#choplifter hd

[orbitingrook]

Minecraft Crossovers

Torchlight 2

Borderlands 2

Choplifter HD

Super Meat Boy

Skyrim and Binding of Issac

The Stanley Parable

Smash Ultimate

Henry Stickmin

[griffmeistergeneral]

High Octane nonsense today on Lockdown Lottery, as we take to the skies in Choplifter HD

[listoriented]

Choplifter HD

military realism and the tyranny of remakes

Choplifter (1982) had the player fly a wobbly helicopter across a lurid purple landscape, looking for blobby white humanoids to pick up and rescue while trying to evade and gun down enemy planes and tanks. The Choplifter page on TV Tropes quotes the game’s framing narrative:

“In an international incident, the militaristic Bungeling Empire has kidnapped the 64 delegates to the United Nations Conference on Peace and Child Rearing. Exploiting an ancient treaty with the United States, you have disguised a helicopter as a sorting machine and smuggled it to a mail distribution center near the border where the hostages are being kept. An opportunity comes when one of the Bungeling's barracks suddenly catches fire, and the hostages run about frantically. As Bungeling planes and tanks approach, you rush to your chopper, seizing this brief opportunity for heroism...”

It was rather fantastical, a little ridiculous. There’s the gag of the set-up, the strange made-up place name. The game’s 8-bit visuals give you the sense that it’s maybe set on another planet. Sure, the game was made the year after the 1980 Iranian hostage fiasco – something the developer, Dan Gorlin, claimed not to have been conscious of when conceiving Choplifter’s premise – but (and perhaps this is easier to say with the distortion of time and distance) the otherworldliness of it makes it hard to now immediately connect the game with the idea that it’s commenting on, responding to or really in any way promoting the US military project.

So it’s interesting, I suppose, to consider the choices InXile – apparently in collaboration with Gorlin – made when remaking the game as Choplifter HD (2011). There’s the choice to set a lot of the scenarios in real places, having you respond to events that sound like remixes of, well, real contemporary events and lots of other contemporary military games. The first mission is prompted by: “A repressive Middle East regime has imprisoned all foreigners. As part of a UN force your mission is to fly into the chaos and rescue as many multinationals as possible. Fortunately, most of the military forces are engaged in controlling the population, so resistance should be light.” The second has you rescuing “stranded victims” from a village overrun by warlords in Indonesia, the seventh has you respond to “terrorists have taken over several buildings on our home soil.” There is, in other words, an intention to give the game an element of real-life simulatory fantasy, one that isn’t destabilised enough by, say, the surprise appearance of zombies in mission four, or the silly wink-and-nod bonus objective of having to rescue the same war reporter, “Scoop Sanderson”, over and over again, or the various missions which lack specific place-name details in their flavour text.

Additionally, we’re now accompanied by the voices of our helicopter pilot and co-pilot, who constantly cycle through a bunch of quips in full American-accented machismo trope-jargon to alert the player to the presence of enemies, such as:

“Another idiot who needs a lesson”

“oooh what a Big Gun he has”

“Truck, about to go BOOM”

“Bad guy with a bad-ass toy!”

“Jeep about to be scrap metal”

“Big-ass gun he’s obviously compensating for something”

“Boo-ya”

“Watch that jeep become junk”

“Who’s that woman I saw you with last night?” “You only saw the one?”

There’s also the look, a little jagged sure, but something approaching realism, 3D environments with details backgrounds drawn to evoke the various mission settings. You add all this up and it’s a clear intentional shift into positioning the player in the hot-seat of a contemporary American heroic power fantasy in such a way that’s meant to be cross-read into real-world events. This is the nexus of a narrative that the US and allies already sell to themselves about themselves – that they’re a global peacekeeper just stepping in to help others in times of crisis caused nebulously from nowhere, in far off places that just happen, for reasons unknown, to be tragically unstable. Given that it’s presented uncritically here and (barring some late-game injunction I never made it to) without any reference to the roles various components of western imperialism play in instigating these kinds of conflicts in the first place (CIA-backed coups, geocorporate-backed military governance and so on), it’s hard to get past the gross feeling that Choplifter HD is basically a playable propaganda leaflet.

