One year after Trauma Center: Second Opinion first appeared on the Wii as a launch title, the point-and-click medical drama returns with Trauma Center: New Blood, a significantly updated sequel featuring crack surgeons Markus Vaughn and Valerie Blaylock. And it's a good thing that New Blood features twice as many doctors as its predecessor, because it's at least twice as challenging. An all-new cooperative mode helps keep you and a friend one step ahead of medical disaster, but cocky surgeons who go it alone will wish this game came with a prescription for blood pressure meds.

New Blood's predecessor, Second Opinion, was essentially a remake of the original Trauma Center for the DS. And while the Wii isn't exactly known as a graphics powerhouse among the current crop of consoles, Second Opinion's stripped-down style didn't even scratch the surface of what Nintendo's little white box could do.

Thankfully, nearly every aspect of New Blood's presentation is a dramatic improvement over the original. It was designed from the beginning to be a Wii title, and it shows, running natively in 16:9 format with 480p display and featuring full voice-over support for all dialogue. There's also an online scoreboard, courtesy of the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, where you can upload your most impressive medical miracles for the whole world to see. The background art in the cutscenes is significantly more detailed, but the character art is still just a series of static manga-style drawings that lack any animation whatsoever. Compared to Second Opinion's bare-bones look and feel, however, New Blood does a much better job of taking advantage of the Wii's capabilities.

Four Hands Are Better Than Two

New Blood's major improvement over Second Opinion comes in the gameplay department. For the first time in the franchise's history, you and a friend can play cooperatively as two different surgeons, feverishly working together to save lives and progress through the soap opera storyline that takes you from the wilds of Alaska to the urban jungle of Los Angeles and beyond. Having a second surgeon on hand to perform routine tasks like draining blood from hemorrhaging wounds and keeping the patients' vital signs up quickens the pace of the gameplay and makes New Blood a much more social gaming experience. It's also a lot more fun than Second Opinion's rudimentary co-op play, where one player used the Wii Remote and the other handled the nunchuk duties.

It's a good thing that New Blood's cooperative play mode is as fun as it is, because it quickly becomes almost impossible to complete operations single-handedly on any difficulty level, even for experienced Wii M.D.s. Even gamers who mastered scalpels and sutures in Second Opinion will have to swallow their pride and lower the difficulty level early on if they want to avoid a litany of malpractice lawsuits.