SimCopter

SimCopter
SimCopter
Developer(s)	Maxis
Publisher(s)	Electronic Arts
Designer(s)	Will Wright
Platform(s)	Windows 95/98
Release	1996
Genre(s)	Flight Simulation
Mode(s)	Single player

SimCopter is a 1996 computer game from Maxis. This game is a 3D offshoot from Maxis's normal fare, putting the player into a 3D city. Like Streets of SimCity, SimCopter also lets the user import SimCity 2000 maps into the game.

Objective

As the name implies, SimCopter puts the player in the role of a helicopter pilot.

There are two modes of play. The free mode lets the player import and fly through cities of their own or any of the 30 cities supplied with the game. However, user cities sometimes need to be designed with SimCopter in mind, and most of the time the player must increase the number of police stations, fire stations, and hospitals to allow for speedier dispatches. The second mode is the heart of the game, the career mode. This puts the player in the shoes of a pilot doing various jobs around the city. These jobs include:

Rescues - There are three things that people are rescued from in this game. They are: Rooftops (are easy, often because of a fire), capsized boats (moderately hard) and runaway trains (very hard). A harness is required for both boat and train rescues.
Traffic jams - Are a simple type of mission that involves using the megaphone to redirect the traffic.
Aerial fire fighting - Is where you are required to extinguish a fire somewhere in the city, it is usually on buildings, but sometimes a fire mission can be as small as a burning car. Sometimes a plane or train crash will start a few fires scattered over a small area. Putting out a fire involves going to a body of water and filling a Bambi water bucket, flying directly over a fire and dropping the water on it either by tipping the bucket or using the water cannon if it has been purchased. The player has to be careful not to fly too low over a fire as it is extremely dangerous to copters. Providing that the fire is near a road, a fire engine can be dispatched to help put out a fire.
Catching criminals - There are four types of criminals in this game; robbers, arsonists, muggers and burgulars. The first three types roam the streets on foot and can be arrested by simply picking up a police officer from the roof of a police station and dropping them near where the crook is. Foot criminals can also be stopped by landing on top of them with the copter, but this risks damage to it. Burgulars drive around the city at high speed and are difficult to catch. To catch a burgular, the player must dispatch police cars and guide them to the crook.
Riot Control - There are three ways to stop a riot. The first way is to use the megaphone to order the rioters to disperse. The second way is to dispatch police cars and take police officers to the site to quell a riot. The third way is to throw tear gas from the copter. Teargas, however may injure or even kill people, making the player lose points. Riots often cause MEDEVAC, traffic jam and fire missions. Riots do not appear in career mode until level eight.
MEDEVAC- These missions involve transporting a given number of sick or injured Sims to the roof top of the nearest hospital. Help is available in these missions in two ways. The first way is to pick up a paramedic from the rooftop of a hospital and taking him to where the victims are where he will help carry the victims back to the copter. The other way to get help is to dispatch an ambulance to the area.
Transporting Sims – Involves picking up a number of Sims at a given location and transporting them to a randomly selected destination.
If none of the above jobs are available, the player can earn some cash and points by seeking out speeding drivers by commanding them to pull over and dispatching the police to charge them. You can tell if a car is speeding if its tires are squeaking around corners. For the player to earn the points, they must stay where the speeder is until the police arrive or else the speeder will just drive off.

The player starts with a small, weak helicopter that has only a megaphone and a bambi bucket and can only hold two passengers. As they accumulate money they can purchase better helicopters and new equipment. Some jobs require certain equipment in order to complete them, and better helicopters offer greater speed, handling, and can carry more passengers. By completing jobs, the player earns money and points. When the player has accumulated enough points, the game lets them move on to the next city. The player then has a choice of going into a new city of the same difficulty or advancing to the next level. There are twelve levels of difficulty, with new types of jobs being introduced and previous types of jobs increasing in difficulty. Jobs will be randomly spawn around the city, but the player's actions can also create jobs.

Any of the following careless actions will cause the player to lose a substantial amount both of points and cash:

Ejecting a passenger from the copter while it is up in the air may injure or kill that person and may cause a MEDEVAC mission.
Landing the copter on a road and keeping it there for more than a minute will block the traffic, causing a traffic jam mission.
Crashing the copter into a car will set the car on fire and provide a hazard to the copter.
Crashing the copter in to a boat will either cause the boat to sink or spawn a boat rescue mission.

