146. Xmas special 2025

for flashback. Tracks from the past. With your host, DJ Damon.speaker-0

It's that time of the year when the weather outside is frightful, but the computer glow inside is so delightful where the humming from the cassette player, the crackling fire and the white powdery snow slowly falling outside perfectly sets the tone for the retro Christmas of an era long, long ago. Just like last year, I have gathered the retro troops once again to get a chat by the Christmas fire going. I'm of course talking about Kourios and the Baron of Dubstep.Welcome!Hello, we meet again DJ Daemon, and Merry Christmas!Hello and Merry Christmas, DJ Demon! How are things over in Sweden? Has the snow arrived yet?No snow as far as the eye can see. I'm still dreaming of a white Christmas. How about Norway? Any better luck?speaker-2

Here, just like last year, got the traditional cold weather with the occasional chance of snow, but it's mostly ice and frozen slush everywhere. That's perfect for falling over, but not very white Christmasy. Hopefully there will be proper snow soon.Absolutely! 2025 has been quite a year and a lot has happened both in the world and in the world of retro. As we close in on Christmas I have prepared a slew of things to discuss.I agree. A lot has happened in the last 12 months. I think this is going to be a great one though, DJ Demon.Me too! The Flashback Christmas Special has become somewhat of a tradition even.Indeed, but first some music to get things going and then something really special, something that I know that you curious love.speaker-2

yes, this is from one of the best retro games ever!It's also the first time we play this on the station. Here is White Hair from Jazz Jackrabbit 2. Let's go!speaker-1

Hey, DJ Demon, you have had the flashback episodes hosted on Spotify, but lately I've noticed that something has happened to them. They're not available for some reason. Would you care to tell us what's going on?Yeah, I would like to know that as well. It would be Spotify, this nice service that has decided that most of our content is copyrighted.I have somewhere around 100 emails telling me that each and every episode of the podcast are copyrighted and should not be added to Spotify. They consequently remove them from the stream as well. if you go to Spotify, you can only find like half of our episodes. And as they were doing that, they also uploaded all the episodes causing the server to crash.So I would say Spotify is not on my most favorite list of services today.They're not on your nice list.speaker-0

Nope, it's kinda like Santa has a list of evil services and that would be Spotify. Absolutely on the naughty list. They get coal in the stockings.I completely agree. I've had some experiences with them too, but on a different avenue. But I totally agree with you there. They're definitely on the naughty list.AbsolutelyBut the episode has been available up to this point, right?No, actually they nuked them a few months ago. So I tried today when I updated the so-called RSS feed that kind of tells the services that their podcast is available and what episodes there are. So said, I'm going to give them another try. And they tried to upload the whole thing and yeah, it didn't work splendidly.speaker-2

And you got a lot of emails for...Yeah, everyone is like, yeah, you're having copyrighted episodes. We don't like that. And it's like, yeah, well, YouTube has no problem with it. They also have a copyright filter.But most of the songs that are included in the podcast are like original track music. Can they copyright that?Yes. Depends on. This is a bit tricky to answer, but if you take something like Dr. Awesome, which is a Norwegian like you guys, an artist named Björn Lunde, and he has copyrighted his whole backlog of Amiga tunes.But you have actually a permission from him.speaker-0

I actually bought it from the site and on the site it said that it's okay to use for non-commercial purposes. So yes, as long as I don't charge anyone to listen to every KDOT radio, it's fine to go.and Flashback tracks from the past is entirely free for everyone.Absolutely. I don't know if anybody wants to pay for it. I don't think so.It's definitely supposed to be in the public domain. mean, this is like history and just say it's historical advisory content. why would charge money for this? I consider that to be unethical.Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I won't really criticize Mr. Lund here. I think he has copyright to the music, but generally, as it's been free on a mod archive and different sites for so many years, putting him under copyright control feels a little bit like you're coming off that now.speaker-2

Yeah, and again, I think it's important point to underline here is that not all song, it just needs to be one song, right? And then the entire podcast episode.Yes, Spotify does that. YouTube is a little bit different. What it simply does is that it gives you a warning that this... then it removes your monetization possibility. You can't sell ads anymore. I don't care because I don't really sell ads, but that's the worst thing. There are two other degrees in hell. You can get a situation where it's saying that it's no longer playing in, Russia or Belarus or something.And the last thing and that's really nasty you can get a copyright strike and if you get free of these your YouTube channel is historyYou're out. Yeah. Yes. Well, that's sad in a way, but mostly sad for Spotify, who are missing out on great content from flashback tracks from the past. Thankfully, you can listen to all the episodes on YouTube and the erik.radio. Are we on any others?Most any kind of service like iTunes and stuff and Google podcast as well and also on all those podcast aggregators that generally just send a link to your site to download the mp3 files so just type flashback comma tracks from the past and you'll find itspeaker-1

Does that include SoundCloud as well?No, not SoundCloud. That costs money.Alright, well we'll head into more music and the next one is Mountain Breeze by Jaren Tell.speaker-0

That was some delightful music here on Flashback, tracks from the past. Time to do some check-in. What are everybody up to right now?Well, this is going to be an interesting one from me at least, DJ Demon. since the last time, I've been diving a little bit into the advanced art of AI and music. But I decided to take a little special focus into AI music, somewhat in the...not trying to use it to generate everything, but trying to use the AI as an instrument, like a complementary source of the total product. Whereas I regain the control and ownership of the most important thing about the music, like lyrical, compositional and arrangement-wise control, that is. And I've been...I'm not going to say successful, but I do have a fair amount of listeners. I also have released albums to Spotify, which is why I earlier said, shame on you, Spotify, or not in so many words. I've also released pretty much across all the different services out there with the exception ofFacebook, Meta, and Instagram, and TikTok, and Snapchat. I'm not going to release my music there. It's definitely an option. And unlike you, I am using SoundCloud for this, SoundCloud for Artists. And if any one of you listeners feel like you want to start out with music and releasing music, I would definitely suggest that you start out with getting yourself a Spotify for Artists account.speaker-1

Sorry, not Spotify for artists. mean, SoundCloud for artists.of course. We're not getting paid.It's not endorsed, but I would recommend it because the tools you have available there, it's rather good actually. So that's more or less like the foundation of what I've been doing. That's, of course, yeah, a little bit of private stuff, but that's not worth mentioning. So what about you, Corius? I hear that you have a lot of interesting stuff in the pipeline.Yeah, well, this year it's been a lot of 3D animation. I worked, so we were at Eddison 2025. I competed together with Alfa in the animation compo there. Me and DJ Demon, commented from Eddison.That was a fun one, DJ Demon, don't you think? And yeah, then there's right now is the 12 days of Christmas, where on the site I run, the Retro Spirit, which is celebrating its 10th year anniversary. And corroborately, the site as well is also celebratingspeaker-0

Absolutely.speaker-2

anniversary. It's two decades, 20 years. So both of them are. it is. I like I'm the only person who develops and maintains that site. thankfully, I get help from you guys and others to provide content. So while I remember, thank you. Thanks a lot for the help you're providing.It's fun actually to write reviews and stuff. I recently wrote a review and some texts about this Mavis Beacon teaching typing. Really nice game, but it's actually more like a program. It's a little bit of gamification where you can really learn to type faster and more accurate. It's a really nice thing.Yeah, it's an edutainment title from the 80s where you are taught typing and you reading that review actually taught me that Mavis Beacon doesn't exist.That's right, they made her up.That's mind-blowing. I've always heard that name. I thought it was a real person, but I never did a research. Wow, so thanks for that insight. Now my typing experience is ruined forever. 12 Days is Christmas is one game, one every day from the 12th to the 23rd of December. And we've been running that for...speaker-0

YeahBut,speaker-2

for 10 years now and before that it was the annual Christmas calendar which was one day, one game every day from the 1st to 24th. That also ran for 10 years. So hopefully if we do 12 days of Christmas next year it will be the longest running event that we have had on the site.It's really cool. One new game per day. Yeah, absolutely.Yeah, so it's since it's anniversary edition we're focusing on cult classics and also platforms that haven't been on the site before. Like one of them is Gamecube. We don't have that until now. And also I think Mac OS because Mavis Beacon was on Mac OS, right?Yeah, it was a release for that platform. You know, this software still exists. It's running on websites nowadays.Really?speaker-2

Yeah? What is-Mavis Beacon, yes, absolutely. You still need to learn how to type better. So it's a very long running thing.yeah, just like Typewriter or TypeRacer and all those kind of...Same keyboard basically.yeah, well keyboards haven't changed that.speaker-0

