RotorSim needs a job generator

An hour after firing up RotorSim, Immaculate Lift’s SimCopter-reminiscent chopper game, for the first time, the campaign progress bar is a third full, and I’m wondering whether I’ll have seen all there is to see by lunchtime. While I don’t expect weeks of entertainment from a six quid offering, a day or two of diversion would be nice.

Friendly yet flavoursome aerodynamics… a choice of three flyables… short but entertaining scripted sorties book-ended with humour-flecked briefings… a demo version… Steam’s latest whirlybird game has a clutch of admirable traits. What it doesn’t appear to have is much in the way of longevity, or the kind of roadmap that turns fence-sitters into wallet-delvers.

An endless mode with randomly generated jobs and weather, a first-person HUD view, and a slightly enlarged map, would all be high on my RotorSim wishlist.

While I’m wishing for chopper-related things I’ll probably never get, could whoever owns the rights to SAR 4 (aka Search & Rescue: Coastal Heroes) arrange a cheap re-release, please? The fact that this under-rated 2002 heli sim was distributed by Just Flight in the UK, speaks volumes about the calibre of its FMs.

Several rungs above RotorSim on the dangling, spume-dampened realism ladder, it came with cockpit-equipped Sea Kings, Dolphins, and BK-117s, equipped with working spotlights and hoists (rescue baskets, slings and litters could be attached to hoists), and laden with deployable medics, swimmers, and stretcher teams. I’m not sure it simmed VRS, but flame-outs, autorotation, and ground effect were modelled.

Although more recent search and rescue games offer superior visuals, titles like Helicopter Simulator 2014 don’t feel half as simmy as SAR4.

3 Comments

  1. Once again Dr Stone sir, as I think of a particular game in my games library and get the urge to play again, great minds think alike and you’re literally doing it too, uncanny! Agreed, SAR4 is an absolute classic and deserves a Steam release to bring it out of abandonware. Allan Kirkeby, Marcin Kalicinski and everyone on the team did an amazing job. I can’t believe it’s been 23 years since they did it, or is it 25 years (including dev time) now? I like what they did on Vietnam MedEvac too.

    PS a tip for new players: Once installed, SAR4 plays best on modern PC’s with Dege’s dgVoodoo wrapper https://dege.freeweb.hu/dgVoodoo2/dgVoodoo2/

    Btw I can’t understand why some PC gamers complain about being CD-ROM drive-less in their new PC’s when external USB CD/DVD/BluRay drives have been available for years. It’s as if they didn’t know they exist or something, quite odd. Obviously ISO images are preferable, but for one’s original (dusty but trusty) boxed games a cheap external USB DVD drive is useful.

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