Retro Sims are Back! A First Look at Thunder Helix | Tech Nibble

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Thunder Helix is a homage to ’90s flight sims with elements of Desert Strike thrown in for good measure. Today we get an early look at the pre-release build of the game set to be released in March.

This video is in no way sponsored by David or Thunder Helix.

Thunder Helix Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1906230/Thunder_Helix/
Release Date: 21st March 2024

#ThunderHelix #simulator #helicopter

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● Chapters
00:00 My Love of LHX Attack Chopper
02:55 First Impressions of Thunder Helix (pre-release)
03:52 PCBWay.com Could Make a Helicopter
04:22 Thunder Helix Preview Continues
09:50 Interview with developer David Walters
19:30 Closing Thoughts

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Helicopter flight Sims I think have had a far greater influence in the decisions I’ve made when it comes to buying computers than they have any right to hello cwell as it’s story time today because I want to tell you about a game called lhx attack chopper a helicopter

Simulator that came out in 1990 I was obsessed with this thing however I couldn’t play on my own computer I had an Omega 500 at the time yes I loved it I played games like mig29 and f29 Retaliator and all of these great flight Sims F-18 great flight Sims that were

Available for the machine but lhx attack chopper was not available for it nor would it ever become available for it I gained access to it through a friend his uncle just so happened to have a 286 laptop and this felt like a serious machine it had a hard drive for a start

That ched away when it started up and this thing called windows on there it was all quite alien to me but I enjoyed playing with it and I eventually found on there this game lhx attack chopper I love the choice of helicopters I love the weapons loadouts the missions the

Serious nature of this simulation it was on a whole another level to anything that I’d played on my Amiga however there’s one twist to this whole thing that laptop was monochrome and the screen was in no way made to play games everything ghosted when it moved but

That wasn’t a problem because in my young mind I convinced myself I was a helicopter pilot and I was playing this thing in night vision goggles these were night missions and I squeezed every ounce of enjoyment out of that game a few years later I would then go on to

Buy my own 486 PC it was this gorgeous looking Packard Bell yes I’ll see you in the comments to fight you about that it’s a good-looking machine and it means so much to me because it was my first IBM PC compatible the decision to jump

Ship from the Omega and go to the PC was made with lhx attack chopper in mind it was made with Ultima 7 in mind because I’d enjoyed six so much on the Omega and it wasn’t coming to the Omega I had to have a PC for seven and it included Jeff

F1gp because the frame rate I’d seen on my friend’s PC was so much Slicker and better than I had on my amiria so I jumped Shi to the PC and it’s there that I enjoyed lhx attack chopper again on my own PC things like gunship 2000 also available on other platforms but the

Brute force of the 486 made it all the more enjoyable I could crank up the detail and really enjoy that game the commane series from Nova logic later Jan’s Apache longbow as well as other simulators the silent service series Falcon uh M1 tank platoon I did love a

Tank simulator as well anything that was simulation I was all over it and I loved it it wasn’t cool but I don’t care I’m too old to care about being cool I wasn’t all about Super Nintendos and mega drives I was all about serious simulations on my PC and I know there’s

Lots of you out there that were too which is why you’re going to enjoy what we’re looking at today so it may surprise you to realize that this on my screen here here is not lhx attack chopper this despite its looks is a brand new 2024 helicopter game in the style of

Those 1990s and late 80s helicopter games that I loved so much it’s by a single developer called David Walters who was clearly influenced in the same way I was by vintage helicopter games but he had a desire and the skill set to do something about it David is Ray

Kindly given us a pre-release version of the game to try out today so we can get a feel for it we’re going to meet David and chat to him about his influences his background and the development of the game and hopefully by the end of it I’ll

Be able to tell you whether you should part with your hard-earned cash and pick this up on Steam this is thunder Helix it’s David’s Love Letter to helicopter flight simulators of old and it’s a camel’s worst Nightmare if I’ve learned anything about helicopters is that a good one has good pcbs and if I was building one I’d go to PCB .c to get mine manufactured they can CNC mill your rotor blades 3D print your joystick and fabricate the sheet metal of the body everything you need to make

