But that was Ubisoft doing the cover and naming the aircraft's full name on it.

To be more precise that problem with Ubisoft/Pacific Fighters was due to the use of company names associated with the aircraft modeled. Look for example at the name:
Grumman F6F Hellcat

The problem in that name is the Grumman part and of course having the "briliant" idea of putting that (company) name in game's box cover was a recipy for what happened later. If Ubisoft and Maddox games placed the name for that aircraft as:
F6F Hellcat or better yet F6F(only) there wouldn't be any of those problems since that part of the name is the US military designation (US Navy to be more precise) and therefore a public name which obviously are subjected to any "licencing issues". And of course the same applies to any other aircraft modeled in that sim (and in any other games for that matter).

what a debacle that was...and yet UBI got SoW anyway...bummer

saw it in the bargain bin already for $12 - if I had bought it a month ago I would be utterly furious

That's what always happen with crappy games.

Got to say I am really enjoying Take on Helicopters.

I was a little wary at first. Nothing can be a 10GB download and the campaign seemed to be a bit slow. My first thoughts - "give my pilot an M16 & that will liven up the campaign."

But having played it for a few days more I am now really enjoying it. The map is great and it runs well on my 4 year old machine. The 10GB download is probably due to the amount of voice audio included in the campaign.

There is military action - just listen to your brother in the campaign when he reminisses about the war. At first I ignored him, but if you listen to him he will link you through to the military missions.

A worthy successor/sibling to Arma2.

Yes, I'm also enjoying this sim very much and I certainly don't regret every cent that I spent on this sim/game!
IMO, the campaign (career) is extremelly well built with a very interesting story which is almost as good (again IMO) as the Operation Flashpoint Cold War Crysis campaign (which IMO was by far the best campaign that BIS ever made for their games). The Take on Helicopters campaign/career resembles very much to a "typical" RPG game where you have the main missions which are part of the story and when you end those missions the campaign/career will end (at least the story part) and just like in the RPG games you also have the "side missions" (which in ToH are missions offered by the "government" and "private contractors") where you can earn extra money which allows you to buy stuff like extra helicopters and equipment for the player's helicopters (such as recover winchs, cameras, FLIRs, etc...) and the great thing is that most of those "side missions" can be replayed (in order for the player to earn more money) and every time you replay on of those missions, that mission will be somehow diferent (such as diferent locations or even diferent kind of objectives). I just wished that there were more "side missions" and more types of these missions.

Despite having some issues, in general I do like the Flight model of this sim where like in a real helicopter you must always keep and eye on the Cyclic, the Collective and the Tail Rotor pedals all at the same time and despite that the trim will alleviate some workload on the controls but you still must constantly keep and eye and compensate all the 3 controls. So the flight model in Take on Helicopters is much more nearer to a "sim level" than to an "arcade level" and IMO it's way more realistic than many helicopter sims and/or dedicated helo games.
I just noticed that in order for the cyclic control to be much more realistic the player must reduce the Y axis sensitivity a lot from that comes originally (putting the Y axis sensitivity at around 25% works great for me) or else it will extremelly hard to put the helicopter on a hover (without using "auto-hover" of course).

Well, this is a small and resumed oppinion of mine about this sim after almost playing the entire campaign/career (which I haven't finish yet)

I guess I'll wait for the boxed version cause I'm not even going to try to download this.

My take is that it's just a fun simulator. Not perfect at all, but just a whole lotta fun to fly.

Figuring that with some BS time and 14k+ hrs irl on fixed wing I could just do the training missions for fun.. But man was I struggling with the winch stuff. So I started with take offs and landings.. Even those were really pretty hard. Fixing the controller profiles changed the ballgame quite a bit for the better.

Let the patches come!

How does it compare to such things as DCS: Black Shark, Search and Rescue 4: Coastal Heroes, X-Plane with a decent helicopter model, or the Dodosim Jetranger in FSX?

Is it a new high water mark for helicopter simulation physics?

Cheers!

Rick...

Rick, the physics seem pretty good (although I am a fixed wing guy). I think DCS:BS has the higher fidelity flight model though. Having said that, I have had a much more entertaining helicopter 'experience' with TOH. The Seattle environment looks great and the missions make a refreshing change from the standard sim fare of 'fly here and shoot this'.