LGR - SimCopter - PC Game Review
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- čas přidán 14. 05. 2015
- Fly missions in your SimCity 2000 metropolis! Fight fires, disperse riots, throw people overboard to their doom. And what's up with all those half-naked dudes kissing...
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● Music used is from the Sim Copter OST. - Zábava
Hey. I was the lead programmer on SimCopter! Reading thru all these comments -- I Never knew! LOL. We were going to do a SimCopter2 with a more realistic helicopter flight model but EA bought Maxis and it never happened. All resources went into doing the original Sims game...Remember -- this game was developed before 3D graphics cards hit the scene so it was pretty limited vis a vis the graphics were concerned as everything 3D had to be done in software. A lot of the game, especially the graphics was written in Assembler language for best performance. Will Wright and I took a real helicopter flight lesson to research stuff for a possible SimCopter2. Thanks for all the comments from players who loved the game. It was really rushed and unfinished because Maxis absolutely NEEDED to have a game come out for Xmas. There was so much more we wanted to do! And Yes! This game I felt was definitely a precursor for the likes of Grand Theft Auto I thought. I was mainly responsible for the overall gameplay, helicopter controls and the 3D engine written in Assembler, and for importing Sim City 2000 cities into SimCopter.
So did you know about the hidden speedo dudes?
Thanks for all the hard work on the game!
wow
A shame a sequel was never made, I would have loved to have seen the idea realized a lot better with 3DFX tech and EA's backing.
Could you shed any light on how the humans were rendered, they look like a collection of prerendered sprite layers? Such a unique method I've not seen elsewhere, reminds me of Ballz and Ecstatica animation but more twitchy heh.
"It was one of the three games he was working on at the time, one of which was a simulation of the Hindenburg airship, which never came to fruition"
I have numerous questions.
It crashed and burned
@@Willie_Pete_Was_Here too soon
@@PigeonScratch It's quite the opposite of too soon actually...
Really the Hindenberg as a disaster is only so famous and 'sensitive' because it was actually caught on film when film itself was just becoming common, also entirely killed the concept of airship travel. I notice that some people to this day are ridiculously oversensitive about it...
@@PigeonScratch r/wooosh
Kunce czcams.com/video/2uQ76qrlK78/video.html
The thing I remember about this game was, it wouldn't let you walk off the edge of a building, so if you walked to the edge your pilot would just put his hands in the air and go 'AaaaaAAaAA' like he was scared of falling off.
Once, I got out of my chopper too close to a phonebox, so I ended up on top of the phonebox. The game counted this as 'being too close to the edge of a building' on all sides, so it wouldn't let me move at all, my guy just stood there on top of that phonebox, waving his arms in the air and loudly FREAKING OUT.
In my mind he's still up on that phonebox to this day.
Also I'm pretty sure you could turn into a dog?
I know this is 7 months old but it's nice to see you like LGR, I really like your stuff on AI.
The dog thing is with a cheat code; you use "Superpowermultiply" and then when you hold Shift down, you're a dog going at least 200 MPH at "full throttle."
Hah, at 6:21-6:35 I thought about AI misalignment, and here you were!
The dog thing was with the "superpowermultiply" cheat code. You'd activate the dog part by holding Shift down if you were outside the helicopter, at which point you'd run very very fast. Sound effects varied. If you held Shift down while flying, you'd just go fast and possibly crash into a building if you weren't careful.
"The immense orange ball seen rising from the eastern horizon early this morning is expected to fall slowly to the west some time in the evening. No injuries have been reported, and rumours of panic have been greatly exaggerated." - Sim Copter radio announcement that I remember word for word from when I was a kid.
Also, I don't remember this game being unstable at all, and at the time I remember thinking the graphics were pretty good. Though.. I was a pretty young
@@brandonakey6616 Your computer was slow enough to run the game much better. I occasionally had issues with it but not near as bad as it seems to be if you run it on newer hardware.
My old comment is accurate, but there's some sort of "patch" to work around this mess. The same can be said of Streets of Sim City.
