Video Game / Heatseeker

Heatseeker is a military flight simulation game for the PlayStation 2, Wii, and PlayStation Portable developed jointly by Australian developer IR Gurus (now Transmission Games) and Codemasters and released in 2007. It places the player in the role of Mike "Downtown" Hudson, a fighter pilot for the International Council, as he is enlisted in missions around the world to defuse international terrorist threats posed by Fictional Countries based on Communist nations of the Cold War, including very real threats of nuclear weaponry posed by a crazy dictator or two.

The game opts for a less realistic and more cinematic experience than titles like Ace Combat, heavily invoking Rule of Cool with hordes of enemies to shoot and infinite plane ammo. Of particular note is the Impact Cam system, where missile impacts on enemies are often shown in dynamic angles.

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This title provides examples of:

• Action Girl: Angel, a Vertanian defector, is referred to by Rumbler as "a damn fine pilot", and aside from her first mission where she's a Damsel in Distress, she proves her reputation whenever she flies with Downtown as a second wingman. Even her initial need of rescue is justified due to her fleeing from half the Vertanian navy and air force in tow on a nearly-unarmed MiG-29, so the fact she hasn't been shot down by the time she meets up with the Nemesis task force would definitely make her pretty competent.
• Alternate History: The UN/NATO are replaced by a governing body known as the International Council, a few fictional countries have sprung up, and several experimental or cancelled planes like the Su-37 and MiG Project 1.44 are in mass production.
• Arc Villain: Each of the four chapters has you fighting a different enemy force:
  • Lord Roberts Island has a force of rebels trying to take the island, though their leadership is not identified.
  • The second chapter has you fighting the forces of Vertana, led by the dictator Estiban Granuja.
  • The third chapter has you fending off Federation forces led by the renegade Admiral Golovich, in order to rescue civilian oil-drilling crews.
  • The last chapter features Bae Jung-Tae, the dictator of the Oligarchy of Kamcha.
• Arrow Cam: Holding down the "fire" button after launching a missile or bomb allows the camera to track it as it travels. Meanwhile, the Impact Cam (if turned on) will randomly zoom in on the results of a missile scoring a lethal hit on an enemy plane.
• Artistic License – Ships:
  • Sovremenny-class ships are labelled as cruisers in-game and are generally more powerful than the Udaloy-class destroyer. In real life, the Sovremenny is also a destroyer class, and the Udaloy-class is in fact the Sovremenny's successor.
  • The ship class of Admiral Golovich's flagship is labeled "Kutzenov" instead of the correct "Kuznetsov."
• Awesome, but Impractical: The A-SLAMR is a nuclear cruise missile and is about as devastating as that implies. However, in addition to being a Bragging Rights Reward unlock (you have to beat the entire game on Ace difficulty, including the bonus objectives of the final mission, to unlock the one weapon pack that has it), it also only gets one shot per mission in a game balanced around the player having infinite ammo, and the weapon pack with the A-SLAMR has no other anti-ground weapons (meaning for any ground enemies aside from the one you want to nuke, you have to resort to Cherry Tapping with SRAMs and dead-fired anti-air missiles) and weaker anti-air weapons than the plane's other loadouts. As such, it's mostly just a novelty weapon.
• Big Good: Stuart "Rumbler" Stephens is the commander of the aircraft carrier Nemesis and the guy you'll be answering to most of the time, as well as your Voice with an Internet Connection.
• Bottomless Magazines: Most plane weapons have infinite ammo, though ammunition has to recharge after firing.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Torpedoes. Devastating against capital ships, which sink in one or two good torpedo hits, but worthless against everything else (attack boats are too small and fast for torpedoes to reliably hit, and they're obviously unusable against land targets), and large ships are valid targets for every form of anti-ground weaponry anyway. They also require the player to fly low and slow to launch, which is generally not what you want to be doing against enemy ships that have their guns trained on you.
• Easy-Mode Mockery: Most planes and plane loadouts are unlocked by completing bonus objectives in missions, which usually require you to go out of your way to find and destroy an obscure enemy target. Each mission has three bonus objectives, but Rookie only enables one and Pilot only enables two, so you have to play on the highest difficulty (Ace) to unlock everything.
• Equipment-Based Progression: As you play through the game, you unlock better planes and weapon loadouts to let you better handle tougher missions.
• Escort Mission: There's quite a few missions and objectives where the player has to protect allies from being destroyed, whether they be civilian ships and oil rigs, the Nemesis, or allied pilots.
• Featureless Protagonist: Downtown is never seen in person and never speaks, so all we know about him are his name, callsign, and piloting skill.
• Fictional Country: The world map is identical to the real world and Antarctica is still the same, though the enemy nations are fictional counterparts of real-world ones: Vertana is a Caribbean island nation heavily inspired by Cuba, the Federation is based on the Soviet Union (or Russia specifically), and Kamcha's location on the map would make it a high-tech equivalent of North Korea.
• Fictional United Nations: Known as the "International Council" (IC for short) in this universe, they serve the role of international peacekeeping and use mostly real-life US military hardware.
• Heroic Mime: Downtown has no in-game dialogue, though he can give commands to Divot.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The difficulty levels from lowest to highest are Rookie, Pilot, and Ace.
• Joke Character:
  • The F-117 Nighthawk has paper-thin health, low speed, and a small payload; while it does possess decent stealth capabilities and has a few decent weapons to choose from, by the time you unlock it, the F/A-18 Hornet is already available and is generally more powerful at the expense of less effective stealth while the F-35 Lightning II and F-22 Raptor aren't far off, making it obsolete very quickly.
  • The Yak-141 Freestyle and MiG-27 Flogger are used by the enemies in the first few missions as basic, barely-armed fighters for you to shoot down, and are appropriately weak when unlocked for use, with low stats and minimal weaponry.
• Just Plane Wrong: Given the arcade feel of the game, a number of liberties were taken with the aircraft in them in addition to the infinite ammo, mostly for Rule of Cool or Rule of Fun:
  • The SR-71 Blackbird is one of the final unlockable planes in the game, and is a fully capable fighter instead of an unarmed reconnaissance aircraft.
  • The Su-37 is given the name "Superflanker," which is purely fictitious; its official NATO Reporting Name was "Flanker-F" while its informal nickname was "Terminator."
  • The Yak-141 Freestyle, Su-37, Su-47 Berkut, and MiG 1.44 MFI are, in reality, technology demonstrators of which only a single unit was fully constructed (or four in the case of the Yak-141); in this game, they're all mass-produced fighters.
  • Stealth in this game works as a Limit Break that is charged by engaging in combat and can be activated to make missiles unable to lock onto your plane for a limited time, which is very different from how stealth technology works in real life (namely, designing the plane in such a way that it isn't easily detectable).
• Large Ham: General Bae Jung-Tae is very fond of loud and flowery threats. Nearly every word out of his mouth is one towards either the IC forces or his own men.
• Nominal Importance: Enemy bosses and important escort targets are often labelled with a name in addition to the vehicle type, making them easier to identify.
• Nuclear Weapons Taboo: The potential use of nuclear weapons by the people you're fighting is considered a critical threat whenever it comes up. Though ironically, the final unlock for the game allows the player to use nuclear missiles.
  • Granuja nuking the IC attack force sent to try and bring him in is considered to be crossing the line by basically everyone in-game. The epilogue implies that the IC tribunal held for him is not going to go easy on him because of it.
  • Bae Jung-Tae is very fond of his nukes and threatening to use them and is the one that gave Granuja his nukes in the first place. Two entire missions are devoted to eliminating Kamcha's ability to actually launch nukes.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: The player character and most allies are only referred to by their callsigns, though their real names are given out in cutscenes either as a Freeze-Frame Bonus or in dialogue (except Divot whose real name, Hank Harrison, is All There in the Manual).
• Ranged Emergency Weapon: Downplayed with the SRAM, a weak and short-ranged missile equipped on all planes that can lock onto both air and ground targets. While it is pretty ineffectual against most ground targets, the game's emphasis on Old-School Dogfight combat makes it perfectly serviceable against enemy jets (though dedicated anti-air missiles do have better range and damage).
• This Is Gonna Suck:
  • In "The Flashpoint," your fighter group has this reaction to seeing a veritable cloud of Federation fighters show up on radar after sinking a destroyer to save a convoy of oil tankers.
  Bull: This'll be the hornet's nest we stirred up coming to say hello.
  • In "Sunburn Alley," the Nemesis task force intercepts a transmission from Bae Jung-Tae that has him yelling crazed orders to his forces to destroy the intruders, which is the first sign that Kamcha is not going down without a long, hard fight:
  Divot: I'm hoping that was a crazy Kamcharian way of saying "I surrender"...
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • At one point in "Search and Destroy", the enemy's next attack wave consists of... a squadron of helicopters, against fighter jets. This gets a heavy dose of lampshading from your wingman and commander. Granted, they do use the opportunity to send forward some attack boats, but given that they do have actual jets of their own...
    Divot: Attack 'copters? They're sending attack 'copters at us in open sky?!
    Picasso: Whoever's supplying these rebels with their equipment obviously ain't giving 'em any brains to go with it!
  • Subverted in "Pillars of Fire"; Rumbler definitely thinks the Federation surface group that decided to drop anchor inside the caldera of a semi-active underwater volcano has a couple screws loose, though in the mission itself, it turns out there was a method to the madness. Because the Federation set up radar jamming around the island, the IC bombers sent to destroy the ships are equipped with heat-seeking missiles that should work despite the jamming... except the missiles proceeded to lock onto the underwater volcano vents rather than the ships themselves, forcing the IC troops to go to plan B.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: Downplayed; the Soviet planes (manufactured by Mikoyan, Sukhoi, and the Yak-141) are only used by enemies in the campaign, and cannot be used by players in their first playthrough (barring the MiG-29 V2, which was flown by Angel). However, you can select them freely from your second Campaign playthrough onwards, as well as in Mission mode. Not coincidentally, these planes often tend to be better than their US equivalents in stats and weaponry.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Destroying a friendly unit earns you an instant Game Over.
• Wingman: After rescuing Divot from a pair of fighters in the first mission, he becomes your wingman for the rest of the game. The player can order him to attack enemies, defend allies, or remain in formation behind them.