The Classic Arcade and Console Era (1972-1989) - Battle Chopper (a.k.a. Mr. Heli)
A deceivingly cute omnidirectional sidescrolling shooter on rails that feels like Blood Money meets Fantasy Zone with some of the toughest bosses you’ll ever face.
RELEASE DATE: 1987
DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Irem
BEST VERSIONS: Arcade
PLAYABILITY TODAY: Highly playable
If there’s one thing you could count on Irem for in the 1980s and 90s, it was high-octane arcade games that had great graphics and a lot of polish. Such is the case with Battle Chopper (released as Mr. Heli in Europe and Mr. Heli no Daibōken in Japan), an omnidirectional rails shooter where you pilot a cute little anthropomorphic helicopter named Mr. Heli through some of the shootiest levels I’ve ever encountered. Fortunately, you’re armed with a cannon, some vertical missiles that home in on enemies and some bombs you can drop when you’re walking along the ground. But you’ll need them all, because this game is absolutely relentless, and standing still will get you killed a lot faster than engaging the enemy head-on.
Battle Chopper seems innocent enough at first. You start out in a rocky area where you have to shoot helicopters while mining for crystals by shooting loose bricks clinging to the ceiling and floor. You can find small crystals that give you $20 apiece, larger crystals that give you $100 (but which can be broken into smaller ones if you’re careless) and eventually, humungous crystals worth $500. You’ll need to collect as many as possible as quickly as you can because also hidden behind the bricks are square upgrade shops that will take your money in exchange for giving you better guns, missiles or bombs, as well as fuel that replenishes your health bar. While you start out with guns that can’t shoot all the way across the screen and missiles that only shoot upwards, you’ll soon have a powerful wave of shots ahead of you and either three or five missiles that will arc around the screen and home in on the nearest enemies. (The bombs, which can only be used when you are standing on a surface, are a little less useful in any state.
Since you have so much firepower at your disposal, Battle Chopper throws an infinite supply of spawning bad guys at you. Most are very easy to destroy, from the little pods that look like a wingless Opa-Opa from Sega’s Fantasy Zone to the bigger helicopters that look like Mr. Heli to much more powerful enemies who can dig through the walls or assault you with rockets. While the levels initially allow you to move at your own pace, you’ll reach on-rails segments where you have to keep up with the scrolling screen or be squished by the terrain. The key recommendation I can offer: don’t be greedy, because you’re never going to feel like you have enough money to buy upgrades, but trying to collect every crystal you see will get you killed pretty easily once you’re past the relatively easy first level.
Each of the game’s five stages includes a larger stage that takes about 4-5 minutes to complete and which concludes with a miniboss encounter before taking you into a short, initially dark gauntlet of tougher enemies who precede a boss battle. While the minibosses aren’t too hard to defeat, the bosses are incredibly hard, in part because they’re bullet sponges who can take a lot of damage, but also because they each have something they do which will mess you up if you don’t figure out how to avoid it. The first boss, by far the easiest in the game, has an endless supply of destructible turrets on each side of the screen that replenish every time it scrolls up and down, and it also drops a constant supply of orbs on you from below. The trick is to using a maneuvering pattern that allows you to swoop down and kill the turrets as soon as they appear and then to swoop up and hit the boss’s weak spot with everything you’ve got from one of the room’s two corners. Trying to take him from below with your rockets seems more logical at first, but it’s deadly because there are so many ways to get killed on the bottom half of the screen, and Mr. Heli can only take 2-3 shots at most before he’s destroyed.
The second boss is a giant orb that bounces around a rectangular room, but he’s smart enough to be able to crush you in a corner, and you’re slow enough to not be able to get around him if he pins you to a wall. Defeating this boss is no small feat, and the trick is to recognize that he isn’t just bouncing off the walls like an object on an old screensaver, but rather is following your movements. If you can keep him closer to the center of the room, you’ll have more room to maneuver while you spin around, hit him and the destructible orbs he’s firing at you with a barrage, and then swirl around him to make another run. A more merciful game would have made the orb smaller or the room bigger. Battle Chopper is definitely anything but merciful, and death means replaying the encounter rather than continuing mid-battle.
