John Carmack has been spending the last month or so working on a stylish cell phone game called DoomRPG—-"sort of Bard's Tale meets Doom." Carmack says that he decided to start working on a cell phone game after checking out the crap Java demos loaded on his new phone.

Carmach's blog entry about his work on DoomRPG doesn't really get into the game at all, instead it's a long, and very interesting, bitch session on how cell phones and Java suck for gaming.

The biggest problem is that Java is really slow. On a pure cpu / memory / display / communications level, most modern cell phones should be considerably better gaming platforms than a Game Boy Advanced. With Java, on most phones you are left with about the CPU power of an original 4.77 mhz IBM PC, and lousy control over everything.

Cell Phone Adventures [Armdaillo Aerospace]

Send an email to the author of this post at .