Choplifter!

The Good
Choplifter features engaging music, colorful and exciting environments, fast and challenging gameplay, and a whole lot of stress! Your goal is to pass over enemy territory, blow open a base with your machine gun, and airlift escaped POWs back to your base. The first level is a desert battleground, the second an upland mountain region, the third is at sea (where you land on battleships and have subs firing on you), and the fourth features a horrible cave with stalactites and stalagmites looming all around. Suffice to say I never made it past this level but from what I have read it was the last one.

The Bad
I owned this game as a kid but rarely played it. It was more an ordeal than a fun experience. When you land your helicopter to rescue hostages, you will crush and kill them if you don't land beside rather than on them. Machine gun fire is hard to spot (being a pixel or two large), enemy planes and missiles come flying at you at great speed with barely any warning -- this game is a real nightmare, highly stressful, and not at all addictive.

The Bottom Line
A challenging and marginally-rewarding action game from 1986. I'll be happy to live a thousand years and never play this dreadful cartridge again.

The Good
Choplifter! is an addictive action game by Broderbund Software, the same company responsible for a dozen Carmen Sandiego games. Some people argue that Dan Gorlin, the programmer of the game, was influenced by the Iranian Hostage Crisis a year earlier where Iranians took Americans hostage inside an US embassy. The programmer himself denies this, and understandably so. While there are indeed hostages, they are not US diplomats, and they are hidden away in cottages that need to be emptied, all the while dealing with enemies such as tank

I first played Choplifter! on the Apple II at school, and we were awarded a game if we were good little boys and girls. The game was later ported to other systems, with varying degrees of success. The VIC-20 version was published by Creative Software, who were also responsible for publishing other addictive Brøderbund titles such as Apple Panic and Serpentine.

I think Creative did a great job at this conversion, and they have added some nice touches to the game. You don't have to bomb cottages first, then set your chopper down so that they can get on board. You just set it down and they will come out straight away. Having played other versions of the game, I didn't know this so I spent a bit of time figuring this out. I like the warning sound the game makes just seconds before a jet appears on screen. There is actually an enemy unique to this version: what looks like a grenade with a propeller following you wherever you go. This enemy adds challenge to the game, and the only way you can get past it is to destroy it.

I was impressed by the visuals, starting from the title screen where a bubble writes each character on the screen, and when you press the fire button, a 3D object forms the circle and text inside the circle appears. During the game, the enemies are well designed and have good animations, especially the explosions. Unlike other conversions, everything is in one color. The way you can press [Return] to change the color of the sprites/text is pretty neat, and you can hold down the key if you want to enjoy a light show. Personally, I like everything white, since it is easy on your eyes.

The sound effects are quite basic, but this is how games were like back in the day. There is no fancy background music like in future versions of the game. The majority of sound effects come from your own chopper. I also like the high beep it produces when an hostage gets on board the chopper.

Choplifter! is the type of game that can be replayed, to see if you can get more hostages than you did in the last game you played. I managed to rescue 57 hostages. There are actually 64 hostages in total, so there is always room for improvement.

The Bad
The only thing missing from the game is the ending. If you manage to rescue all 64 hostages, the title screen appears again. Some type of “Congratulations” would not have hurt.

The Bottom Line
Choplifter! was a huge hit at the time that it spawned numerous sequels and unofficial clones for systems that never had an official conversion. The VIC-20 version, along with the Commodre 64 and Apple II versions, is what I like to call The First Editions. These versions were developed in the early Eighties and had quite basic gameplay. Strangely unlike most computer games, this one was later converted to arcade, which in turn, was converted to the next-gen systems. These versions had nice background music and fantastic backdrops.

There is no definite version of the game, and whatever system you had back in the Eighties, you can be sure that Choplifter! was available for it.

The Good
While you must destroy and kill in self-defence, this game is about rescuing i.e saving lives and I think one feels more like a medic than an airforce pilot(your little pilot wears a red shirt, while the little POWs wear blue). It requires a lot of precision to control the chopper, dodge the enemy, land to take on passengers and avoid shooting POWs. Sega's arcade remake of Dan Gorlin's original has great haunting music giving the gameplay a sense of desperation (I'm not sure if the composer has been confirmed, but my guess is that it was Hiroshi Miyauchi-Kawaguchi for its resemblance to HangOn's music). I like the four stages i.e the scenes/backgrounds, first the desert, the ocean, then forest/cavern and finally the city with it's futuristic look.

The Bad
A lot of arcade games demand time, money and effort, just to past the first stage, but Choplifter is one of the most demanding. One thing I particularly didn't like was that when your chopper is shot down and lands on top of an anti-aircraft gun, the gun isn't destroyed, which I think is rather stingy of the developers. A more decent development team might have given the player a little consolation for being shot down.

The Bottom Line
A great game to watch and listen to, exciting to play, but draining. In the present day, there would be no shame in playing a home ported version and maybe using save states or altering the difficulty level.