As promised back in April, PlanetInAction has released their “Helicopters” game just in time for Google I/O.
The game features a very nice tutorial mode to teach you the controls, then allows you to fly on various missions in San Francisco to earn money. At this point all of the missions are simply taxi services, but they have some cool missions planned. According to them:
At this stage “Helicopters only contains 2 mission types. One is your flight training and the other is Taxi services. But stay tuned. We have a long list of very cool missions lined up for you that we will release every month. You will be chasing cars into town, locating lost boats in the bay. Night-time, rain, fog. You get it all. You may even be send down-under where you help to drive cattle on a ranch or shoot deer in the mountains of New Zealand. How about ski helitours or testing low level radar detection systems. The list of planned missions is long.
All in all, this is certainly one of the most impressive Google Earth games I’ve ever seen. You can read more and see some video clips in our previous post about it, but you’d be better off to simply go give it a try right now at planetinaction.com/helicopters.
About Mickey Mellen
Mickey has been using Google Earth since it was released in 2005, and has created a variety of geo-related sites including Google Earth Hacks. He runs a web design firm in Marietta, GA, where he lives with his wife and two kids.
Yes,ive played this game and it is amazing,mark.
This is amazing work. I am having too much fun flying around seeing the models I made fo my hometown, Frederick, MD. Great work!!!!!
a pity it’s not for linux :_(
I expect that such games will become more popular as Google Earth gets more and more detailed world. Maybe one day some mainstream title will use its engine 🙂 even if the details are too low its not impossible for some company to just make it in sketchup enough detailed and then use this buildings or something else in their game.
Holy !#$!$ this is a freaking good game and I just did the tutorial.
Good night.
PS: It would be neat if they could somehow combine a game with street view stiching the photos together seamlessly
unless that’s totally impossible given how and when the pictures were taken.
Kyle — While I doubt this game could be modified to use StreetView imagery, Google has been using that imagery to put on the sides of the 3D buildings in some big cities lately. As they continue to do more of that, games like this will only get better!
I can’t seem get it to work. I can only get to a certain part of the lesson. I may need to update a plug-in, but I’m not sure which one.(I’m running Firefox on OSX 10.5). What I’ve seem so far looks very cool!