The Doom game franchise has proven its popularity. A movie titled after its namesake has proven its box office might. Sarge and his crew have raked in $15.5 million-- not a bad haul. Yet, noted critic Phil Villarreal said it most succintly in his review of this movie, asking why we don't just simply tape someone's first-person shooter games instead of watching this heaping pile of Doom game franchise filth. Only a rotten 19% of Doom game movie franchise reviews were favourable on the rottentomatoes.com site at the time of this article. While the non-gamer film critic looks on with apathy, the gaming community would flock to see the Rock struggle to convey emotion on the big screen while enthusiastically fragging demons. Gamers are proliferating, and we've seen awkward attempts at game to movie transitions in the past like Mortal Kombat - Annihilation in 1997. Yet, Doom seems quite pervasive. It's the granddaddy of our contemporary first person shooter genre. It earned a #1 Game of All Time award from noted PC Gamer. This is admittedly one of my favourite genres. Just not on my iPAQ, that's all. This stretches to the PDA realm with free releases like the Pocket Doom game beta available for the Cassiopeia E-100 series, posted in 2000. It required the doddering MS Windows CE 2.11 operating system, initially released in Feb. 1999. Unfortunately, porting this game to a movie was significantly more successful than Pocket Doom PDA development attempts. It's a form factor thing. Most PDAs aren't structured well enough to handle the first person shooter genre, unless you'd like to give up your keyboard and mouselook for a D-Pad and hardware buttons. There were quite a few forum posts about the awkward nature of Pocket Doom. The Pocket PC developers performed their Doom game conversion, but in their eagerness they neglected to think about fragging clumsiness with a D-Pad and hardware buttons. A select few Pocket PC games, like the Anthelion PDA space shooter seem to make the first person shooter perspective a decent experience, at least from a space fighter Wing Commander-like cockpit. If it weren't for the leagues of space separating you from other ships during a dogfight, blasting enemy ships may have proven more difficult. The complexity lies in restricted D-Pad movement. This is par for the course for PDA-based first person shooters. I analyzed Pocket Quake benchmarks in an XCPUScalar overclocking article. Fragging monsters was a blast, but strafing with a D-Pad can prove difficult. Even without the Pocket Doom game there's plenty of gaming gold in those PDA hills yet. |
