Hello all,

I've always had a fascination with the Vietnam Era helos and would love to have a sim where I could fly Hueys, Cobras and other types used during the war. What are the latest options out there at the moment? I can't find anything new on the horizon so do any of the older sims cater for that period?

Cheers,

WB.

Nothing at all worth mentioning really...

Search And Rescue: Vietnam MED+EVAC (2002)
Whirlwind Over Vietnam (2007)

Neither are great - they are lite sims at best and are buggy and feel unfinished. There's nothing on the horizon for the Vietnam era as far as I'm aware.

I *think* you can fly Cobra's in the 'Wings Over Vietnam' jet sim total conversion called 'Yankee Air Pirate 2'.

Operation Flashpoint: Resistance with the VTE mod + the Huey pack.
That is the best bet - lots of opportunities for COIN and insertions.

You can also use the 'our weapons' mod to simulate other wars in similar environments (with Mi-8s etc.)

Don't even bother with Whirlwind Of Vietnam,

It was a heavily rushed game with no tech support at all.About 10 scripted missions,no campaign,and once you meet mission objectives the mission instantly ends,not even able to fly back to base.It was a horrible simulation,it had a lot of promise but it was a complete failure.

VTE for Arma is your best bet although it doesn't have the greatest flight model it is certainly adequate and better then the very mediocre helicopter flight model that doesn't feel like helicopter flight at all in strike fighters that Yankee Air Pirate uses.

Pretty much agree about Whirlwind of Vietnam, but most of the missions does not end after you meet the main objectives. While the game does drop you back to the GUI screen after you complete the main mission, you have to click the "continue" button to keep the mission going. I found this out quite by accident and was kind of suprised to find out that many of the main missions also present you with a secondary mission after you clicked the "continue" button, sometimes you just fly back to your base and land. The game does have many faults but as a true designed from the ground up Vietnam Huey simulator it's the only game on the block. I would love too see many of the guys who have worked wonders on other much older titles like EECH, Longbow series and even Gunship give this game a through the once over to see what could be done. I think there is potential in this game if someone with modding skills/coding skills would get interested but alas, I guess there's just no love for the ol' fly by the seat of your pants low tech Huey

There's a Vietnam mod for Arma2 that has all the helos you want.

I agree to a point but the sim gives no option to fly slicks and drop troops which is what I would of preferred.Your stuck in the sole gunship.There is a menu in the game for armament and you can tell they intended to give you the option to configure it but no such option exists to change whats on the hard points.It would of been nice to also have a dynamic campaign,even scripted but that doesn't exist in WOV either.I contacted the maker with issues I had with the game and there was no tech support,not even a reply to any email.The developer and publisher simply released it and shut the door on it.It had a lot of potential and still does but doubt anything will ever be done further on it.There was some talk of a mod group but it never transpired.


Sadly that seems to be the norm these days.Don't listen to customers wants or needs,rush software out half finished,make a profit,and in the end,screw the customer.

I totally agree with you FokkerDVIII. The potential that was missed with Whirlwind of Vietnam is sad. The reason you never got a reply is probably because G5 software got totally out of the PC game business, at least thats the answer they more or less gave me. 1c has never responded to my questions abot WoV either. I guess what I would really like to see is someone in the helo modding/coding community take a good,long,hard look at WoV and see if anything can be done. But unfortunatley I feel because WoV does not have Blackhawks, Apaches and more modern helos and their high tech weapons I just don't think they are interested. Lets face it other then troop insertion/extraction and fire support/supression for the infantry thats about as high tech as the Huey gets in Vietnam. Even if the game would have had the Cobra it would still be a pretty low tech affair till late in the war. But I have seen some of what would could have made WoV a classic Vietnam helo sim. Escorting some Slicks to a LZ we flew over a fire base and was amazed to see them laying down some fire support (I assumed on the LZ we were going to), passed a few Chinooks, and even catching a few black clad Viet Cong scrambling for cover while over a hot LZ (they are hard to spot) but being I was already at the door gunners position I nailed them, it was also surprising to catch a glimps of a few Sandys doing some suppression work of their own. Thats were the frustration with WoV comes in, you can see all the parts are basically there but it needs someone to enhance, add more missions and bring it all together. I did see some radio chatter at the RU flight forums awhile back that WoV had a mission editor but it's hidden in the game somewhere, but no one has ever confirmed this. I do know there was a patch for the RU version but WoV was probably released to the RU before the Western release so the patch is probably already in the Western game.

Thanks for all the replies. I remember WoV when it came out but stayed away from it due to the noise about it being bugged/unfinished etc. A real shame.

I've found the VTE and Unsung mods for ArmA2 and they look promising. Haven't had much time to test and research yet but so far I've installed the Unsung mod and found it takes an age to load - I'm talking nearly an hour from selecting a mission to getting it started! Anyone with experience of this? I'm off to do a little research about this matter.

While the ArmA2 mods seem to give a good flavour of the era the fidelity of the flight sim aspect is somewhat lacking. It's a shame there is no dedicated Vietnam sim out there but like all flight sims these days it appears to be a niche market with few companies willing to dedicate resources to development.

Thanks again,

WB.

I think that G5 Software have had some good ideas for helicopter sims in general, with the aforementioned Whirlwind Over Vietnam, Fair Strike and Red Shark. I also think that InterActive Vision have had some good ideas with Apache Air Assault, Apache Longbow Assault and the Search And Rescue series - but all use rather unnecessarily resource-heavy, buggy game engines and all offer just a handful of scripted, closed missions and an arcade-like helicopter/avionics/weapons model.