Article 326 of comp.sys.amiga.reviews: Path: news.csos.orst.edu!gaia.ucs.orst.edu!umn.edu!news-feed-2.peachnet.edu!darwin.sura.net!math.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: p.a.dale@ss1.bath.ac.uk (Paul Dale) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Gunship 2000, version 3.01 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games Date: 14 Jul 1993 15:01:50 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 305 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Approved: barrett@math.uh.edu Distribution: world Message-ID: <22174u$1p0@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: p.a.dale@ss1.bath.ac.uk (Paul Dale) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: game, simulation, helicopter, commercial PRODUCT NAME Gunship 2000 version 3.01 BRIEF DESCRIPTION Gunship 2000 is a combat helicopter flight simulation. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Microprose Address: Unit 1, Hampton Rd. Industrial Estate, Tetbury, Gloucestershire GL6 8LD England Telephone: +44 666 504326 LIST PRICE 34.99 pounds Sterling. Mailorder price is 22.99. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE 1 MB RAM required for floppy systems. 1.5 MB RAM required if you have a hard drive. Works on A500(+), A600, A1200, A2000, A2500, A3000. No mention of the 4000 :-( SOFTWARE None mentioned in the documentation. COPY PROTECTION "Look up in the manual" copy protection, which I find acceptable. You have to look up a number matching another number next to a flight patch which is found in the given range of pages in the manual. You have to do this once per playing session. Hard drive installable. The game auto-saves onto the master disk, so DO NOT USE THE ORIGINAL DISK! MACHINE USED FOR TESTING A1200, 2 MB chip, 2 MB 32 bit fast, 68881 (MBX1200z), 85 MB internal IDE drive. WB 3.0 Phillips 8833 monitor, external floppy. KONIX analogue stick and mouse. OVERVIEW Gunship 2000 ("GS2000") is primarily a helicopter flight simulator in the same kind of way you might describe Birds of Prey as a aircraft flight simulator. There is what seems to be a good flight model for helicopters (note that I am not a pilot for real :-), and a good bit of blasting tacked on. GAMEPLAY The gameplay is overall very good: much better than any other similarly pitched combat/flight simulator I have played (which include Birds of Prey, B 17, Reach for the Skies). * Main Selection Screen This allows you to choose mission types, theatre of operations (currently "Gulf" or "Western Europe" but more are promised), pilot/flight, and to go on to the briefing. Selection is by hotspots in an animated graphic (the guy at the desk is writing :-)). * Briefing Three options here are to read the briefing notes, choose and equip a helicopter (or the entire flight, see below), or to proceed with the mission. The briefing notes detail all the important information, including wind, visibility (which should influence your weapon choice), targets, time of day, enemy activity, map locations and map, etc. Most of this is accessible in some form during flight. Wind direction is an exception and can be important if it is strong, so take note. * Training The start point is as a novice combat helicopter pilot and a choice of training missions or single helicopter missions. Training is for you to learn how to fly, to use all the helicopter systems, and develop tactics with no risk (and no points). The training missions are the same as the real thing except you take no damage when hit. With all the flying aids switched on, the only way to "die" is to hit the ocean, and even then you haven't lost your pilot. * Combat So having got the hang of blasting numerous targets in training, you will take on the real world using a limited range of helicopters (some are for higher ranks only) and weaponry. The missions are flown from land bases or an assault ship against primary and secondary targets which range from fixed placements and airfields to mobile recon groups or columns of T-72s. The number of different land/sea/air types you come across is large and includes MIGs, SU-27s, HINDS, patrol boats, numerous tank and other vehicle types, SAMs, infantry, oil refineries (large explosions!), oil rigs, mosques, advertising hoardings.... This is just a cross-section from the Gulf Theatre. When in flight, most of your tactical planning will be done on your in-flight map (F10) which has a strategic and operational level (a zoom). All identified targets show up as well as bases, buildings, etc. It's here you can set up to three waypoints to aid your in-flight navigation (accessible through at least three different displays during flight). When on this screen, action is paused so you can take your time in planning. This is very important when commanding a flight. Successful missions bring promotions, medals, and points (not necessarily the first two :-)). Gaining sufficient points results in the offer of a commission to lead a flight of 5 helicopters. You can turn this down, but why miss out? Commanding a flight gives you two more options in the flight selection screen, FLIGHT and CAMPAIGN. These are essentially the same but the campaign is linked sorties rather than one-offs. Now you have four other guys who you have to assign helicopters and weapon loads according to the task in hand. You can split the flight into light and heavy sections to perform