#0036 Choplifter!

So guys, finals are over and school is out for winter! You know what that means! That means I'm back with “1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die”.

For those who are new or don't remember, I'm going through the book “1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die” and playing each game in chronological order to build kind of a video game history with all the great games from those eras.

So, today on 1K1VGYMPBYD we're looking at Choplifter! An Apple II game developed by Dan Gorlin and published by Br0derbund in 1982. It was ported to several systems and in 1985 Sega rereleased a coin-op arcade remake,which in turn had several ports of it's own, making it one of the few games to start as a home computer game, and then be ported to arcade, and in 1983 Billboard Magazine named it Computer Game of the Year. That's a lot of praise for a humble computer game, but does it hold up? Eh, kinda.

Before I talk about the game itself, let me first mention how hard it was to find a way to play this game. Normally I play all my old computer games on an Apple II emulator, but for some reason the site I play said games on wasn't working, so I tried to find alternative means of playing the game including a Java version. Nothing worked. I ended up playing the 1985 remake by Sega, so yeah, going by that the graphics and sound were phenomenal compared to the 1982 version, and still the same overall concept.

In this game, you play as a rescue helicopter, your mission being to rescue civilian prisoners of war from an enemy base. You must rescue as many civilians as possible and return them to your home base without getting shot by enemy tanks, turrets or fighter jets yourself.

In 1982, Softline Magazine called Choplifter "what may well be the first Interactive Computer-Assisted Animated Movie. A fusion of arcade gaming, simulation, and filmic visual aesthetics, Choplifter is destined to occupy a place in the software Hall of Fame"

Wow, the first Interactive Computer Assisted Animated Movie? Filmic visual aesthetics? This game sounds amazing! With praise like that you'd expect it to have some amazing, maybe even 8bit graphics right? Well no, not really. The graphics really aren't all that much to write home about. I mean, they're okay, compared to other computer games at the time, considering many don't even have graphics at all. Overall though, they're not super impressive, I thought Ultima had better graphics honestly.

Well, maybe it has an amazing story that can move it's players with all the emotion it evokes, or keep them at the edge of their seats with the nonstop narrative tension? Again, no. The story is there, but the story can be summed up by “you're a helicopter that rescues hostages from a POW camp”. It gets a little better when you think about how much the hostages need you and how much they're relying on you getting them home to their families, but other than that, the game's narrative really isn't any deeper than Space Invaders. Even Missile Command, which had a similar simple story, had HUGE implications that told a moving, disturbing story about the futile nature of a nuclear holocaust. Choplifter, on the other hand, does not have those deep implications. What you see is what you get.

Okay, so let's take the hype out of this. Let's just look at the game at face value. The controls are a little tricky to get the hang of at first, there's a button that turns the helicopter, which is a little tedious, but it allows you to move backwards while firing, so I think that was actually a good idea. The concept is interesting and different from any of the other games I've played thus far, and that's always a plus. The difficulty is just right, after I finally got the controls down, I had little trouble getting the hostages to safety, and the difficulty with each subsequent hostage group got steadily more difficult, in just the right increments to keep me coming back.

Overall, not a bad game. Certainly not worth the hype it received, and probably not going to be game of the year for me, but a good game nonetheless. If you're interested in a helicopter simulator, and like escort games, then you might get a kick out of this. There's an HD remake for PSN, XBLA, and steam, but it doesn't look nearly as good as the original. I'd recommend hunting down the 1985 remake. You won't be disappointed.

Next up: Robotron 2084