cmcmanis@sun.uucp (Chuck McManis) (09/19/86)
I recently (yesterday) purchased the Amiga program "Super Huey". This
is a helicopter flight simulator. Following is a sort of mini review
of the program :
Super Huey is a helicopter flight simulator. The Amiga display consists
of the forward view from the cockpit and two "floor" windows. Instruments
include engine RPM, rotor RPM, altitude, speed, horizon (not sure how
this one is supposed to work), engine temperature, manifold pressure,
pitch and autotorque indicators, and a few less interesting ones. The
view from the cockpit consists of a flat land area, and a horizon with
mountains on it. (Not at all unlike the Skyfox universe) Unfortunately
the "environment" is the weakest part of this game. Controls consist
of the mouse for actual helicopter control, and the function keys for
things like engine start and stop, weapons, and the rotor clutch.
There are four "missions" available. These are flight school, explore,
rescue, and combat. Flight school, is simply a preprogrammed flight
around the base, the onboard flight computer screen asks you to do
something (like hover at 500') and then gives you directions on how
to accomplish that. After flying through the paces you have a reasonable
feel for how to control the helicopter. You are then ready for "Explore".
Which is, as you might expect, a practice mode. In this mission you can
fly around (without help from the computer) and get a general feel for
take offs and landing. You can also use the compass and homing beacons
to practice going to and from your base. After exploring the desolate
landscape for a while, you can move on to the "rescue" mission. This
mission gives you a purpose, to fly out to a band of stranded military
personnel and pick them up. They have with them a beacon which guides
you to the approximate area that they are located and when they see
you they will shoot up a flare. (It looks sort of like an uprooted
tree) This is good practice for straight an level flight and helps
develop your landing ability. I saw the flare but have yet to see
the people I am supposed to rescue. The last mission is "combat"
where you can use rockets and machine guns to shoot down 32 enemy
helicopters that only attack from the front. Like everything else
in the scenery they are only one color.
The good points are that the helicopter simulation part is fairly
well done. They have thought of an ingenious way of using the mouse
to control both the collective (throttle and pitch) and cyclic (
rotor and tail-rotor control) controls into one unit. The flights
are relatively easy to control and the instruments are all pretty
much functional. If you were wondering how one flys a helicopter this
might be the thing for you. The sound is also ok, although not up to
the standards of Mean-18 it does correlate well with the activity that
is going on.
The bad points are that the scenery is totally worthless, and
the missions are pretty poor also. The scenery consists to trees,
radar stations and various buildings but they are simple one color
hand drawn representations. The land is also one color and the mountains
another. In all I would estimate there are only four colors used for
the "world" outside your cockpit. As mentioned earlier the flares from
the stranded party looked like upside down trees. I suspect that this
condition may be a result of porting it from the atari or limiting
it to 2 bitplanes to save memory. I have not checked how much free
memory is available when the game is running. The enemy helicopters
are also pretty poor, with no attempt at animating any aspect of them.
There are 4 views (left, right, front, back) that are varied according
to the state they are in. (They also jump from a side view to a front
view) What all of this indicates is that there is no attempt being
made by the program to do any sort of three dimensional projecting of
other pieces. They are all flat, which means that no matter how you
approach a tree it looks the same.
On a scale of 10 I give it a 5, flying the helicopter can be fun
but nothing outside the cockpit will hold your interest.
[These are definitely my own opinions ]
--
--Chuck McManis
uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis BIX: cmcmanis ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com
These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.