So I’m writing about SimCopter, a 1996 sort-of kind-of flight simulator that allowed you to fly around 3D models of your SimCity 2000 creations. Yes, you could fly around your own cities! As a kid who played the shit out of SimCity 2000, this was really exciting to me.
The box promised excitement and danger and all that stuff, but I didn’t need to be sold on the game: I got it almost as soon as it came out. And it was fun. But how has it held up?
Well…
SimCopter did deliver on its primary promise: it lets you fly around the custom cities you build in SimCity 2000. And it does feature missions with disasters of the sort you might have run into in SimCity itself: you had fires to put out, riots to quell (with your loudspeaker), traffic jams to clear (again, with your loudspeaker, though it was never clear to me how yelling at traffic through a loudspeaker helped anything.) You could also take rescue missions, airlifting injured Sim citizens to the roof of a nearby hospital (if your city had no hospitals, that was your own damn fault.)
Despite all that, SimCopter has not aged well. This game was among the first generation of 3D games out there – back in the mid-90s, when having a 3D character model consisting of ten polygons counted as a great achievement. Even by those standards, though, SimCopter looks pretty miserable. The buildings are essentially giant shoeboxes, and the people are absolute monstrosities. It says a lot about the graphical advances of the period from 1995 to 2000 that Maxis went from this to The Sims at the end of that decade.
Yes, those are people. The pixel blurs on the right are dogs.
It’s not fair to dump on a game just because it wasn’t ahead of its time, though, and SimCopter was a lot of fun in 1996, terrible graphics aside. For all I know, the designers couldn’t do much in that area because they had to put all their resources towards the whole customization deal that was the main selling point of SimCopter.
One nice thing about SimCopter was all the easter eggs it contained. You could totally ignore your moral and ethical duties as a rescue pilot and throw people out of your helicopter while you hovered hundreds of feet over your city. This game also lets you fly over to an air force base (assuming your SimCity 2000 city file had built one) and get into an Apache, which could shoot missiles with which you could destroy your entire city. And if your city had a nuclear power plant, you could have a lot of fun.
Or you could play the game normally, but where’s the fun in that?
So, is it worth it to bother digging up SimCopter? Unless you have a copy of SimCity 2000 installed, I’d say no, absolutely not. I certainly can’t recommend it to people who are purely into simulation games of the usual SimCity type, because this game, unlike those, is a pretty mindless action title, sharing only the franchise name. And as far as mindless action games go, both this title and Streets of SimCity (which I never owned but from what I have seen is pretty much the same idea, only with cars instead of helicopters) were outclassed in almost every way by urban sandbox games like GTA III, so the only remaining appeal to these games is their customizability (?) The point is, these games are garbage, but they’re good garbage. And that makes all the difference.
Everything is bad for you 