Now it's still QWERTY.But yes, it's... And now of course we're doing the Christmas special. And yeah, it's also just very hectic up towards Christmas with a lot of things happening. And we've also been planning some things, me and you, DJ Demon, but we'll come back to that a little later. and I almost forgot, we have upgradedThe Ericade radio also. The website. Not much, but the podcasts have gotten an upgrade for the graphical, each of the logos and stuff, each of the ingress or header images and the podcast page looks a bit better now.speaker-0

Absolutely, it's been a big change actually. It's looking much nicer. But there are a number of other things I have kind of sent a list of things that needs to be fixed. Not really big stuff, but well, you got your work cut out for you.Yes, do. if I have some downtime during Christmas I can get to them. EriK.radio is, while it's launched and people are, from what I gather, like it, there are still things that needs to be addressed. So we'll work on it as time goes by.So, such is this.and time goes by. Okay, DJ Demon, the next song I challenge you to pronounce the artist on this.That would be a gerontel,speaker-2

No no no, we already had Mountain Breeze by Gerontel. The next one!Stimul and THWY. Is that hard? No.speaker-0

got some interesting news. The big C is back and I'm not talking about cancer. I'm talking about Commodore. Absolutely. The old computer we remember, the old computer brand we remember. What do you feel about that?Well, to be fair, are a lot of the newer generations out there who consider Commodore to be equal to cancer.is back after 30 years, it seems like. I never had a Commodore myself. I always went to friends' places who had Commodores, played Last Ninja, even though the loader and the music was perfect. The control scheme there, we have talked about Last Ninja before, and I freaking hate that thing. Control scheme, you can't make any precision jumping that the game requires.Yeahspeaker-0

Yesspeaker-0

There is one place in that game where you try to jump over, I think it's a log or a boat or something, and trying to match and land on that boat while you're jumping another time to get into the other sides. Impossible basically. You have to try it and if you fail you die and you have to do it all over again.And not only that sequence, you have to go back. It's so annoying. Yeah, that isometric does not translate well to a game or a joystick that...No. No, exactly.But you have a Commodore 64 Digidemon.I have two, three. I have one that is the Z model, the one that looks like an Amiga. I got the classic bread box one. You always seen that when you looked at old pictures of the C64 and I have an SX64, the luggable version of it. It's kind of like a laptop for people that really want something heavy in their lap.speaker-1

Isn't that the one which is basically a carryable 10-inch monitor?Yes, that's the one. Looks like an oscilloscope.Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember those. They're fun.Yeah, Commodore wasn't the only one trying to build stuff like that, so it was kind of common design back in the day.Yeah.speaker-1

I remember Tanberg I think tried and failed miserably with that.Hmm... But most of the brands did fail. In 1983, the whole market almost died, both gaming consoles and computers, and a lot of the brands simply went under or gave up. This was because the market was flooded with cheap and bad games. Do you remember which game it was that killed the whole market? You don't know that? E.T.No.Please do.So.speaker-0

worst game ever.Wait a minute, yes, yes, yes, yes, I remember that. I still have nightmares about it.I think he has done two where he actually goes to the landfill and finds aYeah, the truth is that Atari, I think it was, they throw the whole non-sold cartridges on a landfill and just forgot about it. It's been a rumor for many years, but it turned out to be true.Yeah. But so like in not really recent years, but I'm just going to say recent years in and make that 10 years. In recent years, there's been a resurgence of platforms that have become available in like mini versions. Nintendo did that and Sega Genesis did that. Wasn't there a Commodore 64 mini as well?speaker-1

That is true.speaker-0

I think it was like two.so how is this Commodore 64 that's coming back now, how is that different from the mini ones?The mini ones is basically emulation. It's kind of something you can do with a Raspberry Pi if you want to. That thing that's with the new Commodore, the new Commodore branded computer, which is basically a refurbished Ultimate 64. It's an FPGA emulation, which means it's emulating on a chip level instead of a software level.So it's much more compatible and it's cool technology and everyone who just wants the authentic experience may actually join on that.Yeah, Just like Mr. FPGA that plays original like Sega or Super Nintendo games.speaker-0

honest with you, if you just remember what happened with Commodore, they went under in 1994, 29th of April to be exact. The eyepiece, what do you say, exactly, that was scattered to the wind. Today what happened was that Perifractic, a very well-known YouTuber, was able to get hold of the brandintellectual property.speaker-0

IP so to speak and he bought it from a company and now he's restarting the proper Commodore business machinesHoly crap. So it's actually like now in the hands of fans.Yes. To be honest with you, I'm not super like... positive to this. I think it's a cool thing that he's doing it, absolutely. But I don't really know what he's gonna sell under that brand. It's gonna just keep going for years on years on end because most of the emulated Commodore stuff already exists. I don't know why he's bringing to the table really. No.Are you getting one? Okay.I I'm free, mean, come on. A fool and his money should soon part, see.speaker-2

That's true. mean, it's focused on nostalgia. I mean, from what I'm gathering, it will, since it's FPGA, and it's basically mimicking everything from the original C64, then all the original peripherals would work as well, right?Most of them will. think the user port isn't there. They had to make room for some connectors that are modern like the HDMI and stuff. But bar that the normal cartridges will work. Absolutely. And so will the cassette and diskette drive. You can find a 1541 you can connect up and use it.Do they have like, I'm just looking at an image here, do they have like added USB ports to the thing?Yes, absolutely. Modern times, you know.well, yeah, but if you're keeping it, I mean, I'm getting a feeling that it's a replica, but maybe it's not your granddad's Commodore anyway.speaker-0

No, not by a long shot. As I said, it's FPGA emulated. So it looks like a Commodore 64 and it's on a chip level pretty close. I mean, the SID chip is emulated in a proper transistor by transistor way, so to speak. So yeah, it's cool technology, but I don't see that you're bringing something that we don't already have.It actually is going to lack a very significant feature. And this is something we discussed in the Edison 2023 a little bit with, I can't remember his name on the top of my head, but the one guy from that demo group, we talked to Corius, the one who told us about, you know, using a hair blower, like a blow dryer on the Commodore chip. Yeah, let's try it. Yeah.where they use that to provoke the overheating bug to get the special effect they actually needed graphically. the kind of fun thing is you can't emulate that with FPGA. That is out the window for good. And that kind of takes away a lot of the fun from Commodore is that you can't glitch the processor anymore.You have to, like, you're paraphrasing that interview though, because they actually didn't have the glitch. They didn't intend for the glitch. But when the demo was run, they were like sixth or seventh in line, and the Commodore that was running all the demos had been heating up. So when their demo, which was graphically impressive and very intensive, overloaded the chip and created artifacts, so they had to go with like ice spray.the chip to cool it down in order to make it run properly. So it was a cool side effect but yeah I agree you can't get those experiences but I'm not sure they wanted that experience in the first place.speaker-1

a lot of other demos that actually used these tricks to get these graphical artifacts as a part of the graphical package where you wanted the Commodore to be slightly overheating for the demo to actually work as intended.I think that's correct, but...we can have a fight about.But yeah, the Commodore 64 is back on the production line. seems any other console or thing you hope they will bring back?speaker-0

But most stuff is back, mean the Nintendo, the original NES, that's a mini-version now and the Sega Mega Drive and... That's emulated, I don't know, would you really need a like, transistor exact replica of an NES? Isn't it good enough? I don't know. What I heard people talk about is basically when you emulate something, it runs slower, so you might be in a situation when you try to...that's emulated. That'sspeaker-0

pull the joystick and sprite doesn't move immediately which means it's kind of hard to get a game like International Karate to work right because you can't make the punches land properly.I mean, if you're a purist, then emulation is like, yeah. Swearing in charge.Well, the same is true with FPGA. They would say that's also emulation. So I know purists, are no pleasing them.yeah, okay. I kind of understand that I guess. But for more authentic experience you would need to get an original C64. Are they like, can you get a hold of one these days?Yeah, a properspeaker-0

Yeah, think so. But it's like, thinning numbers. I mean, they break and there are no spare parts for most of the ships. I know there are some new SID ships that you can buy, but generally if they break and you can't find what it's called a new old stock, then you're pretty much out of luck with that. So I believe that FPGA emulation, if I may call it so, that's the future. You can't just run old stuff.for the camera. Yeah, it's not possible. Do you know how many C64s there were sold by the way?I'm gonna take a barren guess just like when we were guessing on songs on Arikade radio. I'm gonna guess seven figures.speaker-1

million or more.No, it's nine. Ten million. Ten but you're close. That's not a good one. And that's a bad one. They say between 10 to 20 millions, numbers, exact numbers are not known, but I heard like 40 millions or something. And that means for just being that brand and that model, it's the most, the most well selling computer in the whole world ever. Computer? Yes.for being that exact model, so to speak. mean, modern computers, if you just think about pieces, that's much more now, many more actually. But...And on this note in guessing numbers, Baron, can I ask you how many number of tracks are on the station of Erickhead Radio?This is not gonna go anywhere good.speaker-1

