Apple Thoughts - News & Reviews on all things Apple

"Wolfenstein 3D was first released in 1992 for the PC and was a massive success and has been rightfully described as the grandfather of first person shooters. Game controls have been adapted to the iPhone and four different layouts of touch screen controls and the option to use tilt controls for either movement or turning. In practice the controls work reasonably well."

Well, don't I feel dumb. Yesterday, I wrote about how anxious I was for this game, and then last night it pops up in my feeds. I downloaded it pretty much immediately and, for the first time, I'm enjoying the control scheme in an iPhone action game. The controls are tight, responsive, and easy to use, and the game itself is an identical translation of the original.

Even more amazing, of course, is that my iPhone plays this game so much better than my first PC, a 386sx-33.

Scary!

"I had been frustrated for over a year with the fact that we didn't have any iPhone development projects going internally at Id. I love my iPhone, and I think the App Store is an extremely important model for the software business. Unfortunately, things have conspired against us being out early on the platform. I was just starting to set up a framework to significantly revise Q3 when I considered the possibility of just going to an earlier codebase to experiment with initially. If we wanted to factor performance out of the equation, we could go all the way back to Wolfenstein 3D, the grandfather of FPS games. It had the basic run and gun play that has been built on for fifteen years, but it originally ran on 286 computers, so it should be pretty trivial to hold a good framerate on the iPhone."

I don't know about you, but this excites me no end. Wolfenstein 3D was the game that got me into first person shooters (as I'm sure it was for many of you, also) and it made me buy a PC in the first place. In fact, when Doom and Quake came out, I also upgraded just so I could play them. I'm totally stoked that John himself has taken on this project (this is no Daiktana thankfully). The one thing I noticed in his post is that he's very serious about playability, not porting, and is rethinking the game in a way that'll work for the iPhone. If you're a fan, this is excellent news. Read the whole post. It's huge, but interesting to see his thought process.