Crashing the copter into a building or slamming it into the ground will not necessarily destroy the copter, but it will damage it. The copter can crash into a building about ten times before it is destroyed. The more damage there is to the copter, the harder it is to control. At high levels of damage, the copter twists and turns wildly, making it very difficult to handle and there is smoke coming out of it. Money can be spent to repair a copter. If the copter is destroyed, it is lost forever as well as all of the equipment on board. When a copter is destroy, it may set a fire to a nearby building or terrain. The player will also lose 100 points and must use their remaining funds to purchase another copter. If they do not have enough money to buy a new copter, then they are grounded, making it pointless to continue on with the game.

Helicopters in this game have a limited amount of fuel in this game and must return to the hangar about once every half and hour to refuel, which costs money. If a copter runs out of fuel while in mid-air, it will fall to the ground and suffer heavy damage. If the copter remains intact after falling to the ground, it can be refueled at a highly inflated price.

The Apache is a special helicopter and cannot be bought from the hanger. It is found on military bases and has a machine gun and missiles in place of the water cannon and tear gas respectively. This helicopter has no seats and cannot be upgraded making it useless for jobs. Its machine gun is capable of injuring sims and destroying cars, boats, and planes. Cars part of a traffic jam, however, are immune. Missiles are capable of doing the above as well as setting buildings on fire. Firing a missile at a nuclear power plant will result in an explosion which destroys the whole city and your helicopter. Both weapons have unlimited ammo.

Maps which have an Apache in them will also occasionally have an UFO appear that flies around. 10 missile hits from the Apache will destroy the UFO and award you with 1000 points and 4000 dollars.

There are five virtual radio stations that can be listened to while in the helicopter: classical, rock, jazz, techno and a mix station featuring all songs from every other station. All stations occasionally play spoof commercials and public service announcements, of which there are more than 100 in the game. The file format of the audio is low quality WAV (uncompressed 8-bit, 11,025 Hz, mono). If a user wants, they can import their own music and commercials into the game as long as the audio uses an uncompressed WAV format.

It is also possible for the user to make custom videos for the drive-in movie theaters. The user would have to insert a specially edited Smacker video file somewhere in the SimCopter installation directory.

The game became controversial when a designer inserted sprites of men in trunks kissing each other that appear on certain dates, which was caught shortly after release and edited from future copies. He cited his actions as a response to the intolerable working conditions he suffered at Maxis [1]. The designer, Jacques Servin, was fired afterwards. He would later become a leading member of The Yes Men, a culture jamming activist group, under the alias Andy Bichlbaum.

SimCopter contains some bizarre, if endearing, quirks. For example, even though the helicopter modeling, air physics, and building modeling are all well-done (considering the time during which it was made and the budget), certain other aspects of the game seem like they were added at the last minute with little or no testing or effort going into their creation. The most obvious of these quirks are the civilian models, which appear normal while in the air but are actually borderline grotesque when seen up-close. The "faces" of the civilians seem to wrap the wrong direction around their heads, as there is usually a line that runs down the front of their faces. They speak in a bizarre, grunting language that almost seems like a precursor to Simlish. Car modeling, as seen in the opposite screenshot, is very, very basic, with little or no actual textures. In addition, the placing of Sims in various missions appears to be random, for example, Sims to be rescued in the rescue missions can be placed anywhere on the building, which can be difficult in not impossible if said Sims appear on certain buildings (for example, the inner arcs of some of the special buildings. It is also of note that the helicopters themselves appear to be smaller than their real-life versions, with the player's character appearing too big for some, especially the introductory Schweizer 300 (it is 2.65m tall in real life).

SimCopter runs by default at 640x480 at 256 colors with a combination of 3D rendering and 2D sprites and at full screen mode (which can be changed by adding command line parameters). The game uses Smacker (.smk) video files, 256 color bitmap images, and uncompressed wave audio as their corresponding file formats. A patch (1.02) was later released and featured a demonstration of the game with Voodoo 3Dfx acceleration and enhanced joystick controls. The patch also fixed several bugs and improved the appearance of fire in the game.

SimCopter contains a special tweak program hidden within the SimCopter installation directory which allows the users to change many paramters of the game engine like helicopter parameters, physics, and triggers.

Maxis released two update patches for the game. The first patch, version 1.01 was later recalled by Maxis. The second 1.02 patch was the official and supported patch released by Maxis. Version 1.02 is contained in the EA Classics release of SimCopter.

To this day the game still has many easter eggs, bugs, and left over content that the developers never implemented. In fact when browsing the SimCopter installation directory, one may see several images and sounds never seen or heard in the game. For instance, there is an image that suggests the possibility of having a fireman onbard, but this never happens in the game.

The format of the game would serve as a precursor to the U-Drive-It mode of the SimCity 4 expansion pack, Rush Hour.

File:Simcopter.png

SimCopter screenshot

Helicopters

Equipment

Equipment of the AH-64 Apache

External link

Template:SimUniverse