70,000?70,000. I'm not saying anything.Wait, don't say it. Do you recall when we had this discussion back in Edison 2023, Okay. Can I guess as well? Sure. I'm guessing 2745.Absolutely.speaker-0

Yeah, that's a nice guess. You're looking at the stats page, aren't you? That's exactly right. That's to the... Well... It's exactly right.And I'm guessing it's about 160.7 hours worth of playtime.Yeah, that means a week actually so if you were playing it would play it it would not come back to point zero to them for one weekSpeaking of songs... Do you want to take the next song we're gonna play here, Baron?Hmmspeaker-1

We will be playing the final mod by Mick RipponHe's super talented good onespeaker-2

It is a pest and Flashback tracks from the past podcast has experienced it first hand from the Swedish Green Ball service thing. It's a tricky subject and the demo scene is no exception. Here to tell us about how much you can sample before you get into murky territory is Baron of Dubstep. Enlighten us good sir.Alright, now this is going to be an interesting one for most of you guys because we're going to go into the details about digital rights management. We're going to go into a lot of the murky waters that is called AI. And as a couple of those of you probably have noticed, there's a new phenomena out there that has been pretty much plaguing the hit lists andOf course, again, our favorite service provided to bash Spotify, and that's called AI Music. The thing about AI Music is usually it's built upon samples. And not samples as in the usual way we would use them, you know, like for...For usual mod making, would sample sounds directly from a song and put them together in a mod plug or fast tracker environment and then record it again. However, this time they actually base the learning algorithms of the AI onto samples, but they use entire songs as samples. But not only that, they also split up songs into various multi tracks and sample each.multi-track lane to train various aspects of the model. For instance, vocals generation, guitar generation, percussion, drums, etc. And the problem here is when you start out looking at the digital rights of it all, it becomes a nightmare.speaker-1

I'm not using the word nightmare lightly, because who owns pretty much the copyright to what is being produced out there?paraphrasing from Wikipedia is that AI music cannot be copyrighted because it lacks human authorship as established by the US Copyright Office. But if you're assisting where human contributes significantly, it may qualify for copyright. So it depends if you're clicking a button and doing nothing versus clicking a button and then massaging it enough.So back to the question of copyrights and how it evolves to the demo scene. This is kind of the problem. How much sampling is too much? That is a definition both of where are you, like in which jurisdiction are you, like geographically. Are you in EU? Are you in Germany? Are you in the UnitedI this in Germany.Yeah, I know. still, in Germany, have German local laws and then you have EU laws on top of that. You can be in accordance with the former and be in breach of the latter, which is also a nightmare. So it depends. If you're going to make a demo and make it legal and make it copyrightable, you have to consult with a lawyer.speaker-1

Don't try to go there on your own.But again, most demo scene music isn't something that's released on Spotify and stuff like that. It's on scene.org or Demo Zoo or ModArchive and things like that.And thank you, the IFP and Sono and the rights holder interest organizations don't even know how to listen to those websites and crawl them for copyrighted content.Don't be so sure. Actually, I would say they turn a blind eye to the whole thing, I guess. And it's historically been this way. If you go to ModArchive and look at their copyright information, they say that everyone who's uploading something is responsible for the copyright, following copyright laws. And that's interesting because if you search in a ModArchive or any of those sites, you can search for intergal.which is this intergalactic, intergalactic, you know that song. you have a number of these, have Axel Foley, cop of LA Coppo, it's generally full of copyright violations and they don't care yet. One day they might actually turn another eye to it.speaker-2

YeahI really want to throw a little bit of context into this for you listeners out there. If you want to go into the details about what we're talking about and hearing it from one of the professionals in the music industry, I would recommend going and looking up, of course, he's not affiliated with us, but look up Rick Beato and his groaning about...YouTube almost terminating his channel because of copyright warnings, etc. And of course, he's also actually outing which artists and rights holders are the decidedly worst on this. It's actually a rather sobering listening.I would recommend just going there just so that you're aware of how bad it is. And how greedy some of the artists that most of us look up to really are. And you'd be amazed when he starts throwing down those names. You're just going to be sitting there like, what the hell?But I don't think the artists are the real problem here. It's the copyright holders and they may not have anything to do with the artist. So yeah.speaker-2

I've actually been thinking about like for Retro Spirit we host most videos if not all on YouTube but in the case where there's like there's let's say there's an intro and there's a song playing like Ave Maria plays in the intro of is it Hitman 1 or Hitman 2 the original games and that's of course copyright strike it from here to the seven layers of hellAnd I've actually been thinking about hosting all the videos ourselves on Retro Spirit. But that means that they can't be that long and there are compression issues and sizes. You can't have 4K videos. Then you would have one video and that's it.Thanks.Another thing I want to talk about which really grinds my gears. It's the whole idea of abandonware. If you think about it, simply copyright unknown. There is no such thing as abandonware. It's copyrighted, all right, but no one is really caring about it. Just think about what would happen with CSDB, the Commodore database with all games and programs ever released. Almost all of them were copyrighted back in the day.and some of- nospeaker-2

I the pen still.The thing about copyright is that the copyright is never perpetual. It has to be renewed within a certain time frame.75 yearsThat's the new definition, the old definition that was in place around the time up until Commodore's first commercial demise. It was, I think, 30 years.And don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that CSDB shouldn't exist. Quite the opposite. I absolutely love what they're doing, and ModArchive and all this. What I'm a little bit worried about is how... ...Slappedash the whole thing in the demo scene. It's like, no, no problem, nobody cares, we can go on like doing this. I would be more worried if it was up to me, basically. I hope that we won't get into trouble, but we should...speaker-0

Kind of be careful with copyrightsWe should be very careful, but also we should not worry too much about when it comes to like abandonware. I would say that abandonware, has the potential of being a ticking bomb, but I don't think it's actually a ticking bomb so much in the sense that whoever owns the IP to the...You shouldspeaker-1

to that content. Usually it's bought off by somebody who were owed money by the enterprise who made it, or it's been sold off just for capital gains, which is a good thing. And the capital gain holder usually doesn't know what they have. They just have that particular piece of binary and they just...know what to do with the IP. that the music industry is furious, it's been like this forever and with the onset or incoming of streaming services they got even more fierce because everybody could listen to whatever song they wanted. But in abandoned world, like you have now US ruling that exempts Web Archive, archive.org to have games on their site.Yeah, I That's awesome. I really love that.Yeah, like ER or Hearts, what was it that this hospital game I was playing on Windows 98. Open Heart is the name, which is a VM, FMV game. You cannot buy that, you cannot find it in any like purchasable version at all, but you can play it and find it on Web Archive. And like itGames are art, music is art, and if it's not preserved, then it will disappear. And this, of course, has a myriad of levels that we're not going to solve here. But in terms of the demo scene and how much sampling is enough, sorry, too much, you said, Baron, that there's like a level just to jump back into the original topic. There is a level that you need to have in order to be original enough for not to be inspeaker-2

in the copyright territory.Yeah, it basically means that you need to reach that threshold of originality so that this can consider to be one of your works, not a derivative work. That particular level where it's at, it's not an international standard. It's a national standard by every jurisdiction out there.So it may vary and your mileage may also vary a little bit with like local variations and local addendums to it. You basically, if you are in a position where this actually matters to you, the best thing you can do is invest a couple of euros, a couple of dollars or whatever currency you have in a lawyer to get a definitive answer. That isthe most important thing you can do.Which the demo scene will never do because we don't care, they don't care. I mean, usually you shouldn't, like you're not, that's not the territory. depends. Of course, if you're releasing it for sale, that's an entirely different beast. But I think it's time for a song and then we'll go into AI and the demo scene just to continue on this path.speaker-0

No, that's the thing.speaker-2

That's okay. And this next song, I guarantee you it's copyrighted. No, I don't think so. But the game is available. It's not a banner where you can buy Simon the Sorcerer on GOG, for instance, not affiliated. And this is Simon the Sorcerer, Dragon's Cave, Dragon's Winter Cave by Select Novel. Here we go.Dear Simon, I am pleased to announce that you have been chosen from literally hundreds of hopeful candidates to perform a death-defying but extremely worthwhile quest for which you will be rewarded quite a lot. All you have to do is rescue me from the hands of the evil sorceress Sordid. Feel free to use my extremely valuable spell book and dog to assist you.speaker-0