different tasks. The range of tasks now includes search and rescue, cargo drops and squad drops/pick-ups. Once all armed and ready, you are on the pad where you access you tactical map and start giving individual flight plans. On the higher level map, you can also tell each flight member what height and speed to fly at and whether they are free to engage the enemy or not (weapons are either free or held). Other options are to disengage, regroup, land, return to base, fly the indicated flight plan or drop cargo. The tactical map is the guts of the game in a lot of respects, as here is where you plan all your tactics and execution. Timing is important as is planning flight paths and protecting the vulnerable members of the flight. You must always keep your objectives in mind (there's a summary on the strategic map) and keep the other flight members in tight control. For key jobs, you often have to assume responsibility and go in yourself, but you could command from the rear. The computer AI for your buddies seems good with sensible weapon selection (helped of course by your choosing the load they carry) and a downright enthusiasm for taking out targets (sometimes too enthusiastic). The flight is generally every bit as efficient as you are and takes comparable damage. Often flight members are up for more medals and promotions than you are. Seeing a well laid plan come to fruition and hearing the digitised "Primary objective confirmed" from the back seat is very satisfying. GRAPHICS AND SOUND The detail in the game is very good, certainly compared to other similar style games. There is a lot of terrain including roads through canyons, pylons down roads, camels, oases, etc. Visibility can be variable and is well reflected: it is genuinely more difficult to see when visibility is bad through the use of different palettes. Although some hills look more like pyramids, there is a good feeling of texture to the land, and you do feel like you're skimming along at an unhealthy rate very close to the ground. The detail and speed of moving objects is very good as well. On my Amiga 1200 at 100 feet doing 140 knots, it seems plenty fast enough and not as jerky as Birds Of Prey on an Amiga 500. A friend reports that an unaccelerated A2000 handles the game on full detail well (and he has Red Baron). On an A3000, I expect it to be a dream. Still pictures within the game are well drawn but nothing really spectacular. For those who know English cricket, the guy who is there to comment on your mission afterwards is a doppleganger of Robin Smith. His wit isn't up to much. There is quite a lot of digitised speech with your counter measures/weapons buddy pointing out targets and missiles. A minor gripe is that, apart from missiles or when you lose your optics, it is obvious there is a target and "target left/target right/target confirmed/missile left/right" becomes hard, fast and distracting. Another nice touch is the missile explosions. Even if you don't get hit, the explosion can be heard according to how close it is and will even shake the 'copter so you can often be fooled into thinking you have been hit when you haven't. If the guy in the back doesn't scream "We're hit! We're hit!" and damage show on the panel then you're OK. Other sound effects are for the engine, rotors (yes there is engine noise and the "thuwp" of rotors), explosions, rocket launches, cannons, stirring selection screen music plus a few other tunes. FLIGHT MODEL AND WEAPONS I have never even flown in a real helicopter let alone piloted one, so I really can't say how accurate the model is compared to the real thing. It does feel true, and the interaction between the collective and stick seems very realistic and tricky to handle. Wind is noticeable and a real factor. Loss of stabilising influences, like (say) your tail :-), has a real and dramatic effect (you spin round continuously :-)). Weapon systems recoil which has a subtle effect in that it slows your forward motion. At high speed, this has the effect of making you gain height as the nose comes up. Generally, firing weapons is OK except for rocket pods which need to be aimed in a straight line. This involves fancy flying because if you pull up at 140 knots to fire, you gain a lot of height very quickly and slow to a crawl. In this position you are a sitting duck, so only use the M series pods for turkey shoots. The array of weaponry is helicopter dependent; and as the available helicopter is rank dependent, you only get the really good "fire and forget" stuff later on. In fact, the low rank missions are the real trial since with better helicopters, weapons and more experience the later flights are easier in many respects. DOCUMENTATION The manual is what most have come to expect from Microprose these days. It is clear, reasonably well written and very full of information. Unfortunately, the manual skimps a bit in certain areas, like what the detail levels mean or exactly what is expected for certain mission types. If you want the armour for a T-72 then you're fine, but that isn't too much help. LIKES AND DISLIKES The worst element is the very dodgy mouse handling for certain screens. From what I have found out from others and experience is that accelerated machines, that is anything other than a 68000, has a juddery mouse problem. This makes selection very tiresome, especially on the helicopter/munitions