I love the idea of a Sim becoming conscious and realising that he's being transported to hospital by the same Maniac who just threw him out of a moving helicopter 😂
Sim: *"Wait, weren't you the same guy who-"*
Captain Clint: 😈
haha good one
@@twistedyogert **Throws sim out again**
And paying for the privilege haha
@@SirKolass Oh come on now, that's just not gonna make you money if you toss them out again.
Well, unless it's only a few feet above the hospital.
This is the gold standard of LGR videos. Obscure game, thoroughly researched and demonstrated, with archival footage and news context. Yay! Thanks for sharing it.
Norman Rafferty I'm glad you enjoyed!
Norman Rafferty Oh hey Rafferty, I didn't know you're in there too.
I wouldn't call sim copter obscure
Obscure? This was my childhood!
Obscure in that it wasn't sim city@@joegugliottajr6363
I used to work in games journalism from 2006-2011, and every single time I ran into Will Wright at some event or had an interview scheduled with him, the first question I would always ask is "Could you please make a new Sim Copter?" He started anticipating it, eventually.
Also you forgot to mention and/or emphasize that the game was capable of converting a 2D-isometric SimCity 2000 map into a fully navigable and destructible 3D environment, with matching buildings and roads and everything else. It was incredibly awesome to be able to take a city you'd been building for weeks or months in SimCity 2000 and suddenly be able to explore it in *3D* in a helicopter or on foot. ALSO, any damage you cause to the city is saved to the file when you close the game, and if you open up that city again in SimCity 2000, the damage (and state) will be persistent. Buildings will be rubble and fires will be burning if you save the game without putting them out first. ALSO, if you use the Apache to blow up the Nuclear power plant, it will explode in an atomic blast and destroy the entire city (which will be reflected in SimCity 2000, as well). A really amazing, remarkable game. I wish we had something similar these days for the new SimCity and/or Skylines, but the game industry just isn't that awesome anymore. This was the real Golden Age of PC gaming.
Really cool for a game back then! Honestly the SimCity 2000 save file integration in this game and Streets of SimCity have are pretty cool! It is kinda like how you can import some of your saves from RTC 1/2 to RTC classic, but at a more interesting level. Just imagine this being applied to other games, like a Minecraft mod that puts your saved cities in the game as a randomly generated structure! Some of the stats of that save file can even affect the game, like perhaps you needing to defeat a giant monster when a monster was on the save file.
@@auravisionsdeluxe2885 I haven't played Minecraft in a couple years but I would definitely pick it up again if there was that kind of integration!
Loved the game as a kid. I should try to revisit it as an adult. You were in the good part of the games journalism era! Integrity is a bygone thing nowadays.
I remember the microphone in that game.... and putting out fires with a bucket of water for some reason. The pilot guy would also say something like "Attention everyone.... HAVE A NICE DAY", followed by everybody crashing their cars and panicking.
This game was weird, but it was also part of my childhood. :)
"I'd like a room with a shower, please!"
*Woman shoots at helicopter*
"Be happy!"
*woman gets head injury*
I remember getting that Easter egg as a kid! I didn't think anything of it then. I didn't realize the guys were kissing, I just thought they were dancing and celebrating. I had no idea about the controversy until now. I really enjoyed SimCopter, I still have my copy somewhere around here.
I saw it too and I just thought it was funny, it's not like it's any more explicit or subversive than anything else in the game except for oversensitive moral majority types
despite the issues I loved this game as a kid, so many fond memories ... mainly of destroying everything with the apache lol
Yeah loved the idea of this, but it did crash soooooo much, I persevered for some time with it but ultimately it was fairly unusable
I played it a lot, too, in about 1999 - 2001. Maybe it depended on which patch version you had. On the subject of patches for this game: there's one version where, for some stupid reason, Riots literally don't show up on your map, so you don't know where they are or if they're ever over. It's not the version I had then, but it's the one I have now.
@@101Volts that's the "Maxis CD Classics" version, it adds support for 4-channel surround sound but introduces a bug that makes completing riot emergencies impossible
7:25 All you had to do was follow the damn train SimCopter!
Jerry Martin is an amazing composer. The Sims Makin' Magic was always my favorite, I love to put it on during fall and walk around the forest...
If I were ever put into a coma due to unfortunate events they could probably wake me up by playing music from an earlier Maxis game. Man, I need to write that down somewhere so they know!
