your fame and popularity grows.

You will of course continue to learn new tricks along the way, especially from mistakes in your design that lead to congestion, long waiting times and ultimately the death of the unfortunate Elvis-imitator whose King-complex was left untreated for so long that he just couldn't take it anymore.

But these mistakes can usually be rectified on the go by resizing, shuffling rooms around or simply buying new realestate lots to place extra rooms of the type that seems to generate the greatest demand (which you can hopefully do before the death toll gets too high).

The only real issues I had with having to adjust my initial designs were usually at the very beginning when you find out that the gate you thought to be the entrance to your hospital was actually the backdoor - on some maps it's not always obvious where the patients will be coming from and you don't find that out until they start coming, at which point you already had to lay out an initial design of sorts. That's when you do a silent facepalm and start over, but fortunately that doesn't happen too often and it's never too much work to redo. Which is a good thing too as I also hate having to scrap my hard work, just like you.

When you start a new scenario, you will of course have to build a new hospital from the ground up and that repetition does lead to a bit of a burnout after a while, but this is still a game I keep coming back to even 15 years after first getting my hands on it in the late 90s. It's a charming little gem that I have no second thoughts about recommending to anyone interested in economic managerial games. :)

PS: Elvis Lives

Sufyan: Theme Park is NOT a complex game. Mechanically it is a very simple game, there is almost no science to how you lay out your park and your rides, though it can be murderously difficult for less obvious reasons. It is simply tough to make money in Theme Park. It is hard to explain but part of the reason is that the game does not give you much feedback on your decisions (though the game loves being a back seat driver telling you everything is going to hell).

I think Theme Park is the easier game once you've figured out the controls and screen layout (some of the more important screens are unrelated to the game screen). Theme Hospital is far more difficult, constrained (going into it blindly you have no idea how big your rooms should be for example) and complex. Lots of more stuff is going on in Theme Hospital than in Theme Park that you need to plan ahead for or be able to drop everything else for to fix immediately. Theme Park is a hectic game too but it runs itself in more ways than Theme Hospital which requires a lot of micro-management.