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SimCopter

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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.

Contents

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:

The player starts with a small, weak helicopter, but as they accumulate money they can upgrade their existing helicopter and purchase new ones. Some jobs require certain equipment in order to complete them, and better helicopters offer greater speed, handling, and capacity. 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 ten 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. Landing on a street will create traffic jams and collisions with boats and sims will create medevac opportunities.

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 missle hits from the Apache will destroy the UFO and award you with 1000 points and 4000 dollars.

The player is assisted by paramedics and police which will ride in the helicopter and can be deployed when necessary. The player can also dispatch police cars, fire engines, and ambulances.

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, 11,025hz, 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 [link]. 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.

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 what SimCopter would run with Voodoo 3Dfx acceleration and enhanced joystick controls.

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. For example, when browsing the SimCopter installation directory, one may see that the ability to have a fireman onboard is possible, however, this will never happen while playing 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.

SimCopter screenshot
Enlarge
SimCopter screenshot

Helicopters

Equipment

Equipment of the AH-64 Apache

External link

The Sim Universe and Maxis
City games
SimCity > SimCity 2000 | SimCity 3000 | SimCity 4
The Sims
The Sims > The Sims 2 | The Sims Online
Other Sim games
SimEarth > SimAnt | SimLife | SimFarm | SimTower | SimHealth | SimIsle | SimCopter | SimGolf | Streets of SimCity
Youth Sim games
SimTown > SimPark | SimSafari | SimTunes
Sim related
A-Train > El-Fish | Sid Meier's SimGolf | Spore | Widget Workshop
Cancelled Sim games
SimMars > Simsville

 

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