An old favorite of mine. This simple chopper game has a number of missions, sarcastic dialog, and beautiful 4-color graphics. Using your helicopter's bombs, missiles, and nukes, you must complete missions to deliver papers, collect lost capsules, intercept other helicopters, planes and cruise missiles, and destroy some weird looking tanks and a variety of enemy buildings. It's possible to eject from a crippled helicopter (auto-eject turns on if the landing gear is up) and wait for a new one to be sent from home base, and you can throw grenades when you're walking around outside of your chopper. There are three difficulty levels, which vary only in the number of bombs you carry, and also three mission categories (easy, regular, and hard), each of which has five unique missions which are chosen at random before every flight. Besides changing the main objective, the mission number also determines which enemies will be on the map: for instance, there are three screens that have helicopters, but they aren't all present in some of the easier missions. The documentation with v2.0 mentioned that for $5, the author would send you the source code for v2.5 which added five new missions in a new "Very Hard" category, but was never distributed compiled and was not permitted to be mass distributed or uploaded to BBS. Author Mark Currie was kind enough to send me a compiled copy and the source code for v2.56, and this may be the only site that has it. I used the source code to fix some bugs and typos, change the behavior of one of the secret areas, and make the sky blue during day missions (not many CGA games took advantage of the ability to change the background color from the default black). There's enough variety in the mission and difficulty levels to keep the game interesting for players of all ages, and the game's popularity is all the more impressive because it was written by a 15 year old.
Added by DOSGuy
Screenshots
Downloads
Chopper Commando v2.57 with Source code in Borland Turbo Pascal 5 (103,290 bytes) | 2014-07-04 | DOS | Play online |
Chopper Commando v2.56 with Source code in Borland Turbo Pascal 5 (157,780 bytes) | 1994-09-10 | DOS | Play online |
Chopper Commando v2.0 (62,555 bytes) | 1990-02-04 | DOS |
Availability
Author Mark Currie has generously released this game as freeware.