ZeniMax, which of course now owns iD software, filed the DMCA complaint with Google. Developer L!TH!UM told the site Android and Me that Doom for Android, offered for free, was built with open source code but "My mistake was allowing the download of the Plutonia and TNT WADs, at least that is what I suspect."

"Although I may not be able to distribute the application through the Market, the APK can still be downloaded and installed through the web," the dev said.

Other ports pulled include: Ultimate Doom; Quake Platinum; Doom II; Wolf 3D: Spear of Destiny (two versions); Wolfenstein 3D; Quake GL; Wolfenstein 3D Lite (Beta 2) and Doom Soundboard.

iD Software frags Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein ports for Android [Android and Me via Game Politics]

The mod's levels employ 8-bit textures and sprites. "Mega Man will jump high and take damage recoil," says the creator, CutmanMike. "Weapons will behave exactly as they did back then, only from a 3D perspective. The plan is to eventually have all the levels and weapons from Mega Man 1-6 (and maybe 9). Obviously some weapons will have minor changes because there are a lot of clones throughout the series."

More info on the mod and a download URL is available at the link below:

Mega Man 8-bit Deathmatch [Cutstuff via Game News HQ thanks Kevin]

Nowhere is the realization of flight grander or more satisfying than in video games. When done right, flying in a game can leave a lasting impression on both players and developers that impacts every game they play or make going forward.

Telltale Games designer Mike Stemmle pointed this out while demoing Tales of Monkey Island Episode 3 for me in September. I asked what gameplay inspirations helped him develop for Monkey Island and after a moment's pause he said, "Kingdom Hearts."

"Oh, because it has pirates?" I asked.

"No," he said. "It's the flying." The way the game introduces flying the player -– about halfway through its storyline after you've been running and jumping on the ground the whole time -– was like a revelation in game design for him. "Because once you get [to fly in Never Land], it's like you knew it was coming. It just felt right."

There's a fantasy fulfillment that comes with flying in video games. And even if flying in a game is just another way to get from point A to point B, it's appealing to a part of your senses that you don't use very much in everyday gameplay.

"We live in a very X, Y world," Dark Void Senior Producer Morgan Gray said. A veteran of flight games like X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance, he knows his Z axis and isn't afraid to build his games around it. "If you look at … shooters, when they first came out, everything was flat. [There was] a roof over your head and walls on all sides. It was only really when you got to games … where you had enemies [above or below you] where you had to start exploring the Z axis."

Like Doom players that had to learn to use the mouse to enjoy Quake, your average gamer has to put in effort to master flight. Instead of thinking in only one or two directions, he or she has to think in a 360 degree bubble where enemies can come from any angle. They have to be aware of their character's (or aircraft's) physics so that they don't get lost when trying to execute a turn. Some games make it easier for the player by limiting the range of flight to forward-only like Star Fox or Panzer Dragoon; other games like Dark Void layer on tutorial after tutorial to make absolutely sure you internalize the controls before cutting you loose in the wild blue yonder.

By that same token, developers without Gray's flight-filled background have to work a lot harder to implement flying. Whereas Gray can look back over both his career and his childhood and see Chuck Yeager's face mocking him after Gray had crashed and burned in Advanced Flight Training, some developers only have memories of Star Fox or Wing Commander as their flying inspiration. They don't realize that there's more to flight than getting off the ground.

"Don't get me wrong," says Gray. "[Wing Commander's] level design was great, the ship design was great, progression was great. The actual nuts and bolts of flight? All pretty arcade-y because [it didn't feel] like there was meat to the simulation."

Developers with traditional level-making experience on shooters or adventure games that have the walls on all sides and the roof overhead have new challenges when making an enjoyable flying sequence or full game. They have to relearn how to organize a level around enemy spawn points in spaces with no walls or roofs.

"You really need to use enemies not only as a way of making a challenge for the player, but as defining space because [players] have to have that frame of reference for ‘where am I in the terrain?'" said Gray. "If you get [the timing right], it really gives the [flight] meaning and puts a plot to the [enemy] encounters. It's different than ‘And now we walk you in this room and find the blue key,' because you don't get blue keys in the air."

He compared a perfect flight level to a map called De Dust in Counter-Strike. To him, it was obvious that some developer had sat down with a stopwatch and timed how long it would take enemies to reach players when spawning from two different points on the map. That developer knew exactly where the player would be and what they would be doing when the enemy got to them, and they build the level outward around the player from that point.

