Talk:SimCopter

Tag
rescues are POV, RoofTop is 'technically' the most difficult due to sims spawning in the wrong, or inaccessable places. weak helicopter (slamming) (This can be dangerous as the patient may still die on the way to the hospital if the player takes too long) The copter can crash into a building about ten times before it is destroyed. 10 missile hits from the Apache will destroy the UFO and award you half an hour to refuel 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. Note: not only is it POV and OR, but the writer who put it as a 'quirk' is an idiot. The reason for civilian models to be of lower quality then building models is because of the quantity of civilian models in a particluar area. Yes, my OR can say that civilians only spawn at a certain distance, but you still have a lot of models to keep track of. (And remember, this is for an 'above' perspective.) Gay.

They speak in a bizarre, grunting language that almost seems like a precursor to Simlish. (Note: Simlish is debuted IN simcopter, therefore it can not be a precurser (for the time period))

I think it is obvious that nothing in this article is referenced and is 90% Original Research.


 * This grunting language can't be simlish, because there is English text on buildings and other references in SimCity 3000.

Just because there is english text in sim city 3000 doesn't mean that the language in sim copter isn't simlish. Sim copter allowed players to import cities from sim city 2000, Not sim city 3000, Although I did import some cities from Sim city 2000 into Sim city 3000.. If there was english writing on buildings or billboards in Sim copter then I might agree. 67.140.39.131 20:08, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

There is no text on any building in SimCopter except "H" (hospital) "P" (police station) "F" (fire station), not specifically because it's multilingual i guess it's simply caused by how the models are textured with repeating used small texture tiles (which was very common back then). However neither i can remember (remember? i still play this game) any similarities of the "grunt" to simlish as used in Sims. It's of course a fantasy language but this won't make it to simlish as in Sims which is a sort of artificial language and has some expressions more as only "grunt". On the other hand Copter can be seen as a precursor to many things which followed in the Sim series. The idea was to reuse the assets (mainly the .sc2 city files and the format for the scenarios) for a range of games of which only Copter and Streets came to life, time moved to fast for such i guess. Further, radio advertises and DJ (DJ is not present at all but jingles like "this is Sim One") are in english (this part isn't multilingual and only in english installation present except you copy it over to the Fr, Ger, His, Swe, Ne, installation) and no fantasy language is used. Besides it's very easy to replace the "grunt" with own recordings, this is maybe something that should be pointed on - the modifiability of the game. It is pointed out that cities must be designed with Copter in mind - this is so far true but instead to place more police stations, hospitals and fire stations you will rather reduce them for a more thrilling gameplay, also high mountains and deep valleys make it much more interesting to play as a common generated SC2K landscape, a wide spread city is harder to maintain as a dense one, instead of a road grid design a city along a long strip (like a snail) this will hold the police, ambulance and fire trucks up. No water, no connecting roads to "H","P","F" makes it even harder without to touch the tweak utility (which works only proper for V1.0.1.3), but apart from that you will rather unbalance the career as anything positive will result from it. If you really think "rooftop rescues" are hardest then you will have to get my modified career cities - hardest is fire in a city with nearly no water (you can't control the appearance of water outside the city boundaries but reduce it if the terrain is very high leveled and the water very low or to "zero" leveled) and no fire station connected to a road.

V1.0.1.3 can be played in 3DFX demo mode, "demo.sc2" is the only city you can use in this mode (while of course you can rename any city to "demo.sc2") and also the 2D image of the cockpit isn't present, but it's ok for a fun ride. There exists a tileset for SimCopter in 3DFX but i haven't yet found out what to do with it, the 3DFX demo runs without this tileset but it could profit much from textures in higher resolution also some have a wrong palette in 3DFX (with the tileset comes a special glide.dll i haven't tried this never and i dunno what result it would have on a real win95 also i don't know if this tileset still lurks around on an old machine of mine). It is what it is labeled as; a demo of something which will come in future for 3D games. The original V1.0.1.0 (incl. the easter egg) is still available in web, but apart from to check them out yourself it won't make sense because the controls and some graphics was improved for V1.0.1.3 (fire, smoke) also they added a "realistic flight mode" for this release (in three degrees of hardness from "wired flight model" to "manual control model"). Stay off of something labelled as V1.0.1.4, it never existed officially and the executable is hacked it's impossible to win the career because of constant rioting sims in very early stage of the career (probably an official hack to counter the previous spreading of the game when it still was copyrighted by maxis? at least this hack makes else no sense to me. Yes it is a hack the tweak utility is untouched and the 1.4 executable fails the same in a 1.3 installation which is still balanced original)

What this is POV? Of course it is point of view from in my heli sitting on my "tushi cushi" and let Mr. Fluffy the cat open his cans himself. The tongue in cheek humor is another noteworthy component of the game (available in blue, green and red bottles).