SimCopterOne, reporting heavy traffic.
SimCopterOne, reporting heavy traffic.
SimCopterOne, reporting heavy traffic.
(And those aliens. They sound like guinea pigs.)
*click* "MAYDAY"
HAHA Yes! The voices are most definitely guinea pig squeaks!
i wanted this game so badly. I use to play the demo over and over again.
I hope you've since accomplished your dream! It's possible to get it to run on Windows 7.
It's still my all time favorite PC game 22 years later !
Heh as a kid I remember stumbling across that "gay" glitch a few times. I just said "huh that's weird" and moved on.
Yeah - most kids wouldn't have even known about the controversy...
It's only adults that would understand the connotations and assume it would warp kids. The only trauma that could be caused by men kissing, is through the reactions of adults noticing that their kids saw pictures of men kissing.
Too busy flying through my city to notice
Of cource you did. xD its allways like that.. people worried X will happen rather than X acturally happening
Same! I had no idea it caused such a fuss on release, never would have guessed.
THAT WALKING ANIMATION IS THE BEEEEST
Romantiqu my favorite
That's definitely not how it looked on Virtual Windows 98, on my G3 iMac, in 2000.
#BringBackTheSimCopterWalkingAnimation
Wow, Clint looks fabulous in those aviators!
Rest in peace maxis, Rest in peace...
I want maxis back we need them back.
Will wright is the grandfather of creativity and im 13 and I still like there 90's games... ; (
One of my favourite games as a kid once I figured out how the hell the controls worked. Did this game have any sort of 'You Win' screen? I remember getting to the aliens speaking, but nothing happened after that.
I remember reading somewhere that Will Wright found the speedo men genuinely funny.
Shame the soundtrack never got a higher fidelity release of any kind.
There were 10 missions, and you'd get a marching band playing at the end of each mission (except for the last one.) Aside from that, the aliens screen was the end screen.
LOVED this game... and the music. Hell I made my own cities and was thrilled to fly in it.
I used to love this game as a child, even though it was already "outdated" when I got it (I was born in 96). I even had the original "easter egg" version, although I never really realized it wasn't "supposed" to be part of the game. Great game for sure, heres hoping it will be playable again sometime soon.
Does anything good happen after "The people in charge demand [insert unrealistically short development time]"?
bigstupidgrin nothing good happens when corporate greed comes in to play
Sometimes it makes people real creative and think of smart solutions and innovative ideas
Well, you do get hundreds of gays prancing around in speedos and making out in your game, so theres that.
I loved these games. I had all three, City, copter, and streets. I thought it was super cool playing in your own built cities using streets and copter.
GTA: Sim City Stories?
WendeXTX I would buy that
GTA was nothing more than an arcade or ps game. SimCity is the real deal.
I remember listening to the Ride of The Valkyries for the first time in my life while playing this game, I called it "the SimCopter music" for quite some time. It used to be pretty heavy on graphics too, the potato I had almost couldnt handle it.
I remember my sister held a sim out the window and was like "wow that's a weird face." So I tried to do that with another sim only she dove for the mouse and I acidentally threw them out of the copter. She was like "YOU MURDERER!"
Lol, when he's walking, it looks like something out of an Atari 2600 game!! ;o)
That isn't how it looked on my old iMac running Virtual PC in 2000. LGR's computer's too fast to run it right.
Righty! On my P1 100mhz it was a dream to play it, on my later athlon XP 1.6ghz with windows XP it ran like that and was prety anoying to play. Then one unlucky Day the Disk just exploded in my 52x CD burner, killing tha drive :( never was able to play it again
@@felix945 That's because the disc wasn't designed to run in a CD drive spinning that fast. Very early versions of CDs were susceptible to exploding in 52x drives due to them not being able to handle the heavy amount of vibrations that spinning at that speed would generate.
"Lazy" game reviews... why, because you don't script horrible comedy bits, bring all of your friends over to play characters and spend more time acting than actually reviewing games? Sir, you are a rare breed... someone who cares more about describing the game in detail than getting over on CZcams. It's just amusing to me that you call your reviews lazy when they are more comprehensive than most.
