Antz and A Bug’s Life. Armageddon and Deep Impact. Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. The amazing coincidence we’ll get to when this project reaches March 2017. Sometimes two remarkable similar media releases come together at the same time. And seeing Desert Strike quickly followed by Gunship 2000 is another. of those times The title screens look virtually identical, a hovering helicopter facing towards the viewer, though only the Gunship 2000 one fires out of the screen.
Two games in 1993 succeeding through having you pilot a helicopter into war isn’t a total coincidence at all, of course, when both take their cue from the Gulf War. Apparently a significant subset of reaction to that was to note how cool helicopters are. Neither game was in its first release in 1993 so they got in even faster, and for the record Gunship 2000 was the first.
It’s a pretty different game in how it looks and plays, being a first person flight simulator rather than an isometric shooter. If you’ve been reading a while you will have noted my resistance to flight sims, but this is the most accessible one so far for sure. Helicopters hovering in place make for a much easier flying experience, at least in simplified computer form, and can compensate for graphic deficiencies a lot easier than a whizzing aeroplane. A lot of the same things which work well in Desert Strike in strategy and feel work just as well viewed from inside the cockpit. Though there are differences – you don’t have to strafe close to the ground when it inevitably comes to blowing things up, being able to take greater height and shoot most things from a safe distance where you can barely see them.
Another difference between the two games is that Gunship 2000’s approach to realism means a different approach to narrative. There is no Kilbaba or Mad Gaz here in the complex campaign of primary and secondary missions. The menu screens are presented as a series of realistic (for 1993) locations in your military base where you click on notice boards, log books and the like to set things up. There is, in the background, a map with a location in the Middle East circled. Put together with the faceless, distant approach to killing, this kind of casually assumed certainty differs from Desert Strike’s brash jingoism mostly in being more insidious. At least Desert Strike wasn’t trying to present itself as respectable.
Gallup Amiga chart, Amiga Power , September 1993