A chopper I wasn’t joking they can do it all at PCB way.com and their support of the channel and the museum is very much appreciated thank you PCB way.com years of Airwolf and Blue Thunder prepared us for this so let’s get to the chopper the game does a great impression

Of a Dos game from the off by simulating the command prompt and then a setup screen which is actually functional although missing a fake sound card menu I think we can forgive them for that and we get the choice of VGA or EG color paletes I’m going for VGA don’t worry

Your monitor doesn’t need to support the 320×200 resolution the game is scaled appropriately for whatever your monitor is set to it is a modern game remember before we set off this pre-release version says it has one campaign with four missions although I think it’s better described as one Mission with

Four objectives as you attempt them all in one flight and we’ll be taking out Vehicles a radio tower an Airfield Sam launchers and a convoy then we choose our helicopter and that includes the Avenger which is clearly an Apache the stealthy Raven and the Lewis the Huey the Huey

Lewis yeah that’s the third option let’s go for the gunship and then when we set off we Zoom down into the cockpit on the back of a boat and we’re ready to go Don are you sure this is just a game looks Mighty real to me no we don’t need you

Here today thank you Ronald for gamers of a certain vintage it’s instantly familiar we’ve got all the camera angles to play with and look at those lovely low poly models all dithered and shaded nicely but it’s doing all of this in a way that’s really satisfying to our

Nostalgia it’s doing it at 60 frames per second which kind of Falls in line with our Rose tinted memories of games like this they didn’t move like this if you were lucky you got 10 frames per second out of a game like this back in the day

But we often forget that so this is really pleasing it doesn’t disappoint your Nostalgia once up in the air there aren’t too many controls to remember you’re mostly cycling targets or cycling way points to get to those targets and then unleashing guns and missiles on them targets are often grouped together

And there’s normally a convenient fuel tanker in the mix where so if you blow that one up it will take out surrounding enemies with them so you can be sneaky about how you approach them that being said in this early build we don’t see ground units taking evasive action and

I’ve yet to see a guided missile not hit its intended target that’d be good to see in future just to make the shot a bit less predictable one of the most fun features is the winch you can use it to pick up ammo crates fuel people and just about

Anything else in the game it’s a feature straight out of desert strike and it works well to keep you in the action instead of having to go back to base to recharge your ammo and your fuel after every Skirmish i’ then discovered something that isn’t yet documented so it took me

A while to figure this out but if your armor is damaged then you can go back to base to get it fixed but only if you’ve picked up people for each person that you’ve picked up you get a small repair that is another desert strike inspired feature and of course there’s elements

Of choplifter in there some of you will have noticed a bit of artifacting on the screen that is my capture I’ve messed something up there for some reason so please excuse me that’s not the game’s fault now some of you will laugh at this some of you will relate entirely do not

Underestimate how exciting it was to see your first Hill in a flight Sim in 1990 a simple pyramid on a flat plane was the Pinnacle of terrain generation and it was a thrill to watch this develop into more detailed terrain texture map terrain and then the rolling Landscapes

Of modern flight Sims over the decades in this game mountains are used to good effect you absolutely must duck behind them for cover and then you pop out to shoot the enemies as I’m trying to do here but it doesn’t always work out next time around I had more success

Taking down this radio tower objective before giving a camel the raide of its life the poor thing please nobody tell Jeff Minter what I’m getting up to today it also turns out that camels are quite explosive when you drop them who knew and perhaps that means they’re a useful weapon to take

Into battle shame there are no llamas the game is fairly forgiving in terms of damage I can go fly and head on into an enemy captured Airfield here and perhaps varying difficulty levels in the final release could help with this forcing you to remain behind cover and think a bit

More strategically but sometimes it is just fun to go in all guns blazing so that’s the game and my first impressions in its current form let’s now take the chance to talk to its creator David about all of it this is the first time he’s ever done a video interview so it’s

A privilege to have the chance to share this with you let’s hear from David hi I’m uh David Walters I’ve the creator of Thunder Helix I was spending a lot of time hunting around over the last few years thinking of projects to work on