The remaining bosses aren’t quite as tough as the orb, but they are still challenging. One hops around the room and shoots miniature versions of itself at you, but it’s easily dealt with if you have fully-upgraded missiles and can hit it from underneath. One looks like a crab, but clings to the ceiling while pillars of lava erupt from the ground. It’s initially a tough battle because the lava gives little warning and will absolutely kill you if you don’t see it coming, but there is a pattern, and you can see it coming if you pay close attention (though you also have to be wary of the shots coming from above!). And the final boss is actually a piece of cake by comparison – he’s just a giant mechanical head that pops out and fires barrages at you. What makes him tricky is that he’s flanked by an infinitely respawning set of aggressive turrets that you constantly have to destroy if you want to have any hope of dodging the bigger attacks.
If you can complete this game without an emulator with saved states or some sort of cheat code, my hat is off to you. Things got so white-knuckle so quickly that I was completely exhausted by the time I beat the second boss and had to take a break to play through the other stages individually. If this were the sort of game where a continue allowed you to respawn in the same place, it’d be more manageable. But with checkpoint-based continues that also make you lose your upgrades, it’s incredibly tough to progress without spending a lot of time to get to know the game.
Despite the difficulty, however, Battle Chopper is addictive enough to keep you coming back because, tough as it is, the game somehow feels very fair. “Oh, I should have been more careful there!” I’d mumble as death once again claimed Mr. Heli by way of a stray bullet. “Man, I got greedy,” I’d think as I found myself trapped near the top of the screen by encroaching enemies who took advantage of my going after a roof crystal. “Geez, this boss is tough,” I’d groan as that second level orb boss crushed me once again. And then I’d keep on trying, because for whatever reason, I really wanted to see this game through. The cute graphics and chirpy soundtrack (which is quite reminiscent of the type of music you’d hear in a Sega Genesis game) kept things endearing.
The ending at least rewards you with a fun bit of text, saying, “It was a great job, Mr. Heli” and then letting you know that “the muddy and the black copters were destroyed and this star was saved from the crisis.” Even so, “other enemies threaten the people somewhere in the universe,” and “Thank you for playing out the game.” It’s not quite the weird plot twist from the end of Fantasy Zone, but it at least puts a smile on your face.
Battle Chopper was only released on the arcade in the US, but its very faithful TurboGrafx-16 port Mr. Heli no Daibōken did make it to the Wii U’s Virtual Console service in 2018. The game is also better-known in Europe than the United States thanks to 1989 ports by UK developer Firebird Software for the Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum. Unfortunately, none of these are recommended over the arcade or TurboGrafx-16 version; they’re all a bit clunky in how they play and each make compromises to get the game running on the PC hardware, including shrinking the amount of space you can move around onscreen. Of all of the home PC versions, the Commodore 64 one impresses me the most because it feels the closest in scale and is incredibly smooth for an 8-bit PC game, but the game is also shorter, with only three stages. Thankfully, however, it excludes the Orb and Crab bosses.
Given the difficulty of the game, I’d recommend playing on an emulator with a game ROM. One way to do so legally is through the online cloud-streaming service Blacknut, though it’s a bit pricey and you’ll only be able to stream the game (along with the rest of Blacknut’s catalog). Irem has never re-released the game in any compilations, but Mr. Heli has appeared in several Irem games, including the arcade game Vigilante, Shuyaku Sentai Irem Fighter on the Game Boy and PS2 game R-Type Final as a playable character.
As Our Series Continues…
It’s time to move on to console and arcade gaming in the 1970s and 80s, and we’re going to cover it all with an exploration into hundreds more games you’ve probably never played but definitely ought to check out. Come for amazingly great early 1980s games like Warlords, Super Locomotive, Shark! Shark!, Acrobatic Dog-Fight, Mysterious Stones: Dr. John’s Adventure and Intrepid and stick around for mid-to-late 1980s greats like Peter Pack-Rat, Penguin-kun Wars, Momoko 120%, UFO Robot Dangar, Wonder Momo, Raimais, Last Alert, The Legend of Valkyrie and the arcade version of Twin Eagle: Revenge Joe’s Brother, complete with a rockin’ soundtrack with wonderfully inscrutable lyrics.
If you’ve never heard of any of those games, you’re in for a treat as we explore them one by one. And If those games are all old hat to you, don’t worry; they’re just the tip of the iceberg for what we’ll be discussing!
If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.
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