Inspired by Ray Barnholt's Low Poly Town 24/7 youtube stream of A-Train spectator modes w/ cool classic sim game music (https://www.youtube.com/@lowpolytown), I've been digging into SimCopter again! I've been messing with windows 95 emulation in PCEM lately, playing through some old shareware discs and checking out a lot of stuff I legit haven't touched in easily 30 years. It's very surreal to poke around a demo disk that i last touched when I was 7 years old and remember an obscure mechanic the game never explains out of nowhere!
Anyway I messed with SimCopter for a bit and it was an absolute treat. It ran great on the emulated Voodoo2 card I had in it, and pretty much was as good as I remembered. That said, "ran great" for SimCopter historically is like... 15 fps or so? So once the nostalgia wore off and I was like, yeah no there's something worth digging back into here, I grabbed the SimCopterX fan patches and fired it up in widescreen on native windows 10. It runs way better, and it's a lot more stable (tho def cap the FPS at 60 with something external or the game will crash frequently).
The music is amazing, and I forgot all about the on-air DJs and fake ads and news stories and stuff. It's the sort of thing where I couldn't remember any of them off the top of my head, but as soon as one started playing, the whole script of it flew to the front of my mind. They're corny, but in a kinda-wholesome sort of way that's easy to laugh along with. If Car Talk is the S-Tier corny dad humor, this is some solid A-B tier stuff.
The best though is the way the game sort of imagines this whole ecosystem where helicopter pilots are both incredibly rare, as you are apparently the only one in the city, but so important and influential that ads for something as ubiquitous as coffee have to be specifically tailored to cater to the needs and desires of a modern helicopter pilot. When you do enough missions to level up to a harder city with more-difficult missions, an 8-person brass marching band in full regalia is there to greet you, beneath a shower of fireworks to celebrate your promotion.
I'm going to keep playing for a while and collect my thoughts into something more concrete, but it's been really refreshing revisiting this. It's a sim that doesn't bother with complicated flight mechanics like at all, but has tons of interesting interactions and complications that crop up. I can't imagine something as simple as this getting sold as a flight sim of any flavor today, but that's not to say simple is bad - I think it's a shame that more flight games aren't made with the kind of intuitive and responsive controls that SimCopter was using in '96. Not only is it quick to pick up, they managed to make a flight model that feels reasonably precise and powerful using only your keyboard for control.
I love a complex flight sim, but I can barely enjoy playing the new MS Flight Sim with a gamepad, much less a keyboard.