Hello, my friends, and welcome to this first episode of the Retro Dogfight (I call it “Retro Dogfighter” in the actual show because I’m a little nervous, please forgive me.) podcast! In this podcast I, along with my friends Chase and Denny, will look back at the classic simulators of old and revisit them for the sake of nostalgia and posterity.
In this first episode, we’ll introduce ourselves, our background with combat simulations, talk about why we love them so, and ramble a bit about the genre in general. It’s a shorter discussion than we usually will have, but hopefully by the end you’ll have gotten to know us and our backgrounds pretty well.
Now, this will be a monthly podcast, and each episode will cover one or more games. We’re going to try to go in chronological order, but for the next episode, we’re skipping a bit, just to set a tone. Next month, we’ll be looking at the three LucasFilm WWII sims, Battlehawks: 1942, Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain, and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe!
If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to leave a comment below or contact us directly at retrodogfight@gmail.com. Thanks for listening, and enjoy the show!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:17 — 25.6MB)
This is the Podcast I have been waiting for !
Since I had my first computer (ZX81) in 1982, I have been fascinated by the flight simulator genre. From the early days of black and white single FPS games such as “Aviator” running at 2mhz on my 32k BBC Micro up to my PC with 4.6ghz with 32gb struggling with MSFS2024 in VR.
I still have a lot of them on a shelf:
Sublogic Flight simulator (C64)
Looking glass’s Flight Unlimited 1 & 2 (PC)
Terminal Reality Fly! *
Battlehawks 1942 (Amiga)
Their finest Hour (Amiga)
Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe (Amiga)*
EA F18 Interceptor (Amiga)
Spectrum Holobyte – Falcon (Amiga)
Microprose F15 Strike Eagle II (Amiga)
Mirrorsoft Strike force Harrier (Amiga)
Thallion Airbus A320 (Amiga)*
Ocean F29 Retaliator (Amiga)
*I bought these for the box/manuals but have never actually played them
I am so looking forward to future episodes which will no doubt bring long forgotten memories come to the surface and the warm fuzzy feeling that goes with it.
All the best for the future.
I am so happy to read your comment! I’m also so excited to be covering pretty much all the sims you mentioned! I hope you enjoy the journey as much as we will. 🙂
Greetings from Finland! Absolutely magnificent idea for a podcast, so big thanks to you all already by taking the plunge. Sims, considering how important genre it actually was up till the beginning of new millennium, are criminally underrated in the retro gaming scene and discussion. You are now filling this void and can’t wait for your future episodes!
I personally was interested in sims since I was a kid and had my Amstrad CPC 464. After I got a PC around 89-90 and in the golden years of flight sims during the next decade or so, they were absolutely my favourite genre. Today, I have a big bunch of PC big box sims with all those beautiful manuals, historic information, maps and so on. And I regularly play them on my vintage DOS and win9x PCs exactly for the reason you mentioned: they are more fun than modern ones and provide better experience. Even tutorial missions in some sims are actually fun to play! (Jane’s USAF springs to my mind).
One thing that pretty much all modern combat sims lack are terrific dynamic campaigns. Sure, not all sims in the 90s had a sophisticated campaign engine, but many did so much so that at one point simplistic campaign really was a big negative in reviews. Most later sims, if they even have working SP campaign, feel just like playing bunch of generic canned missions without any effects or narrative.
What is my favourite sim from those bygone years? Impossible to say, there are just too many good ones, but if I need to name one sim that is still enjoyable today and was very important to me and where I sank countless of hours for several years, then Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe it is.
It would be awesome if you could get some devs of these great games as guests to your show sometimes. Nothing away from them, but people who worked on other genres get constantly air time in many retro gaming shows, but sim dev interviews are rarer than hen’s teeth.
Hellloooooo Finland! So, so happy to read your comment, and thank you for visiting and listening. You got a PC at pretty much a PERFECT time, as that was when sims were really…ahem…taking off. 😉 I too love good dynamic campaign engines. Have you tried Wings over Flanders Fields? Absolutely one of the most marvelous campaign engines I’ve ever seen.
I don’t know if we’ll do guests, in all honesty. One, these guys are very hard to track down. Very hard. Two, keeping this as simple as possible helps keep me sane you know? Not wholly against the idea, just not sure if I’ll go that route in the future, you know?
Thank you again so much for your comment, and I leave you with a question. Which of your current big box collection is your most prized?
I completely understand that finding guests easily complicates stuff a lot: finding them, contacting them, arranging the interview, planning discussion points and whatnot. One way reaching them could be to go to Mobygames, check designer credits for these games (many have several sims and also other games under their belt) and then find if they have linkedin pages and contact them through there. I think the stories we could hear from them are important from the historic perspective as there will be a day when the stories will be lost forever.
Of course, some of them may even bump into your podcast at some point and may even contact you, who knows!
Anyways, I agree fully that I got my first PC at a time when sims were really starting to shine. And PC gaming in general. As for what I think is my most prized sim in my collection is another extremely difficult question. For example, I’m a bit proud that I have managed to get all but one of the EA’s Jane’s sims including Fighters Anthology with official hint guide to my collection. As of writing this, I’m missing the Longbow 1 or the Gold version (in reality there is not much point in owning that game if you have Longbow 2 except for the completeness sake).
I have also many classic Microprose titles, including Gunship 2000, PAW Gold and EAW, the last one is my original purchase from back in the day which has miraculously all the contents still left in the box. I also have titles that weren’t big commercial successes, but have gained almost some sort of cult status, such as Rowan’s Mig Alley (also my original) or DID’s TFX or Total Air War.
But, I think I stay on the same path and say SWOTL. First, as I said I came back to that game in the early 90s again and again and it provided easily hundreds of hours of fun for me. Second, it is also my original game and has been with me close to 35 years now. I still remember getting it and browsing that beautiful manual for the first time and I think for all that, it just deserves the number one spot.
SWOTL is an excellent choice. We’ll be talking about it on our next episode! 😉
And wow, I didn’t think about the marketing angle. Terrific idea.