Alright, AI, this much maligned, loved, hated, whatever, nobody is left without a feeling for artificial intelligence such as it is. A few weeks ago, Flashback, Tracks from the Past, that's the very podcast you're listening to right now, we actually had an AI song, an AI version of Bubble Bobble that we ran in one of our episodes.and it garnered a number of comments and some criticism leveraged towards the show. I actually went to various demo scene Discord servers just to ask them what they did you think about it? And the general thing is the demo scene hate AI. Really, it's a very, very high burning hatred against it. say it's worthless, it's crap, it shouldn't be.and they say we don't worry about it it's never gonna be as good as we are that's generally the feeling you get from it and one guy actually blocked our YouTube channel just because he played that one song so yeah feelings are running wildI can understand exactly why. Although, this is kind of embarrassing for me to admit, but when I do play instruments myself, I play the guitar, I play the bass, I also play the banjo. You will never hear that on this channel, I promise. I swear to God.Thank you!speaker-1

But yeah, that's half of my confession. The other confession is that yes, I use Suno AI. But just like that listener of yours who blocked the channel, I abhor AI slop. Yes. Yes, I have. Do you guys want to hear one of the most...Have you done anything?speaker-1

interesting ones I've made. I'll just play a little bit of the intro. I'm not going to force AI music onto theThis is related to a gaming sound, gaming music.No, this is more like... Well, actually, yes, this one actually relates to Cyberpunk 2077, but it's not retro. But I will play it out to you, like the intro, so you can feel a little bit about what it is. All right? And if you get everything right and you have a strong prompt, you can get things that sound amazing. And I will be... I will be going a little bit about...that particular bit with this one song. And this one is going... I'm not going to say which one it is, but you will probably have heard this one before. It's just that this one is not... This is a remix of a fairly normal one that I love. Here goes.speaker-1

And that is a little bit of what you can get out of AI. And the thing is about all that AI stuff, I like it. Now the question is, should artists worry? Artists shouldn't worry at all.speaker-2

And we're back. You're listening to Flashback Tracks from the Past, the Christmas special episode that we for some years now have been running every year. So it has become somewhat of a tradition. We need to get back into the games and the things that we remember when that we have played during Christmas, either that they give this Christmas feeling or that you justremember that you played this during Christmas and it gave you a long lasting impression. And DJ Demon, you have, like we have every year we make a list of Christmas games that give that Christmas mood, whether or not it's actually Christmas related or it just gives you that feeling during Christmas that I remember this and it was very fun.What games are you going to suggest this year for every listener to play?Okay, first of all, I'm sorry if I'm suggesting the same thing again. I don't remember what I suggested last year. I think I talked about Silent Service, which is not really a Christmas game, but it has this kind of feeling when you're sitting in a dark room and have like red lights around you like you're sitting in a sub. It's a bit... But no, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm gonna go with Christmas Lemmings or Holiday Lemmings, I think it was called.It was released in 1994 and it was a short demo. I don't know if there ever was a real game coming out there, but it was super nice with a few levels of lemming mayhem and of course the music that goes along with it.speaker-2

Yeah, I actually have insight on the Christmas Lemmings because that's that was this is back in the shareware days and the it often was either attached to a magazine or you downloaded it from somewhere if you had a bbs I think and this was the 19 the the first one which year1994 and I think it was like 95 as well, but I don't really know I'm gonna have to go with 94 design nowSo it started in 1991 and...The regular lab is, yeah.No, no, Christmas lemmings started in 91. Yeah, and then you have Christmas lemmings 92. then in 93, it changed to holiday lemmings. And then it's holiday lemmings in 94 as well.speaker-0

Yeah, okay.speaker-0

Yeah, okay, okay, but that's what I meant.So the two first ones, Christmas Lemmings, those were the 91 version came out as a demo and had two levels with Christmas theme and two levels from No!No, no, no more lemmings.Yes. And the series continued in 92 under the same name, but with four levels also released as a demo. Every level this time was Christmas inspired and the difficulty was much harder or it varied much more from comically easy to comically difficult. And in 93, they changed it to Holiday Lemmings, which wasreleased both as a demo with three levels and a whole version or a full version with 16. In the last year, 1994, there were four demos in the demo and 16 in the whole full version. I think actually we're looking at the description here. It says that 94 had 64 levels on the menu. yeah, 94 was, I think that's the cover from the 94.speaker-1

Wowspeaker-2

Game is what you have in the previous flashback episode as cover.Yeah, actually it is exactly that. Yeah, I didn't think about it, but it's true. Yeah, Lemmings. Such a fun game. If you can't beat it, you can always nuke the Lemmings. Just push that button and they all go up in flames. Really nasty way. shake their heads. Yeah. Oh no!And then the timer isn't exact on all of them. So the timer just adds sequentially for each lemming. they don't explode at the same time.I know, know. And they kind of like you'd bore themself into the ground as they are exploding.The holiday lemmings here are going to send the image on the chat here just to get the feeling of.speaker-1

Definitely.speaker-0

Holiday Lemmings. Okay, dear listeners, you can't see it, but it's from the game and it's a snow-laden ground and Christmasy Lemmings that are red. They have like Santa suits and stuff on instead of the normal blue ones they used to wear. And it's also one of the levels has a 1994, I guess. It's kind of the year written as a terrain, so to speak. Yeah.And whoever played this game gave up on them because you can see they have a little two above their head. That's the countdown timer. So they nuked them.Yes.speaker-2

I have submitted this screenshot, so it's probably me.Yeah, you gave up. You gave up on them. You failed them.no, you saved 0 %Rock bottom!rock bottom indeed. Yeah, I remember playing Christmas Lemmings. Also the music there, very Christmassy, very cute and endearing I think. Do you have any more games?speaker-0

Peace.one game. It's not necessarily Christmas themed, but I always consider this one to be Christmassy for me. I do have lot of Christmas memories from it. It's actually called Dune. Not Dune 2, but the old Dune.Yeah, of the first Arthias'sNo, not the RPS. This is the role-playing game where you actually walk around on Dune as Polar Trades.okay.speaker-2

I sent a link there in the chat you can see.Yeah.Another thing that the users, the listeners can't see, but we are actually linking to Retro Spirit here and looking at Dune, the original game. Okay, I did not know that. Released on DOS.Yeah, there was something in the game's description which is rather hilarious for us Norwegians. says, Emperor has given the Atreides house rice to manage the extraction of most precious substance in the entire universe, the melange. Which is pretty much what we use as margarine when we're frying stuff in the frying pan.It has a rather nasty death picture here. I'm looking at your site now, Kurius. And he looks really stone cold dead and it says back to starting point. Yeah. Failed.speaker-2

Yeah, common theme here. Have any of you seen the new Dune movies?Nah,I saw the television series. Intriguing to say the least. I'm not negative. I'm tentatively positive, actually, because they don't make the usual... They don't do the same that they did with Game of Thrones, for instance.I've seen the first one.speaker-1

overhyped it. mean, it's not bombastic. It's good. And they stay true to Frank Herbert, which is also very important that you deal with the Dune universe.Mmm.speaker-2

Yeah, I've seen the first movie and a bit of trivia there. The Ornithopters, which is like the insect kind of helicopter thing. They, in order to get, if you haven't seen the movie, Digidemon, I highly recommend it. Just for the visual effects. They, if you're interested in rendering in 3D as I am, you'll learn from behind the scenes that when they render that motion in order to get it, like with insect wings, it moves really, really fast.Absolutely, yeah.speaker-2

So they had to render four subframes for every frame. So usually when you have a movie it's 23.96 or 24 frames. But here for every frame you render four more frames. So in a second you would have 96 frames for instance instead of 24 frames to get that kind of fidelity.And that is why special effects, where you actually take care of that, makes it rather expensive, but it adds more credibility to the special effects, I would say.Yeah, the original Dune. The funny thing there is that the first game and the second couldn't be more different. It's almost like the first one is a fishing simulator and the next one is a flying simulator. It's that different. So the first one, like first person RPG, the second one is basically Command & Conquer or the precursor, Grandaddy, Command & Conquer.I'm not going to go into details about the second one because I can talk about that for hours.We know that.speaker-2

Yeah, but for me it's a couple of games. The first one is, I'll also send that in the chat once I get it up here. Let's see. It's a Norwegian game. It's Interpost Christmas Greetings.Huh?speaker-2

And this was like a Christmas edition of Interpost. Interpost is a side scrolling shoot them up just like Gradius and to an extent Arkanoid and things like those games. So you move from the left to the right or move to the right, you upgrade your ship and stuff like that. And this was Lynx, well, it was very cat, feline based kind of universe. And they had a demo orChristmas offering where the evil lab coat Atnas Sualk, which is Santa Claus backwards, have made their own Santa Claus's and reindeer's with one goal, take over the North Pole and send all Christmas presents where the pepper grows, which means basically to hell. since Christmas needs to be saved, our Lynx hero,is once again traveling in space to save the day and world.links so is this some kind of furry thing going onYouspeaker-2

