The GOG.com site is only giving away the German simulation games Biing 1 and 2 (PC) for a few hours. Our author Schuhmann says: These are great German sims with deep mechanics and challenging gameplay, but you have to deal with the many boobs and the humor that the developers throw at you. Both games are NSFW (not safe work work), rated “16+” by the USK – so nothing to play in public.
How do you get the games? The site GOG.com is giving away Biing 1. The offer runs until Monday, February 20, at 3 p.m. German time.
Biing!: Satirical hospital simulation from Hanover
What is Bining! for a game? It’s an erotic and satirical hospital simulation from 1995.
The game has a crude sense of humor: all the doctors are incompetent bunglers who only want to play golf, all the nurses are lecherous and the store clerks are basically drunk.
The player clicks through various static screens, hires staff, sends people to courses and hires thugs who ambush unsuspecting passers-by in front of the clinic entrance and ensure that the emergency room is well attended with a baseball bat.
As the game progresses, the player opens hospital rooms, an intensive care unit, operating rooms and a pathology department in case something goes wrong. A player can bring particularly difficult and therefore lucrative cases into the house by racing ambulance races.
From today’s point of view, biing is a kind of text adventure: There is little graphic representation, the actual action of the game takes place in texts, for example when you have to choose exactly how the doctor will treat a patient. Also the riot in the ambulance races only takes place in the text, you don’t really see anything.
German simulation pearls from the 90s with … idiosyncratic humor
And is this a good game? Yes it is. biing! received ratings in the range of 85-90% at the time.
Behind the silly and no longer up-to-date facade is a sophisticated and tough simulation. For example:
Anyone who thinks they can click through Biing and enjoy themselves is in for a rude awakening. The game is difficult. Above all, it is important to survive the tough early weeks. It’s actually only possible with a beginner’s guide to survive the first few days (via biing-fansite.de).
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Studio shot at Biing 2 against German gaming press because of bad tests
And what about Biing 2? Biing 2 dates back to 1999: Here, the game runs a holiday resort. This is also a very deep simulation, with an even stronger focus on the erotic.
How did the series end? Biing 2 had many technical problems when it was released and received negative reviews between 27 and 65%. At the time, the company felt that it was wrongly rated so badly and called on fans of the game to complain to the publishers of the German PC magazines.
It was said that the magazines had not tested the game enough. Biing 2 would only have started to be fun after a few days (via archive.org).
The company feared the negative reviews would jeopardize the studio’s existence, and in fact Reline Software disappeared in 2002.
Biing – a piece of German gaming history
Is the game still relevant today? More than 20 years after the end of Reline Software, there is still a small German community that regularly talks about Biing and mourns the old days.
Here, Biing is considered an underestimated masterpiece, and many comments convey nostalgia for one’s own youth.
The failure of Biing 2 is still the subject of legends in the community today. Fan sites like to tell (via forumromanum) that the PC games journalist Petra Fröhlich (then still Petra Maueröder) killed the series. She is said to be somehow responsible for the fact that there was no Biing 3.
But others say it wasn’t like that. All magazines rated Biing 2 badly back then. It was just not a good game when it was released. Only later updates would have made Biing 2 playable and good.
What about the people behind the game? The game comes from the studio “Reline Software” from Hanover. The leading minds of the game were Holger Gehrmann and Olaf Patzhauer:
From a similar era to Biing but with a very different approach comes the simulation Dwarf Fortress:
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