screen. The keyboard alternatives don't seem to work fully as advertised either. Shoddy work. In flight, I haven't had any control problems except having to zero my analogue by taking it to the map screens and correcting the drift on the detailed map (tactical) where you can scroll around. Again a bit shoddy. The game does also guru on my A1200 for an unknown reason. I've disabled the cache to no effect (doesn't cure the mouse problem either). I haven't tried using the ECS chipset as it boots fine in AGA and I don't see why I should. The guru frequency is low (about once per day) but seems to only occur during flight which is annoying. Another gripe is the leaving out of the recording feature, by which you could record and play back missions. Reach for the Skies does this without slowing, so why not GS2000 on my nippy A1200? If it did adversely affect speed I could turn down the detail or not use the feature or suffer a marginally worse frame rate. Let me choose though!! I infer a lack of time to do the full job. I don't believe a 386 PC is any more capable. My main like is the overall quality of the graphics, sound, gameplay and flight model. This is an extremely addictive game to play and certainly one of the best I have played. Apart from the niggles above this is one superb offering and will undoubtedly set a standard to be followed. I've not fully described all the features (check out the README file!) but there is plenty to hook you and keep you going. For seat-of-the-pants flying and blasting action, Gunship 2000 is going to be hard to beat. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS Compared to Birds of Prey, B17 or Reach for the Skies, GS2000 wins hands down. This is one excellent game. BUGS Dodgy mouse, keyboard, analogue stick handling (see DISLIKES). No mouse or keyboard problem on a A2000 though (and presumably a A500). Undiagnosed guru on A1200; none reported on an A2000. CONCLUSIONS A tremendous game packed with very high quality gameplay, graphics, sound. If you like action and flight simulators, this is a very good game to buy. COPYRIGHT NOTICE Copyright 1993 Paul Anthony David Merlin Alexander Dale. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to distribute this review by any means to any person(s) under the conditions that no profit be made or the content changed without the author's permission (except Dan Barrett :-). --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews Article 327 of comp.sys.amiga.reviews: Path: news.csos.orst.edu!flop.ENGR.ORST.EDU!ogicse!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!pirates.cs.swt.edu!swrinde!menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: p.a.dale@gdr.bath.ac.uk (Paul Dale) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: Re: REVIEW: Gunship 2000, version 3.01 Keywords: game, simulation, helicopter, commercial, followup Message-ID: <223ts4$ddm@menudo.uh.edu> Date: 15 Jul 93 15:41:56 GMT Article-I.D.: menudo.223ts4$ddm Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Reply-To: p.a.dale@gdr.bath.ac.uk (Paul Dale) Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games Distribution: world Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 22 Approved: barrett@math.uh.edu NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu I've had a few responses to my review, both of which state that mouse accelerators are responsible for the juddery mouse problem. Disabling them seems to cure things. [MODERATOR'S NOTE: This information will be added to the archived copy of the original review, available on our ftp site math.uh.edu. - Dan] Paul Dale BUCS, Bath University, Claverton Down, Bath, Avon. BA2 7AY e-mail: P.A.Dale@uk.ac.bath tel: (0225) 826215 fax: 0225 826176 --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews Article 332 of comp.sys.amiga.reviews: Path: news.csos.orst.edu!flop.ENGR.ORST.EDU!rutgers!uhog.mit.edu!wupost!howland.reston.ans.net!spool.mu.edu!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: kaiser@ira.uka.de (Michael Kaiser) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: Re: REVIEW: Gunship 2000, versio 3.01 Keywords: game, simulation, helicopter, commercial, followup Message-ID: <231cgn$frf@menudo.uh.edu> Date: 26 Jul 93 19:49:43 GMT Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Reply-To: kaiser@ira.uka.de (Michael Kaiser) Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 31 Approved: barrett@math.uh.edu NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu [MODERATOR'S NOTE: This is a followup to Paul Dale's review of 14 July 1993. With Paul's permission, this information has been added to the archived copy of the original review, available on our ftp site math.uh.edu. - Dan] This is a followup to the review of Gunship 2000 ("GS2000"). The reviewer is right that the game won't work on the A4000 if you follow the normal installation procedure. In particular, it refuses to go beyond the mission specification and the setup/code protection to the cockpit screen. However, it does work when started from the GS2000 disks. One possibility I discovered was to install the game on the hard drive and boot the A4000 with a copy of the first game disk. Then "cd" to the game directory on the hard drive, start GS2000, and voila: everything runs fine. BTW - this is one brillant game. A little violent, but otherwise really worth buying. regards, Michael kaiser@ira.uka.de --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews Article 333 of comp.sys.amiga.reviews: Path: news.csos.orst.edu!flop.ENGR.ORST.EDU!rutgers!