SimCopter

The Good
Everything, i'm an addicted player. Nah, o.k. let's nail it down, i like the gameplay because it isn't to serious. It's a game and no Flight Simulator. It's relatively easy to learn to fly your Heli and you will have very soon success which will keep you playing the career. Early career levels can be boring after you gained some experience. The game is easy to modd which is a plus and certainly was meant by the devs, in those days some developers loved to kick the players in direction of developing (instead of "we are gods" .- "come and join us"). The career points, times, gains can be changed by use of the Tweak utility (works only for V1.0.1.3 and above).

The Bad
If it's not liked. Erm, no but there exists a version labeled as 1.0.1.4, "Weeds" stated that it is the last official release but this can't be it's a hacked executable and the career isn't to win because already in early levels your city will be flooded and destroyed by rioting sims you can't stop and which won't appear on your radar screen. Stay off of it it's broken.

But there is nothing i can mention about as bad, for sure i'm biased i love this game incl. all the flaws (flaws in a game are like wrinkles in the face, as older you get as more you will like them).

The Bottom Line
As an addicted player of SimCopter i have to add a few nit picking things to the reviews and especially to the trivia here. "Great Game - poor Graphics", true it is but one has to keep in mind that it needed some time to develop it and that 3D was in very early stage when they started out. It is stated in the Trivia and in a review that it is possible to play a demo city D3D accelerated this is a wrong statement, it's not D3D it's 3DFX which we have to separate 3DFX was leading and introducing the 3D acceleration, D3D is NVIDIA and Microsoft. V1.0.1.3 won't need a patch for this it's already patched for the 3DFX demo which is rather to see as a demo for 3DFX itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx_Interactive

Seen from this pov the graphics aren't that bad and no i didn't think the stupid 2D "walker" from "Streets of SimCity" looks better as the LEGO™ style Sims of SimCopter.

Practically it's this, there is no other Game similar except "Streets" which can use the assets of another game, in this case SimCity 2000. This already limits certain things but also opens some doors for the user to play in a different way (fiddle around with it and modify it). The lack of graphics is easy compensated by great gameplay and a lot of humor which you will miss in most recent games - they tend to be to serious for a game. Sure there are graphically better Heli and Rescue Simulations but none of them contains "Mr. Fluffy" or anything of that. The continuous advertising for water is recently more fitting and hits the spot ("Our water is the best water! Why? It's imported"). This game and Streets keep my busy since many years and there are not many games which are such long time runners as SimCopter. Even if you know this game by sleepwalk it's still fascinating to play it from year to year again.

What a young fellow (23) felt about it: "great i have to come over and play it" Usually he rants about the stupid old games with these rotten graphics i play but SimCopter seemed to fascinate him at first bite. He's one of the dudes who think it's common that a game has a volume of 100GB (trash i say, it has no effect on gameplay as you see, btw he played with great fun a inty demo together with another comrade of mine, 6kb of pure fun vs. boring 100gb of a game you will forget after a year, gameplay is neither bound to volume as it is bound to graphics - gameplay is gameplay and not emptying your wallet except it is a virtual wallet).

A point to the request for a remake, a dude started years ago to disassemble it and started an OSX project called "MisCopter" unfortunately he canceled this project and it's left unfinished. Sure as a 3D modeller and addicted player i would love to contribute to such a project. If you aren't certain about how good this could be refer to FFED3D which is still the original First Encounters just with enhanced graphics.

I heavily modded this game with stereo sounds, extra music from SimCity and Sims and a own set of career cities which are much harder to play as the original cities, each is designed especially for Copter (some for Copter and Streets). Some of the Cities are similar to the "starter towns" of SC3K, you can start the city and watch how it will grow to the city i used for SimCopter (shout if you would like that because them i didn't released yet).

Smacker movies, unfortunately it's not longer possible to implement smacker clips in SimCopter due to the fact that "Miles" changed the format and the previous release isn't compatible with the recent format of Smacker. Neither you can use a different version of "smack.dll" to playback recent smacker clips, SimCopter won't accept a different version of "smack.dll".

It's stated that Train Rescues are impossible to solve this is complete wrong they are hardest to solve but by far not impossible, in my own creations you will find very special railroads winding up and down mountains which will make the train rescues even harder but not impossible for an experienced player. In general my career cities are harder to play as the originals with exception of the early levels, they are meant for one who played the game very often.

Look out for YT clips of "Gernot" about SimCopter for additional stuff. Check also Rich "Weeds" Nagel SC2000 page.

Yes probably one day i will open a own page about SC2K, Copter and Streets, just because i created many things for them (and already lost a lot of it).