Yeah, well, yeah, it's links. So it's you control like cat creatures in the original. Like if you if you check Retro Spirit for Interpose, you will see that they were heavily inspired by movies of the time. And one of us is like in the intro, you can see there's a line of maybe I don't have it on the site, but it's it'sa band of soldiers that are like on a conveyor belt, so they're producing soldiers and all of them look like Sylvester Stallone. So the evil guys and the cat people has to save them from them.Okayspeaker-1

So, yeah. Actually, I see in the description of that. Just a little trivia to you. I'm not sure if you know it, but it's actually a... This is actually something that has been featured in Star Trek Enterprise and because of the ship's doctor coming from the planet Denobula.Die.written assets there.OK.Okay. Yeah.speaker-0

I'm sorry, this flow over my head.But yeah, again, Evil Scientist is taking over Santa's home at the North Pole and you're trying to save them. So the music is very like cozy and I forget, I think, yeah, I did a playthrough of the entire thing, which you can see on the site as well. Another game, this one is not Christmas related, but I remember it fondly.I remember playing the demo a lot. It's Lost Eden from Cryo Interactive. The music here is produced by the South African musician Stefan Piquet, which passed away earlier this year. We actually have Lost Eden on Arikade, believe. There's one, Lost Eden music or whatever it is. Yes, we do.toand we have the full soundtrack on the site so I highly recommend listening to it because it's very very good you can also buy it on Bandcamp I thinkspeaker-0

Stefan Pikk according to the notes.Stefan Pick, yeah. And he produced a music to this game and it's once I got it because it's on it's a CD version so it's because it's pre-rendered and has a lot of animations and stuff and it's weird. It's Cryo Interactive which was I mean people from Exxon, if you remember those FrenchSospeaker-2

They created Commander Blood. Commander Blood is weird as hell, which is a common theme for French developers and games from France. And this is, I mean, it it harkens back to it, even though it's a bit reeled back, more anchored, but still a bit weird. the story here is that you're Adam of Moe. You have to save the dinosaurs from moremorgus rex or morcus rex which is an evil entity and you have to travel the land on a pterodactyl which is your friend and you have to disappoint and click adventure gameI love those.Yeah, But it's obscure, it's dinosaur focused and tribe people. And the soundtrack is so... It fits the game so well. So Lost Eden is highly recommended. And lastly is Uplink. Uplink is, to me, a game that you can just play calmly.until stuff goes sideways and then it's not very calm at all. I also remember that the interface does not provide enough... If you look here, I sent you a screenshot of when you have to proxy. So Uplink is a hacker game from intro... what's that called again? Introversion? No, introversion software.speaker-1

Youspeaker-1

introspectiveYeah, sorry.and they made Darwinia and they made Prison Simulator and all kinds of things. this game is not only is it like it kind of mimics the hacker setting in a semi good way. mean, at least at this time, it tried to give you an insight of like how hacking would work, even though you kind of click a button and theneverything is good or click button and then hack and then you're in. But bouncing, proxy bouncing is a big thing. the graphic, I remember the graphic interface would not work well if you had a lot of proxies and you jumped all around the world before your connection went through. The soundtrack here is stellar. one of the reasons is that it has so many well-known composers.But itspeaker-2

Skaven 252 is here, Carson Cough, which made the music for Flying Tigers among others and Time Lord. All of these have contributed to the soundtrack, which is actually also on the site on retro.gg. one of the songs from that album or game is The Blue Valley by Carson Cough.Awesome song, really awesome one.Yeah, and we actually talked a bit about Karsten Koch and Flying Tigers during our summer show at Edison 2025. But here is the Blue Valley by Karsten Koch from Uplink.speaker-1

And we are back. We wanted to talk a little bit about good games that feel retro, even when they're fairly recent. And we've all been there, like we've played the recent games and it just has that feeling like this is timeless. It's actually so good. It reverberates in your body. Like why isn't this considered a classic? Becauseit will be a classic in X amount of years. So do you have any like that DJ?Yeahspeaker-0

Absolutely, have two that comes to mind. The first one I actually bought and played it is Thimbleweed Park By Ron Gilbert. I think it's name and it's the same guy Yes, it's same guy that made Monkey Island and he came back and this was in 2017 so it's a pretty recent game and it was kind of likeHe wanted Monkey Island, but he didn't have the copyright for it, so he made this instead. It isn't about pirates and stuff, it's more like X-Files with Mulder and Scully and like aliens and the weirdest people in a small town. Really, really well done. I absolutely love that game. The other one I have never played, but I...saw it on Retro.gg as a recommended one and I looked at YouTube and I loved the backgrounds. They kind of harkened back to what backgrounds used to look in the point and click era. But it's not a point and click game. It's called Dust and Illusion Tale. And it's more like a side scroller and it's super nice backgrounds. The backgrounds are, whoa.Yeah, that game is made by Dean Dodrill, which is, he has single-handedly, except for the music, made everything himself. He's also, fun fact, he's the graphic artist from Just Jackrabbit.Yes, I know that. know that. it's a... love him. Yeah, absolutely. I haven't... mean, Jack... Let's see... Jess or Jackrabbit, I always get that wrong. It seemed to be a really nice one. I never had it because it wasn't on the Amiga. I kind of give it up on side scrollers when the Amiga died.speaker-2

Okay.speaker-0

But seems to be super nice game, really good, nice looking graphics and I don't wonder what kind of drugs was Jazz Jackrabbit on, he seems to be on all of them. He looks crazy, don't write crazy.Fermented carrots, brother.Jack... Jack... JackRabbitNah, did I say that? Okay.I was just thinking the other way around.speaker-0

Yeah, but that's what I'm always saying. I kind of screwed that up a number of times. Jazz first. Yeah, yeah. Jazz. Jack Rabbit.I'm listening to jazz, Free jazz.What's his name? He was Cliff Blazinski's creation. The guy from Epic Games. The guy who made also Gears of War and stuff like that.What do you have then, Corius? Do you have any favorite games, like modern games, that you think qualifies for retro status?Well, they feel retro. At least the first new XCOM has that feeling that you remember from the original games, remaking stuff that original game, the XCOM Enemy Unknown or UFO Defense. Those games were so wellspeaker-2

like they have cult status and trying to remake that heritage is a lofty goal. to me they pulled it off.Yeah, totally agree. Totally agree. I played the XCOM new one that came in 2010 or something like that and it was actually quite good. It wasn't as hard as I remember the XCOM games were back in the day, but it was fun, real fun.I think it balanced quite well between making a new game and it kind of took a step away from that catastrophic, sorry, that catastrophe avenue that the XCOM game previously went on. It started with UFO Aftermath being like the last good one in my personal opinion. And then you have Aftershock and Afterlight and et cetera, et cetera. That became more and more like childlike.And then suddenly came the new XCOM, which went all the way back to the same feeling, the same atmosphere and the same, should I say, not kid friendly theme that was in the UFO aftermath.Like new features all the time.speaker-0

I the second game that was like XCOM 2, the old one. And it's like, that was the hardest start I ever had. It was a ship that had sunk in the ocean and you were sending your men there. there was some aliens and they shot one shot and killed all the guys I had except one who hid under a table or something. It was like over before it started. That's a very hard way to start a game.I would say that Terror from the Deep, I do seem to recall it having been nominated and actually won the nomination for being the most obnoxiously difficult sequel ever made.Yeah, from Deep, I kind of liked it, it was... making progression in a game was hard. was... And from what I understood, I never finished that game, but once you got like upgraded lobster armor or whatever, there wasn't much after that. So you kind of waited a long, long, long time, then you got one upgrade and then it was basically nothing after that, which was a very anticlimactic thing.actually all you had to do was get like the hand drill and then you could drill yourself through everything and then the game actually became trivial.tried you to be up close though.speaker-1