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!usc!cs.utexas.edu!pirates.cs.swt.edu!swrinde!menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: koren@fc.hp.com (Steve Koren) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Gunship 2000 Keywords: game, simulation, helicopter, commercial Message-ID: <238o27$fgu@menudo.uh.edu> Date: 29 Jul 93 14:49:43 GMT Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Reply-To: koren@fc.hp.com (Steve Koren) Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 320 Approved: barrett@math.uh.edu NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu PRODUCT NAME Gunship 2000 (henceforth, "GS2K") BRIEF DESCRIPTION GS2K is helicopter combat simulator by MicroProse. If you are at all a flight simulator fan, get this game. 'Nuff said. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Microprose Address: Unit 1 Hampton Road Industrial Estate Tetbury, Glos. GL8 8LD UK LIST PRICE $50 (US). Mail order prices are cheaper. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS 1 MB RAM if run from floppies. 1.5 MB RAM if run from a hard drive. (I recommend this because the game comes on 4 floppies.) COPY PROTECTION GS2K is hard disk installable and protected via keyword lookup in the manual. You only have to do this once, and it is quite tolerable. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING The game was tested on an Amiga 4000 running AmigaDOS 3.0 with 18 MB of RAM. INSTALLATION AND SYSTEM FRIENDLINESS Microprose did not use the standard AmigaDOS Installer utility, but made their own. Theirs offers me some strange things, such as the choice of installing the software on my tape drive, but otherwise works OK. The game supports an analog joystick, which is quite preferable to keyboard or digital joystick control. GS2K multitasks fairly well, except that it rather rudely insists on closing down your Workbench screen before it loads. If you have other workspaces open or have a hotkey to instantiate one, these will work fine after the game is loaded. In fact, I have GS2K running right now as I type this review into Emacs, with the only noticeable effect being the repetitious music. It helps to lower the task priority of the game though. THE GAME There are several phases to GS2K. Initially, you are a novice pilot who must complete flight training before being qualified to fly combat missions. In flight training, you are supposed to learn the to fly the helicopter (or "copter"), operations of the weapons systems, etc. Enemy fire has no effect on your helicopter in this mode. After training, you are qualified for combat ops. There are 8 total helicopters in the game which you can fly: the AH-64A Apache, The AH-64B Longbow Apache, the AH-1W SuperCobra, the AH-66A Comanche (2 versions), the OH-58D Kiowa Scout, the UH-60K Blackhawk, and the AH-6D Defender. However, you can't fly the better equipment until you prove yourself in combat. Each helicopter has its own selection of weapons, and picking the right copter for the job can be important. Each copter has its own features and cockpit layout (the cockpits look quite nice). After flying a certain number of single-helicopter operations, you can graduate to controlling a flight of 5 copters, divided into a heavy section of 3, and a light section of 2. There is a primary and a secondary objective to each mission, and you can send one section after the primary and one after the secondary, send both sections to either objective, or any other combination. You have some limited control over the individual helicopters; you can give them destinations, and commands such as "hold position", "land", "disengage from combat", "rejoin formation", etc. They also have some degree of independence: they will attack targets of opportunity or defend themselves against aggression. You can review the systems status of each copter, including damage, remaining weapons, remaining fuel, and cargo. This can be important when deciding which member of a flight to send into a dangerous situation, or whether to send a critically wounded flight member back to base early. By controlling the paths of helicopters, you can use terrain as a shield when approaching a combat area. You can use tactics such as safely landing your gas-guzzling and cargo-laden Blackhawk helicopters behind the shelter of a hill while your Apache Gunships sweep the landing zone to eliminate any opposition. Scouts can be used to supply remote target designation for hidden gunship. During combat, you can jump to an outside view of any helicopter to see what it is doing. You can take an active part in combat operations in your helicopter, or just fly in to a spot near the battle, park safely behind a hill, and tell your other flight members what to do. Other flight members will fill you in on their actions, such as "I'm engaging target", or "Primary objective sighted". Your flight members all have skill levels, and loosing one in combat gets you a new rookie to train from scratch. Experienced pilots are tolerably but not exceptionally intelligent. They are, however, almost too brave in the face of insurmountable odds. COMBAT Combat is quite well done. Weapons are modeled well, both yours and the enemies. You are able to fight with better weapons