Blog

Ikona here, back from the holidays and recuperating from the flu. Anyway over the break I had a chance to play Doom III — on a Mac, no less. Certainly brings me back, I’ve always got a kick out of the id Software games, all the way back to the original Wolfenstein 3D. But playing a game like Doom III on a Mac though is a bit of a head-fake; I kept trying to right-click with a one-button mouse…yeah, good one ikona.

Anyway, back to id. Their first Doom game helped put PC gaming on the map back in the day, and Quake was one of the forerunners to all these glitzy high-tech first-person shooters that dominate next gen consoles and PCs right up to the present. Doom III certainly lives up to that legacy, no matter what kind of mouse you’re using or abusing.

So yeah, id is still taking names in the FPS game, but what’s really interesting to me is how id’s John Carmack is so enthused about mobile game development. He’s been one of the most influential PC game developers over the last couple of decades (right up there with Will Wright, Sid Meier, and Peter Molyneux), so to have someone of his calibre excited about mobile games is great for the whole industry.

More to the point, he’s not just talking about it, he’s released both the Doom RPG and Orcs & Elves for mobile phones in the last year. In several different interviews he’s talked about how he loves the faster development times and smaller teams associated with mobile game development.

And while these games have nothing to do with Nokia or N-Gage, they should of interest to anyone interested in mobile games, given how they revisit the tried and true gameplay of the old days and combine it with the superior firepower of today’s mobile devices. Needless to add, they’re also a lot of fun to play, as numerous reviews and awards attest.

If you’d like to see for yourself, head on over to the EA Mobile and play an embedded demo of Doom RPG or Orcs & Elves right on their website.