Yeah, but you just went on top where you just spotted them with one character that was in hiding. And then you just took one of the other characters from the floor above and just drilled through the floor and then fell down next to them and then just kept drilling them.But that requires you to be relatively close, then surprise and jump through. I also enjoy the XCOM 2, which was the sequel. It improves on the first formula. And I've been talking and recommendingwarmly to Baron of Dubstep, the expansion War of the Chosen. Because it's probably one of the hands down best DLCs I've played. Because it feels like an entirely new game. Most DLCs is like one short story or a couple and then you're done or a couple of new weapons. This changes the game into basically, it felt like it's double the length.and it adds so many meaningful things, but it's still in that XCOM thing. You get that sense of upgrades and sense of surprise when there's new technology or new things happening. And now there's also a Doom timer on the map that goes down. Once the Advent Tower starts building, you cannot remove it, but you can reduce the speed of when it will be completed. So once that arrives,you need to deal with it, otherwise your game is over. everything, every time, you cannot just go there and take a mission. You need to lower the energy barriers and stuff by going through side missions or doing stuff out in the world. And it makes for a very tense nerve throughout the game. And with the DLC or the War of the Chosen, they add three nemesis in addition, whichspeaker-2

screws up all your missions. can appear any time and they can suddenly like when you're landing on a mission they can just kidnap one of yours and suddenly instead of four you have three and they can spawn in new ones stuff that wasn't either in the original XCOM the new one or XCOM 2 the base game and it adds just a lot of new encounters and stuff to the game. Additionally there's a modwhich was very popular for the first XCOM, which is called the Long War. And that adds a new, another layer of strategic decisions to your gameplay because infiltrations now take time. So you can't just choose a mission and then fly there and go. You would need to take into consideration the size of your squad. So if your squad is very large, it will take longer to infiltrate and your opposition will be muchlarger as well because the aliens will now know about your presence as opposed to if you're moving in with two or three people then the infiltration time is lower and the enemy resistance is slower as well and they add a plethora of things just to make a long game even longer. The first or the two of the new XCOM games I feel arestill have that retro feeling but wrapped in modern decisions that make sense. you have others, DJ Dimin?Not what I can think of right now, but there are a number of games that are fun to play when you are kind of relaxing at Christmas. Now I'm gonna have to say I draw blank here. I told you what I know.speaker-2

I think one game series I know you love is Civilization.Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that I remember there was one Christmas in the 90s where I spent the whole Christmas evening to play Civilization 1. It was a game where I first started it. I had no idea how to play it. And then suddenly you kind of figured it all out. And it was like, God, I need to continue. How should I just one more turn, you know?Yeah, just one more turn. And then Gandhi and you could use...He was nasty!done.speaker-1

Gandhi the most peaceful conqueror and obliterator.Yes, absolutely. He was the peace president. He should have won the Nobel Prize Prize.Yeah, it reminds me of playing Civilization 1. So I was playing as, what was it like, English or something. Came over to the New World, started colonizing there. And I had horses, I had musketeers, and I met like robot armies with whatever, something equivalent to that. It was just like...the Aztecs having battle tanks just rolling over my unit like, what the hell?yeah, Civilization. Have you played any of the new ones, Digidemon?speaker-0

Absolutely, I played everything up to Civilization 7. But actually the one I liked the most of the new modern versions, that would be Civilization 5. I think Civilization 6 and 7 never really worked for me. I don't know. It's something that doesn't really attract my attention that much.the core gameplay of moving pieces on a hexadecimal board or something? Is that still there?I don't know, I can't remember if it's still a hex grid in the bottom. I think it is, but I haven't thought about it. In Civilization V you could actually dumb down the graphics so you could see the grid. You just switch to a specific mode there and it would just show. It would look pretty much like Civilization I.I,You have a couple of games that I want to mention for your retro status that are pretty new ones. And I'm going to actually say the one that really deserves to be mentioned here and that is Disco Elysium.speaker-0

Nah?That one blew me away straight off the bat. mean, it's like point and click isometric view adventure, pretty much any kind of old, I'm going to play a, I'm going to be a police investigator type of game, but it contains a very, should I say, avant-garde or no, not avant-garde, would say art nouveau,city which is called Revastrol. It's very French oriental based theme mixed with like all the like all theold French architecture. And the thing is, you wake up as an alcoholized police investigator and there's a murder to be solved and whatnot. But the story itself is pretty good, actually. I would say it takes you for a ride. But not only that, what really, really, you know,What really floats my boat about that particular game is how you emphasize the skills and how you can augment the thought process and the various conversational opportunities you have, like conversation options, like various things you can say based on whatnot. And that kind of goes a little bit in towards you experience things.speaker-1

that you can internalize. And when you internalize it, get a small nerf on one of your stats, which is translated into a larger buff on other stats, such as my personal favorite internalization there, Hobo Cup. You don't have money. You don't have money, but that doesn't stop you. You can sleep in a container.Alrightspeaker-1

And that also allows you to pick up plastic bottles that you can tear off and get money for. money. And that way you actually manage to survive the first couple of nights in the game if you screw everything else up. But not only that, it's the music also. The music just hits home with every sense there. It's just...amazing. And also the fact how the character plays, how he's built up, because it takes into consideration the old, not to say the old, but some classical psychological theories about how our psyche is structured. know, like in the Empire, have the old reptilian brain, etc., etc., etc. And all of thosethey interact with you when you are posed with difficulties. So I like to play characters in these kinds of role-playing games that are very mentally focused. So I decided the first playthrough that I'm going to create my guy and put all his points into mental only. So I have a longer conversation then with my reptilian brain, which tries to say that, go back into the darkness, you don't want to live, et cetera, et cetera.and I fight him and argue with him until he lets me wake up. So my character wakes up in a room that's totally trashed. There's empty wine bottles all over. So I take the character and goes into the bathroom, looks in the mirror and then I'm presented with like the very first internalization. I'm a DISCO COP!Okay, so it's from a hobo cop to disco copspeaker-1

the Hobo Cop comes later. So the kind of thing is he's a disco star and he puts on his clothes and before you can exit the room you have to grab the tie. The tie is stuck on the ceiling fan overhead and as I don't pay attention to the health bar of my character he has one hit point. So II don't see exactly where you have to click to get him to turn off the ceiling fan. But I see the tie. So I mark the tie and click for him to interact, that is try to jump and get it. He fails the die roll and dies.Okay, Instant punishment, old style.Yeah, just like Kingsquare.Yeah, this is one of the better modern games I've ever seen and by far I would say this qualifies not only as a classic but it qualifies for as many awards as it can get.speaker-2

ThankAnd lastly, there's another game also that's definitely a good candidate for being retro, like modern retro. It's called The Ascent. Me and you have played it a little bit, Corius. Yeah. Yeah. I think that one has it in it to definitely be called that because of the cyberpunk style, but also because it has so much like...dark wave features in it that it just to me it feels like it's like an old modernized Amiga shooter game pretty much.Twin stick shooter in many ways but sprinkled with lot of details and vistas that look pretty nice. I have a couple more. Actually as you were talking I remembered more. I'll link this one because this is an incredible one. It's called Against the Black Priory.Bye!speaker-0

Okay?If you've never heard about it, that's fine. But this emaces on so many levels. It harkens back to the EGA, CGA days where you have a band of adventures, I think it's six or eight, and you move around in an isometric way, similar to Ultima Pagan 7.which is very popular. But the mood and the setting and the amount of customization and interactability is so modern. You don't expect to things like move a cabinet. In the old days, you would just open the cabinet and that was it. But here you can move it. You can expect it from the backside if there's something written there. Just small tidbits thatadd to the modernization of like, it makes sense now to be able to inspect on the side instead of just the front, for instance, of a cabinet. And it's the, you start on a ship, everything is gritty and then you move, you make landfall and there'sSospeaker-0

itspeaker-2

I mean, the art style is just fantastic. Whoever made this deserves praise. It harkens back to early 90s CRPGs.But know what that actually reminds me about? It's an old NES game called Shadowgate. And the reason why I remember it is because it was in Swedish.Okay.I think it's more eye of the beholder, but stillYeah absolutely, that was an awesome game.speaker-2

Yeah, so still. I have two more and I'll shut up. It's a similar vein, I think. It's the original Stronghold. Stronghold is a strategic game where you're cast out from your kingdomNo.speaker-2

where you have to compete against other... Let's see. What was the story here? I forget. It's been some time since I played it. Yeah. You're in a medieval England. The king has betrayed his treacherous lords and the realm is on the collapse. So you have to scatter... The forces are scattered, so you have to reunite them and your kingdom against...four evil lords. is it looks like this. It's been remastered and stuff like that but it still has that core essence feeling and look but with a lot of modernization things like widescreen, quick save and stuff like that. Things that just makes so much sense. And then there's I haven'tnextspeaker-2

played this. I'm curious whether or not to add it to the list. It's the new Alone in the Dark. I absolutely love the original Alone in the Dark. And the new one seems to put some action into the mix. the original, of course, I'll send you a screenshot.looked like this, let's see, where you walked around a mansion and had to figure out what was going on. There was, of course, some Indian occult occurrences happening. And the new Alone in the Dark looks a bit...Okay, that graphic has not aged well. It looks likeWell, was very polygon, but still... But if you compare it to the new one, you're still in an evil house in the Dersetto manner. The intro, the original, Alone in the Dark is iconic, where they arrive at the house and there's a frog jumping over.ARIPONspeaker-0

You know that lady has duck lips and it is what was from the 90s. I really weirdShe has duck legs.Yeah, look at him.Yeah, maybe. Really polygamous lips. They take up a large portion of the face. I think Ballersgate 3, I haven't played it, I Baron has played it. think that needs to be mentioned. Obviously it's very popular.speaker-0

