Back in the day… no, back even farther than that… in fact, unless you’re in your mid-30s, you might as well skip this paragraph… back in my Apple II+ days, there was a set of games that I played incessantly. One of these was Choplifter, by Broderbund. It was in HiRes color! Check out the majesty (click for larger):

Choplifter is a simple game. You are a helicopter pilot charged with rescuing hostages. You have to land your craft nearby them, wait for them to board, then fly them a few at a time back to your base. You had to do this without landing on them, crashing your helicopter, or getting shot by various enemy bad dudes, including tanks, jets, and mines that homed in on you.

Phew.

Now, there have been various rewrites, arcade, and console versions over the years. But I tell you what, the very best interpretation I’ve seen, bringing Choplifter to the modern age (aka Mac OS X), is Chopper, by Majic Jungle Software. And since a picture is worth a 1000 words, I’m going to shut up and let you take a gander at couple of thousand of them (click for full view):