The hiatus is over. With my new slimmed-down post-production, I now plan to get back to regular episodes. For this one, it’s back to the usual magazine coverage and talk about what’s I’ve been doing in the last year.

The culmination of the first “season” of the Player/Missile podcast is a review of my favorite game and the announcement of the project undertaken by Kevin Savetz and myself to reverse engineer the game. We’re sponsoring a level design contest, and there’s still time to enter! Oh, and I’m taking a hiatus until I can collect the physical magazines. You can help out with your contributions!

Game review of Getaway! and interview with the author Mark Reid. The program won the Atari Star Award and the $25,000 prize in 1983. I also introduce Omnivore, the 8-bit binary editor that I’ve been working on during the hiatus. Kevin Savetz has a guest review of the APX Spring Catalog, and we add a new section to the podcast, the countdown to the Tramiel takeover.

Part 2b of the flight simulator roundup with Chris Olson, reviewing helicopter sims and the all-time classic F-15 Strike Eagle. Plus: an update on speeding up Star Raiders.

The universe of games really begins to expand in 1982. From here on out we’ll have a huge selection of choices to talk about, and Shamus by Cathryn Mataga leads us off. Also, an interview with Michael Portuesi who is both a published author in Compute!’s books and a listener to the podcast.

The first half of the military flight simulator roundup with Chris Olson. I’ve included a bonus tech section at the end discussing a clever display list technique used by the MicroProse sims. Guest reviews: Michael Glaser of the XEGS Cart-by-Cart podcast covers SoftSide and Kevin Savetz summarizes the APX Winter 1981 Catalog.

Two new magazines for the coverage: Computer Gaming World and my first magazine from the UK: Computer & Video Games, and two guest reviewers of magazines. An overview of KansasFest from the Atari point of view, and a review of the APX game Reversi II.

Jack Nutting of the Retro Computing Roundtable, Victor Marland of Ten Pence Arcade, Wade Ripkowski of Inverse Atascii and Kevin Savetz of ANTIC join me for a 5 round draft of Atari 8-bit games.

Summary of Bill Kendrick’s Atari Party 2015 and review of the excellent port of Missile Command. In magazine coverage, I’ve added MICRO: The 6502/6809 Journal, and new contributor Michael Glaser takes over SoftSide Magazine.

Flight simulator roundup where Chris Olson and I review 5 noteworthy civilian aircraft sims on the 8-bits (military sims will be the subject of part 2). Also added Byte to the magazine to the coverage due to the serializiaton of De Re Atari.