Yeah, absolutely.speaker-1

Youspeaker-1

I'm getting there when you're done.So, I mean, I don't want to drag it out too much, but I think that game is getting a lot of praise for both how Baldur's Gate was, because Baldur's Gate, the original, is fantastic. Just the environment and the music and all that. And Baldur's Gate 3 just puts it up.several notches with freedom and see where you can go if you do this or do that.I completely agree with that aspect. I've been having so much fun in that game with one of my characters. I made him specifically so that he's able to talk his way out of every encounter. So basically the only thing that he has had to kill is the devil and one of the bosses. The rest he actually man...the three of the bosses. Like you have the boss fights that are part of the story, you have to do those. But all the other encounters he actually managed to talk himself out of. And that's kind of important.speaker-2

I mean like in that game you can just kill off everyone and the game still figures out a way to make the story progress from what I have heard and that is pretty that's quite a feat.Yeah, modern games have this, some characters are unkillable because it would kind of destroy the whole story if they were not around.Mm-hmm.Yeah, but Balor's Gate 3 would have none of that. That's fine.Can I take one more game? Super short. It's called Fox Tales and it's a modern game created by some Ukrainians. It isn't done yet and they're trying to fight making this game although they have had some problems with their village being taken over by Russia. So it's kind of a game. I don't know if it's ever going to be completed but Fox Tales is a game where it's a point and click adventure. You're a young fox woman who walks around and tries to clue.speaker-0

find closer on how to do various things. don't know how it ends because it isn't done yet but it's super like 8-bit graphics and looks very very nice.I've heard about it, but I just checked Steam and it says A FoxNo, that does not know not a normThat's not the one.Okay.speaker-0

It's called Fox Tails. Tails like as in... Tails? It's I think that's some kind of... ...shrubbery or something, I don't know. Yeah, exactly. It's an old joke because it's a fox girl and you know, they have tails.Yeah, yeah, yeah.speaker-2

Let's take thatspeaker-2

I cannot find it onLet's see if I can bring it up.Yep.I think I kind of... Is it a children's game or is it...I don't know, it's... I think it isn't...speaker-1

Define children.I find like a...I think it's for everyone, I think it's a pretty harmless game, it's not like PG for-It harkens back to the classic point.Absolutely, that's kind of what's making it.speaker-0

Bye.See ya!Okay.Let's see what it looks like.Well, we're done.speaker-1

While he's looking, I have one I want to mention. I think this one, you actually agree with the couriers. Alan Wake.Yeah, well, yeah, it has that original horror, like the vibes of Alone in the Dark.stuff like that. but I mean, mean the music, the music in that game. my God, the music, like the soundtrack in itself. Just f-ing wow.I mean, like, feels... How does it feel retro? I would guess like the horror sense and...There you go.speaker-1

Yeah.The horror... Sorry, we were just discussing one. We'll get back to that. Go ahead, DJ.Yeah, I actually found the game, it's kind of hard to find. a very unknown game. it's a joke. exactly. It's kind of the thing. What I like about it is that it's a really harmless point and click that doesn't really offend anyone. It's kind of cute in a way. And the graphics really nice down with backgrounds. I mean, kind of sucker for a good background in a game. Oh, yeah.Like the ant tail.speaker-2

I definitely agree. You know what this reminds me of? No. This reminds me of Legend of Kyrandia.That one, yeah that's awesome. Love that.All of the three games there are...I think the second one is the funniest because it has more variety in it in a way.Yeah, and the vistas there. Here's one where you travel on the dragon. I mean, it's very...speaker-0

I love that crazy jester that he simply lost his... Yeah, no, that would be the third one.the third one.Yeah, that's when you play the jester and try to clear his name. He was the guy who killed the king and the queen in the intro of the first game.Yeah, this game. That was when they started to add, this was the rendered 3D time. So instead of pixel art, you would have semi-bad, semi-good 3D.Mm-hmm.speaker-0

Yeah, absolutely. I hope they actually complete it because I look forward to play through the whole game.Have you played the Siberia games?speaker-2

Pretty... Also if you enjoy a good story and point and click, But yeah, I digress. What about music? What do you think about that, gentlemen?Sospeaker-0

I think we lost all listeners, there you have it tuned into something else.it's because.Let's give him some music to get him back.Yeah, I'mAnd this time Scrap Metal featuring Arachno wants to throw us into space with Jupiter Girl.speaker-1

Now it's time for a very, very engaging subject.Yeah, let's start the fight Yes, it's war between the PC master race and the gaming console nerds I don't know, war never changes Yeah, but we've seen this I mean I'm an old PC gamer I don't really subscribe to this PC master race that's a rather nasty jokeYeah.And you guys seem to be more versed in gaming consoles, am I right?I genuinely find myself mostly at the computer games, but I do like the Nintendo.speaker-2

I have, well, it's mostly PC. have PlayStation. I actually have all PlayStations. One, two, three, four and five. And I don't actually sold the Xbox. I never had the original one, but I have bought those like handhelds.that can emulate a lot of the systems. have a Trim UI and I also have something with 365, forget what it is. But it basically looks like a Game Boy, but you can play PlayStation games. So can play Silent Hill or Resident Evil or Spyro the Dragon on these kind of hand-held devices. But gaming console, yeah, mean, they will never catch up to PC.youspeaker-0

I don't think so either, but on the other hand, if you just think about it, I remember all the load high shenanigans we went through. It was like, okay, I can't start a game in MS-DOS because there's not enough memory, so I have to use this load high command and I screw everything up and I try again and finally I get it to work. By that time, whoever had a gaming console has completed the game.pretty much.Yeah, yeah, dose equals high. Yeah, you know, it's on something.dos equals hi comma UMB.Yeah, yeah, exactly, I remember that.speaker-1

And also, what's the difference between expanded and extended memory space?Yeah, well, you have to ask some bigger nerd than me. I don't know.But you had like, okay, this game needs eight megabytes of EMS and it needs that. And you have 16 RAM available, 16 megs of RAM available, but it was configured as extended memory, not expanded. So you didn't have enough memory to run it after all.never stop telling you that it was always and I remember the big problem with MS-DOS was that it was running in real mode which meant that it didn't have access to the all the memory spaces you had to use some kind of emulator to switch it to protected mode where it could access the memory and that was like okay yeah exactly exactly that one and you were messing around with it to get Duke Nukem to start yes that was timesAlso, that was because you also had to paint for larger than 320x200 resolution. It actually composed it by a multitude of 320x200 screens that were placed in a... that was composing up the screen. So when you scaled out to 640x200,speaker-0

Hmm.For AT, there was something like with the, where you had a multitude of these 320 by 2 something. So the DOS4GB allowed you to write to the screen buffers of each virtual screen before it went out onto the screen card. And I looked at the reference documentation after I grew up and becomebecame capable of programming safely. I just looked at that and thanked all that was high and holy that I didn't have to read and learn that shit to make a living. That was horrible.Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, don't want that back.Nospeaker-2

I don't remember if... I don't recall if you remember RAM doubler.Yeah, absolutely. But that was a scam. Scam.It was a scam.com indeed. I'm just reading here on how it worked but theythink it kinda screwed around with the paging file adding more paging space or something like that.Yeah, compressed and set aside your RAM as a buffer and then used things that were less used were compressed away.speaker-1

Basically, they took the general idea of a ROM disk and just flipped it upside down and didn't tell you.Well, these days I think a rab doubler would be like a gold bar thing.butspeaker-2

I actually saw, not to digress, but I saw now a price for 64 gigabyte RAM had passed 50,000 Norwegian kroner.15, yeah.50, 5, 0, not 15. We were talking earlier 15, which was ludicrous, but now I'm talking about 5, 0, 15.Yeah, yeah.speaker-1

yeah.To get back to the core story, the war has always been the PC guy says that we have better graphics, better sound, we can buy new hardware and make it much better. Whereas the gaming people on the console say, yeah, but we always play the game. We just start up and it boots immediately and you don't have to kind of screw around with the settings. We just want to play the game.And mean, how this war... I mean, the... I think this kind of starts with the PlayStation and the first Xbox. Because if you think about the Nintendo and stuff like that, you didn't have the same saturation. Nintendo games did not exist on PC and vice versa, or most of them.Yeah, I think so.speaker-1

D.speaker-0

NoSo if you wanted to play Mega Man 3, you had to have a Nintendo. And in that way, there was like, you needed to have both if you wanted to play, let's say, Eye of the Beholder and Mega Man. There was no crossover. Once the game started to appear on both, like PlayStation 2 at least, you would have Grand Theft Auto 3 on both Windows and consoles.makes sense for them to like, okay, I'm not gonna use Windows, I'm just gonna use PlayStation because I get all my games that I wanna play there.Another thing I rememberAnd also like in the beginning, sorry.speaker-0