And um I caught a video of of lhx um some people were talking about it brought back a lot of nostalgic memories for me from the 16 bit days playing games like Chuck Jager on my Atari and um I thought yeah let’s see what happens and so I’d created a um dithered EGA

Looking helicopter and posted on Twitter and got a good response and that’s kind of snowballed from there really I suppose you would say it a simulation but it’s definitely meant to be um a simulation of a guy who’s really good at flying a helicopter so I’ve made it so

It’s quite accessible you know you don’t have to be a very good pilot I’ve tried DCS modules and they’re fantastic but I feel like I need to be an octopus to to actually fly around on these things um and I wanted something that was a lot more accessible like the older games like

Lhx um where you just you could play with the keyboard you could fly around blow blow things up and you have a lot of fun sometimes you know in an evening I just want to fire up a game and and make things explode I don’t have to

Recall all this this training I built this from scratch I I experimented with unity trying to get this dithering effect to work but I wasn’t having much luck and I’ve been doing uh using C++ my whole career it’s what I’m most comfortable with so they didn’t take

Much to sort of make me want to switch back to just starting my own engine I’d written some graphic framework for this so it was it was basically building uh an environment on top of this with the code it is an it is an entirely new engine um I think that’s

Where I was most comfortable though it’s something I started four years ago and about now this time of year four years ago um but you know there’s there was been a lot of sort of disruption in my life in in the meantime because we we

Had a we had a little boy and um getting used to that was just a massive disruption you know amazing for my life but in terms of the game projects really terrible at getting it done so I announced the game about two years ago and it’s taken about about two years to

To get to this point um and I think now it’s sort of ready to to go into Early Access by this point I decided that the camels really did need someone to stick up for them so I asked David specifically why the camels and why the winching of the camels

Well that is kind of a that is kind of a sort of a meme from lhx that I’ve uh latched on to but you know you don’t get any points for killing camels in this game uh there’s wooden ones you can blow up and you get points for but if you

Blow up a camel it doesn’t count it’s just something you can choose to do but you can leave them alone as soon as I put the winch in the game I had to make it so you could winch everything so you can lift up trucks and all sorts of

Things like the camels and anything unrealistic doesn’t matter in the early days of the project can I make a winch desert strike has a winch let’s try this it works it was quite fun and it and it really changes the way the game works because it allows you to fly for a lot

Longer because you can refuel and pick up ammunition during the map so it becomes a little bit of a resource management games you if you need more things you can go and do it a lot of flight Sims I was disappointed by some of the realistic aspects of like the

Amount of weapons you could have it was always more fun to be able to shoot as many Rockets as you want rather than having a finite number so I thought this is a good compromise because you can reload and so yes you have the limited capacity but you can basically go and

Find some more and continue blowing things up I learned a program on a Commodore 16 but it was very limited system and moved to an Atari St it was SG um my my dad picked that out for me um when I sort of outgrown the Commodore

And I had that for a long time um a lot longer than a lot of other people that I knew they’d all moved on to PCS but I was sort of in the late 90s still had this Atari and I was using St basic on it which I thought was fantastic I I

Loved making stuff in that and um because I didn’t have a lot of the games that like I could see around me in magazines and things I’d sort of recreate kind of fake versions of that on in like the Sprite editor on on Stu basic and things like that so I’ve

Always been kind of interested in um studying other titles and sort of replicating the nuances of them yeah I was very enthusiastically made an FPS in there which I look back on it now and it’s it’s cute but it’s very very poor game um but yeah sort of flat shaded

Doom clone um very sort of yeah teenage me want liking Doom didn’t have a PC make Doom myself so after University I I started work at particle systems and worked there for a couple years uh made um remake of power drone and I moved to work for Sumo digital for about 5 years

And worked on a few little things there’s nothing particularly substantial uh the studio put out some bigger titles in that time like Sega RAC uh Sonic racing but um I I’d worked on things like um stuff for the PSP so we’ done a conversion of virtue tennis and uh the

Last thing I worked on was Dirt 2 I think I’ve always been quite a interest in the older titles and nostalgic kind of ideas of things um you know probably as early as the 2000s i’ started to become a little bit dissatisfied with the games that were coming out obviously there was some