Way back in 2008, I'm pretty sure he was just being...lazy...with the name, or something.
no, he called it lgr because his early reviews were completely unscripted.
Also, I don't see how trying to entertain people is just for the views. Not everything has to be super serious.
I think hes simply showing his taste by making the content he likes, not his distaste by rebelling against other forms of media.
Finn Jenkins you read the first one wrong.
Jacques was trying to add some humor to the game, but eventually his boss was Servin him a pink slip.
HA!
What a Jacques ass!
I remember this game. I had so much fun with it as a child, and even went through the trouble to figure out how to get my city on the school's "educational" macs that had sim city into Sim city 2000 on the one PC the school had... all for the sole purpose of getting the city onto a floppy so I can spend my days flying around my city in my Sim Copter.
Oh man- you brought back some vague childhood memories of me trying endlessly to figure out how to be successful at this game as a lad on my parents handmedown computer. It frequently crashed and I often gave up, but I had some fun!
I loved this game as a kid. Even today there's just something about being able to build something in a game and then play a different kind of game within that thing - if that makes sense - that I still find incredibly compelling.
There was also a UFO flying around which you could shoot down with the Apache and get 1000 bucks.
This was one of my favourite games in my childhood
One of the games that kept my love for the Sim series. I remember buying this at a garage sale in Dallas, and loved playing it any time I could. Great review!
Thank you for covering this game! It was one of my most favorite PC games, next to Lode Runner: The Legend Returns and Outpost 2: Divided Destiny. Making a map in the Sim City urban renewal kit and then flying through it, or driving through it w/ Streets of Sim City was an absolute dream come true as a kid growing up. I was pleased to discover that I have one of the original game CD's with the infamous dudes. I've been trying to get it to run in a VM for a while, but there's nothing like running it back in the day on Windows 98 SE on an old Compaq Presario.
This and NFS High Stakes were my early PC gaming Childhood games!
Great game
"Dollhouse sounds pretty lame."
...That eventually became the Sims...
"I take that back."
This was one of my all time favorites. Making my own radio station BLEW MY YOUNG MIND! You could drop wav files into the station folder.
One of my favorite games as a kid. It was strange too. Me and my friend understood it was "ugly" and clunky but were able to look past its flaws.
Our favorite part was when you had to disperse the crowds and the pilot would say "Leave or you could die, or worse!". As kids we thought that was pretty assuming and often wondered what was worse than dying.
The only sunglasses I've ever owned in my life came from SimCopter. I'm awesome.
0:45 "and help the police keep your pesky Sims under control."
Had this as a kid. Along with a plethora of other Sim titles. Simcopter was the only one I could get to run, never understood how to do anything, never passed missions, just walked around the city with that incredible walk animation for hours. Fly around for no reason. I loved every second of it.
dude. the last time i have seen gameplay footage of simcopter i was a kid playing it in the 90s! i have incredibly vauge memories of it and i dont remember if it was just the demo or not but it always stuck with me because i remember it being so much fun. seeing this video took me wayyyy wayyy back. thank you so much. im gonna have to find an older pc so i can play all these games again
I was waiting for this one since you mentioned it in the Streets of SimCity video :3
oh my god Nostalgia. I LOVED this game as a kid lmfao. I remember literally hurting people with tear gas. I'm mad I didn't find this sooner. This and Dune 3000 were my favorite old games.
What I enjoy about this channel is I find out about games I never knew existed. Some of the games I've found out about I plan to try one day if I find copies cheap enough. Good job 👍
Oh man. This is giving me flashbacks to elementary school. I love this game back then. I was terrible, but I loved playing it. Good times. Thanks for doing a review on this.
No mention of the ability to cause a nuclear meltdown :(
what exactly happened when you did that i know the whole screen lit up white with a giant explosion but does the game just say "You caused an accident- 9000 or something like that?
Life Lesson #1: Never work with EA.
I remember this game. I was a huge fan of SimCity2000 and when this came out I got it as a gift from my dad. I remember having a PC just able to play it and was so excited. And then I immediately crashed the first helicopter because I was bad and I couldn’t afford a new copter so I just gave up on it and returned to SimCity2000.
addicted to these videos
I loved this game, haha. It was the closest thing to a 3D GTA game you could find in the 90's.