Please proceed. Go ahead. No, okay.I mean in the early 90s and late 80s the Nintendo and the consoles were still, I mean they were taking over in a way because computers were really expensive and few people had them. So there wasn't like much of a war. you wanted entertainment you used a console. If you wanted to do your spreadsheets you used Apple II orHmm PCCommodore or something.As far as I can recall, it was like with the advent of the 82-86 and the introduction of the 83-86, that marks the turning point where computers could be used for gaming and not for like, like they could be used previously, but I mean the graphics took an upswing. It started improvingspeaker-1

going from like a semi-linear improvement graph to a more exponential one. It was around the 286-386 switch time. I think that I would put that in at around 1989-1991, somewhere between there. But previously, it's right that you say that Nintendo, it kind of had like...established amongst the consoles a very established position. But it was mostly because of their... You know how all the Nintendo games had this stamp on the carton that said Nintendo approved or something like that? Not by a but it was approved by... It had been...Nice.Yes.speaker-1

It had not only been licensed, etc. It was quality assurance approved.And it had another dimension to it. It had a key and lock chip, meaning that it would not work to create your own game and try to run it in the NES. And that key and lock chip was cracked and broken in 2006. Before that, Nintendo was safe. There was no way to kind of cheat and release your own subpar games without the quality assurance. That is kind of why Nintendo succeeded so well.I agree. And as far as I seem to recall...you're talking about seed of equality. That's the one.Yeah, the seal of quality. But as far as I can recall, as you said, the couriers, and I think you are spot on placing the start of the war, formally speaking, at the introduction of the PlayStation 1. However, I do seem to recall that it started around 1990.speaker-1

1993-1994, it wasn't necessarily a war, but it was like a somewhat more entrenched stance between like the gaming console owners and the PC game owners about who had the best systems. It started off like kids bragging, hey, I have a better set of games than you will ever have. It kind of started off around there, but it didn't become like...in the lack of a better term here, weaponized war as we have come to know this later, where people are actually... Yeah, pretty much. That particular step when it stepped into the seriousness range, that happened around PlayStation 1 when that was introduced.But also it was because the computers evolved spec-wise up to a point where during that time it was also the time when having emulators was justifiable when it came to like CPU requirements and speed, etc.The emulators at that time didn't really exist. You could emulate basic 8-bit systems. BLEEM was the first one that could emulate copyrighted or proper regular games on PlayStation. That's the first one, BLEEM.Yeah, that's pretty much what I'm trying to get at. You could emulate Nintendo's, but only the 8-bits. That happened because you had the availability in the PC hardware that could support that at that time when the PlayStation entered the market, which was coincidentally. However, that marksspeaker-1

where you had the war actually starting to become visible. And as time progressed, the PC capabilities grew exponentially, making it possible like Bleem to emulate even copyright protected games and doing multi-platforms. I even recall several times that people wanted toemulate PlayStation games, but it too taxing on their system so you couldn't get proper results and it would lag etc. etc. Because the PlayStation was so new in its architecture. things escalated above that.So what you have to remember here is that back in the eighties, having a computer was a massive investment, meaning that it would be the rich kids that would have a computer or if you're really lucky, computer and a console. And in those senses, were like people would go to other house, other kids houses to play games because they didn't have it themselves. So either you would have none of them or you would have one of them.MMMSo, in that sense, the game releases were very isolated. Very rarely would you have cross-pollination where a game would be available on the PC. Like the 1942 series on the Atari, it wasn't available on the PC.speaker-2

Some of them were, but still it was very obscure. remember also games were expensive and not easy to get a hold of. had to like either BBS call or send like a mail, a regular mail, a letter somewhere to order it. And then as the late 80s approaches and Nintendo takes more and more over after the game console crash in, was it 85 or something?Hmm 8383 right so Nintendo is basically prominent in in the area and Sega slowly arriving so there was I think in in the early 90s there was a competition between those who had consoles I I have Nintendo we have said they have Sega my Nintendo is much better than yours there you would have cross-pollination you would have things like hook Captain Hook that would be available on Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis sopeople would compete or like this is a better one. The PC starts to get better because you have Moore's law that just doubling the computing power, making it more more powerful for every year that goes through while the consoles are stagnant until there's a jump or leap in processing power. And I think that from what I recall, like Monkey Island, of course, was very popular and that's91 or something. And you didn't have Monkey Island on any of the other consoles. You would have Sonic or you would have Castlevania or something like that. But they weren't directly competing. I think the competition there would be that we have the better games, not that the game looks better on my system. But now once you enter the millennia shift,speaker-2

the games were available on the same system. So then you more have like, should I have a computer or should I have a console? Because as you said, you wouldn't in the early 2000s with Windows 98 and the Windows XP and stuff like that, you had to configure a lot of bullshit and handle IRQ interruptions and all that kind of business in order to make shit run while your friends were just inserting the Grand Theft Auto 3 CD in their PlayStation and off they went.That's true.So I think that's at least that's my take on the case. Did you demon what do you what do you think you have more experience with the Commodore and the Amiga and like what's your impression there regarding the slow the slow popularity of or a growing popularity of consoles in the 80s.It was hard to say really. mean in the 80s there was one console that mattered and that was the NES that was the big one everybody wanted. The C64 was riding high and Amiga was doing inroads and competed with the Atari. Then the whole gaming era changed in the 90s because suddenly you had the situation where PC and Mac took over and all the gaming PCs, not PCs but gamingcomputers. simply, Atari and Amiga, they went away. So then it was PC versus the gaming console. I've seen the whole thing change and there was a number of consoles that failed. don't know if you remember those, Philips, I- CDI. CDI, yeah, CDI. And stuff like that. Never did it. Commodore had its own failure too, actually. It's called CDTV and CD32.speaker-2

That was an extension, wasn't it, for Sega? CD32.No, see different to us an Amiga with a CD-ROM. It was so yeah Detroitto make.Maybe we can end with that.Yeah, the angry video nerd. Yeah, exactly. He burnt one CD for the two in a container with a flame thrower or something. So yeah, obviously he hated it. Yeah, hilarious. Yeah, I have one of these myself, but it's kind of in my cellar. I haven't unpacked it since I moved here.speaker-2

Video game nerdspeaker-2

where it belongs.speaker-2

the ill-fated Commodore.Yeah, I always come back to that. But that's kind of the thing. mean, the gaming computer, so to speak, it was no more in 1992, 1993. I remember Atari made a last hurrah with its Falcon. It never ever took off. It was a really nice computer. It was the first Atari that could beat an Amiga. I don't say that lightly, but...I'll take it, Alcon. But I mean like 10 years too late.Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, something like that, or at least a few years too late. It was, and that's kind of the thing, when the whole dust had settled, was like Nintendo, Sega, was PC, was Mac, and it's kind of like that.And I think yeah, that's like, yeah, beginning right mid 90s, where where the computer like introduction of the CD-ROM wasspeaker-1

huge.Yeah, and this thing that was FMV, full motion video, it really didn't age well. It looks horrible.I mean, it has a charm. I think it has aSure does, it sure does. I speaking about that contradiction. That's also, by the way, a good old retro modern game, I would say, because of the video, full motion video or video acting or what you want to call it.Spot the liar. Contradiction.speaker-1

Yeah. god, that was a good one.Alright gentlemen, we have to start wrapping this one up. It's been really a blast. I think this is third time we're this, or is it the second? Don't remember really.I think we've, yeah, heard sounds correct. Have to check the podcast archives.I think so. So... Yeah, yeah, I can do that.Oh wait, you can't do that on Spotify.speaker-0

yeah, yeah, I walked right into that.Thank you. You don't have to.No.And I actually just checked out here on Spotify. Half of the episodes are still there. It hasn't really nuked them yet, but they're gonna do that.You can listen to all episodes on erikade.radio.speaker-0

Yeah exactly, that's probably where you want to go. Or some other podcast player if you have a mobile phone.YeahSo what song are we playing next by the way?And wrapping this show up is Slash80D, Russian artist and it's a song called 8-bit Tadestan.speaker-2

And I think we should add one more, end up, end with one Christmas song as well. And doing it on the spot, think JPK and Tracker with Christmas Silence, the 2K stereo edit and Christmas Two from Jazz Jackrabbit Holiday Hair 94 is those two, I think would round off this very nicely.speaker-0

youspeaker-0

Thanksspeaker-0

coming up next week I hope or maybe the week after that it would be the second, third actually, Amiga only podcast episode where we only play Amiga musics for at least one hour. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!Merry Christmas, everyone.