Some Dude started a couple of years ago an open source derivate of the original game for OSX but he cancelled his work and the project is unfinished (unfortunately).

References for certain claims i made you find in +++Weeds+++ SimCopter Trivia or by playing the game. Stop it Gernot before it turns to a review. GernotSchrader (talk) 01:16, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

POV
Yes, someone should just copy or reference this page on another site, then reference that site as point of reference, and presto! Or should i say, and Wikipediowned! But wikipedia's notorious follies aside; this is an old video game, there is no in-depth third party research on it aside from gamer experience. It's pointless to cry POV on gamers simply technically describing the functioning of the game. No one is saying "This is the best game in the universe!", instead they're saying "you can exit the helicopter and pick up the injured or call for ambulance dispatch". I'm removing the neutrality and reference tags unless someone can find a serious POV incursion in the vein of say "It's stereo sound is the best stereo sound i ever heard it's like helicopter is in your room and your monitor is like a little window you're looking through man!!!".

189.120.9.13 (talk) 01:01, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

you gotta be kidding. this game is barely playable —Preceding unsigned comment added by 189.120.9.13 (talk • contribs)


 * Not sure what you're referring to exactly - technical playability or "enjoyability"? On modern machines, yes, you'll have difficulties playing this game, but those can be worked around with a combination of compatibility mode and a CPU slowing program. As for the level of enjoyment you get out of gameplay, well, that's up to you - personally I find this to be one of the most addictive and enjoyable games I've played. Yes, some of the graphics suck, yes there are a couple of glitches (the water tower draws its boundaries incorrectly, and the police car doesn't pull over to the side like it should) and yes, I wish the music WAV's were of higher quality, but those are my only complaints.
 * Remember, this game was rushed out by a team that was placed under an unimaginable deadline. That deadline wasn't helped by a rather selfish individual who felt that the world needed to hear his opinion, and he communicated his message by doing his best to ruin their gameplay (though, as it happened, the "himbos" glitch turned out to be a massive flop, and most players just found it to be funny. Servin tried to laugh it off later by saying it was just a joke. Yeah, sure...). With all this nonsense, the fact that they managed to put together something as awesome as what they did continues to amaze me. Passing it off as "barely playable" is a bit harsh when you consider what this game went through to even make it to the shops. SMC (talk) 13:48, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

A patched easter egg
I noticed a sentence in the SimCity 2000 article that concerned SimCopter, but doesn't seem to have a counterpart here; does anyone know anything about this? I hesitate to add it to the article before it can be confirmed with a source. Phoenix-forgotten 22:00, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
 * "SimCopter was perhaps best known for a rather notorious Easter egg which, if successfully triggered, depicted two scantily clad men in a homosexually provacative state. Due to the (predictable) uproar, this "feature" was patched over in a future release."
 * Yep, it's all true and I have a source for it somewhere in this pile of magazines. I'm cataloging them all for the WikiProject Computer and video games/Magazines so when I do find a source I'll put it here. - X201 22:12, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

In the very first version of SimCopter, Supposedly when you complete a mission instead of a band playing at your hanger there are girls in bikinis. This was supposedly patched up because I do not remember seeing girls in bikinis after completing a mission. Also it should be noted that is you use the "Greet" Key (F10, I believe) Sims may do strange things. They may shoot at you, They may get abducted by aliens or they may go in a very strange pose and you'll hear what I assume are fart sounds. 67.140.39.131 20:02, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Simcopter box cover.jpg
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Article faults
This article contains, quite frankly, an enormous amount of useless information (including the entire 'Objectives' section), unverified claims and a number of trivial waiting-to-be-deleted sections and subsections. This article will require a MAJOR cleanup and rewriting to get anywhere off its 'start' ranking. I'll try to work through this over the next couple of weeks :/ Trollyboy (talk) 03:42, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

Source

 * https://archive.org/stream/boot-magazine-vol01-issue01-sept-1996/Boot%20Magazine%20-%20Vol%201%20Issue%201%20August%20September%201996#page/n79/mode/2up - Interview
 * https://web.archive.org/web/20160322191634/http://scans.roushimsx.com/PCGamer_1997_03_pg052.jpg

Release date
Actual US release date was widely reported as 1996-11-20. See: https://www.wired.com/1996/12/boy-bimbos-too-much-for-game-maker-maxis/ https://apnews.com/aff6c2e1026de62147a132c2605e63d9 https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.flight-sim/TH74Cn-LFUw/Jxg6lPSMyKMJ (Maxis developer) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jacobbrett (talk • contribs) 10:13, 9 February 2020 (UTC)