systems as you gain combat experience. These can make a critical difference in the battle: getting good fire-and-forget weapons instead of helicopter-guided ones can tilt the table in your favor. Proper use of terrain is a must. If you simply charge into battle with an armored unit, guns blazing, you are not likely to last very long, especially with enemy skill set high. Instead, you must plan your attack carefully. One tactic is to hover behind some covering terrain such as a hillside or ridge, pop up over the top, launch a weapon, and dive as soon as the weapon has hit. This limits your exposure to hostile fire. This situation is, however, complicated by the fact that the bad guys will notice you and shoot back. With low skill opponents, it might take them 10 or more seconds to shoot back. With highly skilled opponents, they will have their shots off as quickly as you do. Thus, to avoid being hit you must dive behind cover early, meaning your shot was not guided in and is likely to miss its target. Since ordinance is quite limited, this can be a major problem. Other problems involve getting close enough for a targeting solution - often you must fly between two hills with no protection from the terrain, making you a sitting duck for SAMs or AA fire. In this situation it is tempting to fly straight for the things which are shooting at you, but this is usually not wise. Your copilot helps out by calling out things like "incoming right!", or "target left!". Before a crash he will also say, "We're going in!" Also, stereo sound effects are supported, so you can often hear which direction a missile is coming from even before you see it. There are a wealth of little details in combat taken care of which make the game seem much more realistic. For some examples: - Speed of various missiles is modeled accurately. If you fire a fast weapon, it will get there sooner, thus giving you more time to hide before incoming weapons can reach you. Even your cannon rounds take a little time to travel a kilometer and a half. - Bad guys turn to face their current target. On the weapons camera, I once watched a SAM unit turn to face my wingman who was a little distance away, then turn again 50 degrees to face me and fire. Often you can even tell when they have a weapon loaded. - Sometimes if you are hovering just peeking over a hill, the bad guys won't pick you up on radar. However, if you fire and don't destroy them, they will immediately turn to the direction your shot came from to look for you, and then fire. This is the kind of simple feature that adds realism but is missing from many other games. - If an incoming missile misses you, it will often detonate when it hits a hill or ridge in front of or behind you, making a nice explosion and sending fragments flying. If it is close, it will also shake up your helicopter a bit. It is a nice effect. - If you shoot down a helicopter, its wreckage will fall down and you can go fly by it later :-) The set of possible missions is quite large. There are various kinds of enemy tank or armored groups to destroy. There are ground targets such as oil storage sheds, refineries, ammo depots, parked aircraft, trains, etc. There missions to rescue downed pilots, or drop off supplies or troops into a battle zone. If your objective is capable of moving, it probably _has_ moved since you left base, and you must go search for it. Fuel can become a problem in this case, especially for heavy helicopters such as the Blackhawk. There are sometimes "FARP" (Forward Aiming and Refueling Points) available, but careful fuel management is necessary. Most weapons systems are, IMHO, a bit too accurate - they never are duds and they never seem to miss (assuming they have guidance all the way into the target - they _do_ miss otherwise). Also, many helicopters are equipped with a weapon which a friend of mine aptly calls "The Gun of God". The cannon seems capable of destroying almost anything with a single 20 round burst, and it _never_ misses. (This is only true of the cannon on the better copters. The smaller guns aren't quite that effective). There are very few targets which can withstand more than one burst from this cannon. TERRAIN The maps seem to be dynamically generated for each mission (or at least I have not seen the same map twice in over 30 missions). Terrain features are quite varied, and include various hills, canyons, rivers, trenches, buildings, etc. There are lots of little details such as animals, billboards, bridges, and many other things. The terrain uses polygon mountains. Often there is a road down the middle of a wall of mountains on each side, and these are great fun to fly down to use as cover. In the European theater, there are railroad tunnels which you can fly through (carefully!). There are railroads complete with signals, highways, houses, churches, airports, etc. In fact, just exploring can be a good deal of fun. In spite of all this detail, the game runs superbly fast. Even with 3 or 4 other helicopters in view, several hills, half a dozen enemy units, and a few houses and runways, the frame rate is still incredibly fast. Although I have not tried the game on a slower system, I suspect it will run just fine on a 68020, and possibly even a 68000. In fact, the response is so quick that I think they could have done a 640x400 version for the A4000 and possibly the A1200. With the higher