Great titles but I always preferred the ones from the ’90s I think there’s quite a lot of similarities between EGA graphics and and the Atari the same sort of 16 color aesthetic um I’ve always quite liked the dithering even though you can see it I I think it was probably

Designed to be hidden by the blurry televisions of the time but I quite like seeing that that texture on the graphics I think a Dos game is more sort of going to resonate with a lot more people it started off as an EGA uh exclusive color palette which is very sort of primary

Colors and that seemed to catch people’s eye I think it work quite well on Twitter when you’re scrolling through and and you catch a a glimpse of it it does sort of Pops me meet you Paws my biggest priority is more content for the game I feel like it’s a solid foundation

It just needs a time putting in now to um uh to add more missions more more things to do a lot of people are asking for things like uh Mission editors and um more sort of dynamic elements so that you’ve got the more replayability of it the engine’s capable of doing um day

Dawn dusk and um night missions and the uh the other campaigns I’ve got are going to be sort of based in the desert but during different times of day and and different Maps so I going to try and really add more content in variety to it

I don’t really want to just um reuse a lot of stuff I want to make a new campaign being a new thing so really kind of trying to put the effort into making so I think the next map will be setting a city rather than a desert so

It won’t be a like Los Angeles size thing but it’ll be um you know there be lots of buildings to hi hide behind it different opportunities for uh combat in in that scenario I’m optimistic um you know my My Success doesn’t have to be huge for me to want to continue working

On this um definitely have a sort of idea of where I want to take it in terms of adding more content and yeah I’m very open to to listening to the community to hear what they want you know hearing this desire for more Dynamic elements is

Uh is really good to hear um because it means I can I can develop in the direction that people want Early Access launch is kind of just the beginning really I really want to make sure that it’s a well-rounded product by the end um future I’d like to work on more games

In this style um one of the things that’s held me back in the past was trying to be too ambitious with the graphics Fel felt like doing creating art in this style is being really quite easy for me to do and I’ve developed the

Skills to do that so I think I’d like to continue that there’s other games from the Amiga and the and the old Atari games that um that that I would like to uh to cover in future I think I think one of the things that people find

Uncanny about it but actually quite like is the fact that it runs at 60 frames a second it’s very smooth and I think it catches people off guard but it’s but well received I think if I tried to make it run on an old machine it would just

Look really quite strange because then it would be really slow again I have convinced I have tricked quite a few people into thinking it running it is running on dosbox I’ve been a little bit too effective I think at uh recreating the style of it U thanks for having me

And uh yeah I’m glad you you enjoyed playing Thunder Helix uh you can get it on Steam it’s coming out on March 21st and um you can follow me on Twitter at Hidden Asbestos and enjoy the game yes so thank you again to David for taking

The time to chat to us and tell us about thunder Helix what’s the verdict then well it’s a pre-release version that we’ve been trying today so there is a chance for everything to go horribly wrong but it’s highly unlikely because it’s very stable it does what it does

Well it doesn’t try to overpromise it just delivers that feeling of our 1990 lhx attack chopper Style game and all we need to see now is all of the missions added I I want tens if not hundreds of missions to play through campaigns to play through I’m excited to try out that

City landscape because uh it was in Apache Longbow that you got to fly around in a city and I’d like to try that again that changes the whole dynamic of the game playing peekaboo behind skyscrapers and going down city streets while uh locking onto tanks and

Taking them out that adds a whole new dimension and really tests your your controls and that’s where it all comes together it feels like you’re fully in control of the helicopter when you master it you are at one with the machine with the Apache with whatever helicopter that you’ve chosen in the

Game uh and it delivers that feeling that we got way back in the ’90s that perfect balance of arcade and simulation where you come away feeling a bit like Top Gun well done to you David the only thing I would ask is perhaps we could

See a big box version of it one day I mean is it really a flight sim without a weighty manual a map to hang on my wall and a keyboard overlay I think we’ll let him off this time but if you could make that happen I will be first in line to

Buy it go and check out Thunder Helix thank you for watching and I see you in the next video everyone bye-bye