What about driver?
@@StMozzer
Can't kill pedestrians.
Neither here you can just harm them, but yeah it's closer to GTA in that regard
@@StMozzer
You can harm them, and if I remember correctly they die if you wait long enough.
@@Mechaghostman2 I once had a Paramedic get out of my helicopter to get a Medevac case.
The timing was just in time for both of them to get hit by a train on the way to the helicopter.
Nostalgia overload, I loved Sim copter, I used make maps of where I lived then destroy them in Sim Copter. Place down a nuclear power plan and take the Apache to it then watch the whole word blow up, or pick up Sims fly as high as you could then drag their faces to the middle of the screen and watch them fall the their deaths. Totally normal right? I never knew about that gay easter egg though. Thanks for the great video!
I played the demo for this way back in the day and I loved it. It was an open world game before open world games were a thing. I especially loved the radio station that played classical music, very relaxing.
Oh man I used to play this a lot in a great manche controller. And even loaded a Sim City map or two...
I Didn't see you telling about it but actually the Military Chopper is used to try to hunt down the aliens that comes randomly.
Definitely one of my favorite childhood games. Maxis made very good use of their EXTREMELY limited graphical capabilities, and although it didn't look AMAZING(not even back then) it was still satisfying to look at due to it's odd, funny graphics and well-fit sound effects.
+1 for mentioning LHX.. almost forgot how much time I spent playing that awesome game :] ..
Ah, memories. Spent many an hour working my way up that flight line.
Thanks for the post!
I bought this specific game around 2001 at a comp USA that was going out of business, but it's way long gone now. So many good memories!
This is one of those games that I had super fun with as a kid. Then I played it like a year ago, and its horrid :P. But still the fun memories and playing in my own cities back in the day was still a blast. Just not now. Tho my original boxed copy is long gone and worn down. Instead I have a dvdcover version that was re-released and made by Dice multimedia back in 2000 ish.
This game was my childhood :D
Absolutely! Join the club.
I gave another shot to searching this game after 7-8 years.Pity nothing comes up when you query SimCity2000 helicopter, but so glad I finally found this game that captured a very happy period in my childhood. I was 7 when I first played this in 2001 and as I watched memories resurfaced in a flash as if they never left.
Heartfelt thanks man
Well it's called SimCopter not SimCity2000 Helicopter so that would be your problem. It doesn't work well on modern OS's and while a couple have some workarounds you still more than likely will experience a CTD somewhere. Best best if you do get a copy is to load it on a tower with the supported OS or run it through VM and even then it's not guaranteed to work well but it's definitely a blast regardless.
Oh man i remember playing this as a kid. Being able to fly around a city you created in simcity was SO cool to me!!
Does anybody remember a mod that replace all the sims voices ? It basically turned everybody to talk in English.
The funniest is when they saw the UFO and you heard “what the f*** is that.” That was the only naughty word in the audio files.
I do, but I don't think I played it enough to hear that. I did hear "What a stupid place to put a wall," though.
I loved it as a kid. One of the first games I owned.
im really glad that you decided to make this review
I played this all day everyday for a solid 7 months as a kid. This takes me back.... thank you, sir
so many hours in this game. so many hours...
a flock of sea-cows, esquire oh god the graphics I remember them being so sweet
10:20 - "was" able :'(
Damn it, EA, stop killing off good names like that.
If I recall correctly, one of the lines over the megaphone for clearing up traffic was "Get moving you stupid idiots!"
My grandparents had this game back in 95. I have fond memories coming over and playing this, along with Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain. Since neither of these games would run on our 486, I loved going over and playing these on their Pentium machine. It was also one of my Grandfather's favorites, who passed away in 97, may he reset in peace.
We need a Sim Copter for Sim City 4.
I have always thought that.
I wish Cities:Skylines had something like this. Imagine making your own city that you can fly around in!
"Aha", I thought, "I have this game!" And I ran off to my game closet #8, where I dug around a bit and finally turned up... "HeliCops". Still shrinkwrapped though. Anybody have any idea if that one is any good?
goopah Sorry, I've never played it. Surely though, someone did.
I always wanted to play this but I'm glad I had me some flight simulator 98 lol. Badass video man. Brought me back!