graphics bandwidth of those machines, it should easily be possible. Right now we don't see such things since they want to run on low end systems as well; but once the base-line system moves up to the A1200, perhaps we'll see more of this sort of thing. FLIGHT MODEL The flight model has its strong and weak points. It models the interaction of the collective, aircraft orientation, etc., fairly well. Pitching up to slow down will often leave you exposed 600 feet higher unless you simultaneously back off on the collective control. Slowing rapidly without gaining altitude with the realistic flight mode is a trick which must be mastered. In theory, the game claims to support rotor detachment and auto-rotation, but I've never been able to accomplish this without crashing. On the other hand, there are many problems with the flight model. The speed limit (135 knots for most helicopters) is artificially "hard". Acceleration seems too rapid. You can drop like a rock from 1000 feet, then increase collective and be in a hover almost instantaneously - a feat which, even if it were possible, would result in the damage or destruction of a real helicopter. (In other words, it doesn't model momentum.) The relationship between pitch and collective is not taken into account below a certain speed - this makes slow speed maneuvering _much_ easier, but is a bit unrealistic. Taking off with heavy loads doesn't seem any harder than with light loads, and the helicopter seems just as maneuverable. It is also artificially easy to hover or maintain a perfectly level flight. In many respects, the helicopter in ArmourGeddon actually had a more realistic flight model, although GS2K's does simplify gameplay; for example, it was _really_ hard to hover well in the ArmourGeddon helicopter. Also, GS2K does not let you pitch or roll beyond a certain amount. Even with all these problems, however, it's likely that only hardcore flight-sim fanatics would appreciate a model more realistic than GS2K has. (There is also an even easier model available in the game, in which, for example, slowing down without adjusting collective doesn't make you gain altitude.) DAMAGE The damage system is weak. There are a dozen or so systems that can go wrong with your helicopter: things like rotor damage, fuel leaks, weapons systems failure, etc. However, a hit by an enemy missile usually just results in failure of a single system. Thus, even after being hit by 5 or 6 SAMs, you can still be flying. I have trouble imagining a helicopter ("collection of parts flying in close formation") surviving even one moderate sized SAM, so this stretches the imagination a little. I have taken to counting a mission as a "success" if I get hit 0 or 1 times, and a failure otherwise, but the game is quite lenient here. I realize that for novice players this is a nice feature, but it would be even nicer if experienced players could turn on a realistic battle damage mode. There is also an "auto-hover" mode which puts you in a nice, level hover, but I consider that the same as cheating. :-) SOUND General use of sound was discussed above. Sound quality is not bad, but it is not nearly in the same league as the incredible sound in Birds of Prey, for example. The rotor sample is good enough to avoid being overly annoying, but it could be better. The engine sound suffers from a case of "SoundBlasterism", sounding FM-synthesized instead of being a nice sampled turbine engine. The sounds of explosions scale aptly with their distance from you, as do sounds of other helicopters and any missiles in the vicinity. Stereo is supported; you can tell whether something is to the left, right, or fore/aft by the location of the sound. The sound could be better. It could also be a lot worse. Unfortunately, the game seems rather insistent about turning on the Amiga's lowpass filter. This is annoying. However, you can start a task before hand which, on the press of a hotkey, invokes the program to turn the filter back off. Then you can press this key right before you enter the cockpit, to get around the game which has just turned the filter on. This improves the sound quality. BUGS The game seems to have few bugs. There is an annoying mouse handling bug in the screen in which you pick weapons for the mission. This can supposedly be fixed by killing any processes which act as mouse accelerators before running the game. About once in 20 missions, the game will crash my system in mid-flight, which is annoying. The auto-pilot dumps collective when you turn it off, causing a sudden and usually catastrophic loss of altitude. Other that that, it seems pretty robust. CONCLUSIONS I haven't had quite this much fun playing a game since Armour Geddon. Even with its limitations such as a partially-bogus flight model, it is still a lot of fun. You must be willing to spend some time in order to get good at it - it isn't something you can master in one flight. But it should appeal to any simulation fan. Re-playability is high since maps and missions seem to be dynamically generated (or at least there is a huge number of them). You don't get bored with the same old terrain, and you have to figure out new strategies for each mission. I give this game a score of 9 out of a possible 10. Get it. Its fun. Steve Koren 303-226-4985 (evenings, weekends) koren@fc.hp.com (email) --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews