I tried searching for some good helicopter sims and got C4 based on lots of glowing reviews. I got done with the training and found that it is rather arcadish. I can't "barrel roll" or do other crazy stunts with the helicopter and try to flip it / crash it. All you can do is just take-off and maybe land really hard damaging your landing gear, etc...

It seems very fun though with a twist joystick. I can't seem to figure out how to work the throttle, my top speed is about 125-135 knots and max altitude is about 1200 feet ASL.

I've been playing Jane's F-15 and gotten used to 1100+ mph NoE, cruising at 50,000' ASL, etc...

Are there more realistic combat helicopter sims out there?

While certainly dated by the graphical standards of today, IMO Jane's Longbow 2 is still the finest helicopter simulation ever made.

I can't get it to work in XP

C4 is pretty arcadish but that doesn't mean it doesn't get pretty tough once you get into the campaigns. FWIW, I attended a Comanche prototype demonstration flight and got to see the bird up close; it used a twist grip cyclic for anti-torque control, not pedals.

+1 on the Jane's Longbow 2 comment.

Other decent helo sims (some pretty old, XP compatibility not assured):

Apache
Hind
Team Apache
Enemy Engaged: RAH 66 Comanche versus KA-52 Hokum
Enemy Engaged: Apache versus Havoc
KA-52 Team Alligator
The Search & Rescue series (non-combat)
G. Police (also very arcadish but with a real Blade Runner feel, and great fun)

I was wondering: How do you make the helo strafe in real life?

In C4, moving the stick left/right allows the helo to strafe left/right. I don't see how you can do that in real life given that if you're hovering, there's no lift generated on your wings. That leaves just the main rotor and tail rotor.

C4 has hanged a few times while playing, but so has NFS: Hot pursuit 2 for some odd reason, and this only happens on one XP Pro SP-2 PC.

I would imagine strafing is done the same way side-slipping is: left/right cyclic input with appropriate main rotor blade pitch adjustment through the collective (throttle).

At the demo flight the Comanche did a "strafing" pass down the flight line, nose toward the crowd, fuselage 90 degrees to the runway.

It is also an extremely quiet machine. Hovering directly in front of the observers you could barely hear it over the sound of a Sikorsky S-76 idling down the line.

It's a shame they got rid of it, and I know it's been a big hunk of $$ too, but what I don't get is that since the taxpayer money is already spent, the least they could do is start fielding a few of these???

I remember when I was in HS our flight sim geek club would be talking about the F-22 and Comanche. Now I finally see the day the F-22 is ready for combat, but the Comanche was axed.

Come to think of it, I seem to remember the strafing maneuver consisting of using anti-torque control to rotate the craft 90 degrees while maintaining forward velocity. Kind of like Wing Commander's "Afterbrner Slide."

In fact, as more and more of my memory becomes unclouded, the Comanche may not have had a conventional collective control, either. That, too, was handled by vertical up/down input on the cyclic.

Of course, I could just be remembering hallucinations alogether.