What’s doubly weird is that, given how overt it is, none of the reviews of the game from 2011 seem to make note of this shift at all. Sure, many complain that the “comedic” pilot and co-pilot banter gets annoying quickly (agreed), or that the realist-leaning Unreal 3 engine assets don’t look that good (also agreed), or that the game is often difficult in a way that tends more toward unfairness and janky design than simply being mechanically challenging (definitely). But there’s little to say about how this remake is dressed in a tone-deaf, unselfconscious veneer of status quo American imperialism that’s much more pronounced than it ever was, ever could have been, in the 1982 Apple II original. Perhaps there was an acceptance of inevitability here about the games industry in 2011, that if you’re making a military-ish shooting game then OF COURSE it’s going to evoke these ideas of distinctly American heroism and righteousness, it’s hardly even a choice, no questions asked. Or perhaps there’s a feeling that this choice of presentation doesn’t matter, given it’s a sidescrolling arcade game, something you’re gonna play in fifteen-minute bursts, where the flavour-text for each mission makes little functional difference to the game-play.

But this was a set of choices that InXile made, regardless of whether these choices came about from a passive parroting of the hegemonic narrative, or whether they were made with certain conscious political and/or marketing intentions. Each of these choices might, in hindsight, seem like a sacrifice, given that they’ve all made the game worse – the gung-ho copter bros are unbearably irritating, the realist-aesthetic leads to a lot of visual clutter and indistinctness, and much of the flavour text is half-hearted and dull. Perhaps a more creative remake of Choplifter could have revived the original’s interesting arcade concept without making it into a bland and problematic power fantasy. I guess we’ll never know.

up next is Chroma Squad

[livefromthearcade-blog]

Choplifter HD

Another truly atrocious trailer. Who makes a trailer like this and expects it to sell their game? It doesn't even show off any zombies, which is usually the first selling point of any game that has them.

Anyway; this game is actually quite fun. It's understandably quite retro in feel (the original was released in 1982) but there's some good ideas and plenty of variety to keep you interested.

[livefromthearcade-blog]

Choplifter HD – A retro update as it should be

Game: Choplifter HD

Price: 800 MSP / £6.80

Genre: Helicopter rescue and shoot 'em up

Gameplay: The main aim of the game is to rescue hostages or civilians from dangerous situations with your helicopter and return them to your base. There's only limited capacity so you'll have to come back for the ones you leave behind.

Out to stop you are a whole army of enemies; with machine guns, anti-air guns, rocket launchers, tanks and jets amongst other things. Also hindering you are the fairly strict time-limits and you ever decreasing fuel supply, which fortunately can be replenished at you base or at fuel dumps.

It plays like a cross between a side-scroller and a twin-stick shoot 'em up, but the unique; 'save the hostages' mechanic adds something important and without it would reduce it to the level of just another generic shooter.

Visuals and Sound: It's not much of a feast for the eyes and things can often get muddied away in the scenery making enemies rather hard to spot even with the 'lock-on HUD'.

Sounds work well, particularly the full voice acting employed within the levels, which really add to the sense of atmosphere.

Like it:

Builds perfectly on the premise of the original game.

Difficult but never unfair.

Nice to be saving people for a change and not just murdering them.

Loathe it:

Hard-to-spot enemies with damaging weaponry.

No multi-player, co-op would have been awesome.

Might get a bit boring after awhile.

Worth a purchase?: This game should be held up as an example to all developers as an example of how to do a re-make of a retro classic. It takes the original formula and adds more depth, progression, interest and fun.

If you're not a fan of straight shoot 'em ups, this game might help to convince you that they're not all bad. If you are a fan of shoot 'em ups then this should definitely find a place in your XBLA collection.

Rating: 4/5

[beastgamerkuma]

I am a pleased gamer today since finding out that Sony just announced they will be giving away a lot of free titles for PlayStation Plus members that is worth over $260 of content and frankly that is an awesome deal since you only play $50 dollars a year and on average Sony Entertainment Network gives away free titles usually every month, so it is worth the subscription. It is not available now, but definitely check out the site later on today when it comes available in the store and on a side note shout out to Elly’s facebook E3 page and one of the members Jose Padro for the information. If you want more on this news check out Sony’s site PlayStation Plus E3 2012 page, stay frosty gamers!

[wirebot]

Choplifter HD has just been released on PSN with the Xbox Live Arcade version following the PC version release of Wednesday January 11th. Players can take on a side-scrolling helicopter rescue adventure. You can view that all in a newly released trailer. More » via wirebot.com

[splazerproductions]

Choplifter HD XBLA - HD Gameplay