Watching this reallllly takes me back. I still have this game collecting dust somewhere.
I remember this game! This was the one that destroyed Maxis as an independent game company!
drsdino Pretty much :/ Maxis really were their own downfall.
A whole city full of half naked men making out? Sounds like my kinda city. lol
I have a feeling i'd be shooting them all with the apache just to reap the reward of medievacing them.
@@sheilaolfieway1885 They die if you shoot them. The Greet Key will just give them head injuries, use that instead.
That menu music makes my soul stir in a good way. I just love how it sounds and makes me feel nostalgic despite never owning this game.
"I'd like a room with a shower please." Spamming messages over the megaphone was one of the most amusing feature of the game. If you did it enough since Sims would even shoot at your chopper. I've been wishing for years that they would re-release/update/make a new version of SimCopter. I would buy it in a heartbeat if they did.
you're great!
Lol the aviator scene
LOL, funny video, Clint! Love all the historical background info! :D
Your voice is just so soothing. Your videos are like sweet cream butter.
So basically this game, if it was combined with Streets of SimCity, would become Babies First GTA, complete with a Hot-Coffee easter egg? :D
FWIW if you have the latest patched version of the game, you could run it in GLide accelerated mode if you have a 3dfx card or wrapper. It involved using a command line switch. The problem was it was basically alpha quality, there was no main menu and it was hard coded to load one of the included cities and not much more. That GLide mode later found its way into Streets of SimCity.
NJRoadfan Yup, I skipped out on talking about the specifics of the patch because the result isn't worth much.
NJRoadfan : the dgVoodoo 2 wrapper isnt only 3dfx, its support very old direct x application as well. if you just drag and drop the files from the dgvoodoo zip file, and the ddraw.dll file, that include. simcopter will run in 640x480 directx mode with the wrapper witout complaining. try it out. also you can use a ps3 controller as well with Motionjoy ds3tool. config it right and you can use analogue stick too
i probably said this about 300 times during the last few years, but once again a perfect nostalgia entertainment education trip :)
Thanks for always putting out quality videos
I loved this game when I was in elementary school; I still think back on it! I loved everything from putting out fires and yelling at traffic jams to disperse, to (i think using a cheat) to be able to morph into a dog and run across the city or call in an apache helicopter to go cause havok inbetween resucing people from capsized boats. Great times!
Hope so as well, SimCopter was one of my favorite games growing up. Don't think I had the version with the gay easter egg though.
BTW The gay men are called "Him-bo's" lol
The best thing about SimCopter was that you could open your SimCity maps in it and fly around your own created cities! Amazing to see your 2D city in 3D for the first time!
I loved this game back in the days! You had so much to do and mess around with haha.
I'm hoping for a sequel: SimClopter. What happens when you merge horse and helicopter? Heliclopter.
Shade Draws You should really stop doing drugs, mate.
clop clop
I Am The CEO of McDonnel Douglas.. 123456789. Heheheheh. Who knowz whats up (;
Ah yes, THE cheat code to unlock ALL the helicopters!!! Used it EVERY time!!!
Give me bucks or give me death 10000 _Game crashes_ Well i guess it gave me death
Yeap. Exactly
I would have liked to get a game like this back in the days. Great review!
I grew up playing this game, I never did play the Streets of Sim City, but I ran SimCopter just fine. I loved importing my cities into it, so much fun! It is also why I am very excited for newer games like Flashing Lights.
its GTA 3 before GTA 3!!!!!!
you have an amazing narrator voice.. i just love it man,. keep up the videos. do alot more. (dont just do games. do tops tens. do fail videos. do lets plays.
Jd Cunningham Thanks! But I already do much more than just games, and I do lists and let's plays (called LGR Plays) and more. Check my channel :)
My wish has been fulfilled! Thank you so much, Clint! This was my childhood growing up and I'm very sad that there is no other game like it today. Forget Eurotruck, give me a Simcopter sequel.
Also, I think I'm very lucky for not getting the "easter egg" version of the game warping my fragile little mind.
I remember playing them demo a lot. There was the Ride of the Valkyiries playing and when you completed them demo, a band orchestra was playing at the landing pad. Good times!