Re: Your favorite Apple II game?

[Roger Johnstone <roger@roger.geek.nz.removethisbit>]

In <9db76bec-d6aa-424d-974f-7cdbcf9d59dd@m3g2000hsc.googlegroups.com> 
golfrock  wrote:
> Strange that no one has mentioned - Choplifter!!!!
> 
> The was the first game I bought for my II+.  I played it for too many
> hours to remember.
> 
> I only recently was able to get all 64 people back to home base on my
> IIGS.

Many years ago I friend of mine got a, ahem, copy of Choplifter for his 
Apple //c. Unfortunately we didn't have any instructions and couldn't 
figure out how to make the blasted chopper get off the ground. We didn't 
known that it required a joystick. Eventually we found that pressing a 
certain control key combination made it take off, and another made it 
move left or right. Excitement! Later I learned that these key commands 
were for reversing the joystick axes. With no joystick plugged in it 
defaulted to hard over right and down.

Imagine two teenagers with fingers stretched across a keyboard pressing 
control-Y (or whatever it was) to take off (straight up, full speed, 
hard over to the right) and then control-X (full speed, hard over to the 
left), pressing the apple key on one side of the space bar to change the 
direction the chopper faced, and the apple key on the other side for 
fire.  Landing required repeatedly pressing control-X to toggle between 
hard left and hard right so that the chopper would sort of hover, then 
doing the same thing with control-Y to get it on the ground at a safe 
speed.

We never got very far in the game until he got a joystick.

-- 
Roger Johnstone, Invercargill, New Zealand -> http://roger.geek.nz