The News in Brief

• Doom 2 RPG, having slipped out onto J2ME/BREW phones a few months ago without anyone noticing, is now out on the App Store for iPhone and iPod Touch gamers. If you've played any of id's other RPG games, you should be well aware of the mixture of turn-based shooting and lame humor within.
  
• TechRadar sat down briefly with John Carmack and three other gaming legends to see what they think will come of the future. It's always interesting to see what's going on in Carmack's head.
  
• Australian games magazine PC Powerplay has dedicated a hefty chunk of a page of their latest issue to Thomas van der Velden's stand-alone ZDoom game Harmony as part of an article on mods for older games. It's always nice to see the continuing Doom mod scene get recognition from the mainstream, especially compared to the other mods in the article like Oblivion Lost.

I hope a transcript pops of the Thomas van der Velden article.
Nice to see that a mod for a 15 year old game can get some time in the spotlight nowadays. :)

sgtcrispy said:

I hope a transcript pops of the Thomas van der Velden article.
Nice to see that a mod for a 15 year old game can get some time in the spotlight nowadays. :)

Sometimes it's more the technology people are interested in rather than the game; such is the case with Thomas van der Velden, who recently released Harmony, an entirely new game using the zDoom engine (which is itself a source port of Doom) which took seven years to make. For him it was about pushing the engine further than people thought possible.
"Harmony started out as a mod, eventually growing to be a stand-alone game. You could say I just wanted to see how far I could go with an old engine. Along the way I kept getting new ideas on how to use glitches and tricks to create new features. In addition to the new maps I decided to make new textures, enemies and weapons. It was creatively challenging in many ways, but it was all well worth it. It's a unique and cool feeling to be able to walk around in world you created yourself!"
The sprite-based engine also allowed him to do a whole bunch of things that wouldn't work on more modern, polygon-fuelled engines.
"For me, Harmony was more an art project than a computer game. Being able to use hand-painted clay sculptures for enemies and drawings/paintings for textures felt more like making art than a playable product. Many modern games use polygon models, but if you think outside of the box there are more methods that can make a project stand out. Powerful engines and financial support do not guarantee a fresh and interesting game. Only creativity and persistence can do that."

Other mods looked at and interviewed in the article are the Vampire Bloodlines Unofficial Patch, Oblivion Lost for STALKER, Ultima 5 for Dungeon Siege and Marathon Resurrection for Unreal Tournament.

Those gaming legend interviews are pretty solid. Carmack and Meier are always interesting to read, but the Pong guy's (Nolan Bushnell) interview was really hilarious too.

NB: This is kind of amusing. A guy stole a design out of our labs and started a company. They were going to compete with Atari using a game called Viper Plane. Of course, we got a restraining order so they couldn't show this game at the upcoming trade show, but then we heard that they were at the show anyway and pulling our distributors up into a hotel room. In the same hotel we were staying at!

So one night we were maybe drinking a little too much and decided that we were going to take the law into our own hands and break into the guys room and beat the sh*t out of him. And so with all pompous self righteousness about how they were thwarting the law with this product, we pounded on his door, really put our elbows into it, but nobody was answering the door. And we couldn't really break it down.

So with sore shoulders we went back down to the bar muttering about the injustices of life. I've often looked back and said, 'Thank God we didn't carry that out.' It was one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time but really wasn't.

ATARI THUG LYFE.

The Tetris guy was boring though. F'n Communists.

Trasher][ said:


Other mods looked at and interviewed in the article are the Vampire Bloodlines Unofficial Patch, Oblivion Lost for STALKER, Ultima 5 for Dungeon Siege and Marathon Resurrection for Unreal Tournament.

thanks!

Shaikoten said:

Those gaming legend interviews are pretty solid. Carmack and Meier are always interesting to read, but the Pong guy's (Nolan Bushnell) interview was really hilarious too.



ATARI THUG LYFE.

You wouldn't believe this but a lot of games were conceived at Atari under the influence of LSD, weed, and copious amounts of alcohol.

Csonicgo said:

You wouldn't believe this but a lot of games were conceived at Atari under the influence of LSD, weed, and copious amounts of alcohol.

This is unsurprising.

Csonicgo said:

You wouldn't believe this but a lot of games were conceived at Atari under the influence of LSD, weed, and copious amounts of alcohol.

Then they cleaned up