Flying levels, Gray said, should be built the exact same way.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the upcoming Avatar for the Wii. A flight level with a giant lizard bird was the centerpiece of a demo given to me by creative director Daniel Bisson and he wasn't shy about telling me it was the hardest level to design. In early efforts, the enemies spawned too fast and the Wii Balance Board was over-responsive to even the slightest shift in weight, causing the lizard bird to pitch wildly and slam into spawning enemies. As the level developed, they added more environmental boundaries like tunnels and trees to define the flying space and confined 360 degree movements to quick time events.

So what began as a flying level instead turned into an arcade-style on-rails experience. Sure, you're up in the sky on the back of a bird. But, there's not much fantasy fulfillment and no raw freedom in having your hand held.

The trick is keeping reality from ruining fantasy. Yes, it's a lot of work to pilot an X-Wing in the Star Wars: Battlefront games; but if you get to blow up a TIE Fighter as a reward for your patience, you don't mind sinking effort into learning how to be a pilot. Likewise, War in the upcoming Darksiders would look silly with a pair of wings sprouting from his burly back; but hijacking a gryphon from an angel for a quick joyride through a ruined city appeals to the fantasy of the character and doesn't last so long that the game needs to bog the player down with real physics.

Above: The lone flying level in Darksiders.

With Crimson Skies and flight sims on side of the spectrum and our Star Foxes and Panzer Dragoons on the other, there are so many ways gamers can fulfill the fantasy of flight. Each new game that introduces a flying segment or builds its entire experience around the thrill of strapping on a jetpack builds on the collective fantasy gamers and developers share of taking to the skies.

The ultimate dream of flight in games, says Gray, is this: "I don't know where I'm at, but I'm having fun."

Image Cred — Kingdom Hearts
Title Image: The Fall of Icarus, Peter Paul Rubens, 1636

Punchatz who also illustrated for top-flight publications such as National Geographic, TIME and Playboy, suffered a heart attack on Oct. 11 and never regained consciousness. After two weeks of treatment and tests, doctors advised there was no hope of recovery, and Punchatz's family removed him from life support.

"He never wanted to be kept alive like this," Greg Punchatz, Don's son, said to SpectrumFantasticArt, "so we are respecting his wishes."

Punchatz's iconic Doom box was just a small piece of his overall portfolio of work, which brought acclaim from luminaries such as the author Ray Bradbury. Spectrum Fantastic Art reports that Punchatz had already cut his fee to help id Software meet its budget. Id counterproposed that Punchatz accept a percentage of Doom's profits instead, but Punchatz stuck with his fee. "So how was I to know this thing called Doom would make a jillion smackers?" he laughed later.

Don Ivan Punchatz (1936-2009) [Spectrum Fantastic Art via bit-tech.net]

Civilization Network will allow you and your friends to band together to create the most powerful, wealthy, or most intelligent civilization. Think Mafia Wars, only with shifty Romans instead of shifty Italians. I suppose that's pretty much the same thing these days. Toss giant plumed helmets on the mobsters and off you go.

Sid Meier himself announced the upcoming app in the CivFanatics forums.

I wanted to let you know we'll soon be looking for beta testers to help us develop a unique new way to play Civilization. Ever since we finished Civilization® Revolution™ last year, I've been looking at ways of expanding the Civ gameplay experience to include solo, competitive and cooperative play to take advantage of the uniqueness of social networks. We're calling this project Civilization® Network™ and the full game will be available next year on Facebook. Civilization Network will allow you to join together with your friends to create the world's most powerful, richest, smartest, or just plain coolest civilization. You can coordinate your strategy to win great battles, share your technology to jump ahead of your rivals, lobby your family and friends to form your own government and win vital elections, manage and grow your cities to maximize production and happiness, spy on your enemies, and work with your friends to create the great Wonders of the World. The game will offer everything you enjoy in Civ in a fully persistent environment - you can play as much as you like, whenever you like, and it'll be free to play.

Thanks a lot, Sid. I still had a little free time left, and that was bugging the hell out of me.

As the man says, they'll be looking for beta testers soon. Your best bet? Head over the the Civilization Network Facebook page and become a fan. Might as well get it over with now.

Announcing Civilization Network! [Civilization Fanatics Center - Thanks Mike!]

He thinks that Sony could release a new console before Microsoft. Here's his rationale: "The whole jockeying for who's going to release the first next gen console is very interesting and pretty divorced from the technical side of things," he says. "Whether Sony wants to jump the gun to prevent the same sort of 360 lag from happening to them again seems likely. As developers, we would really like to see this generation stretch as long as possible. We'd like to see it be quite a few more years before the next gen console comes out, but I suspect one will end up shipping something earlier rather than later."

Sony has repeatedly stated that the PS3's lifespan is ten years. The console came out in 2006 in Japan, which means that Sony is not expected to release a new console until 2016 or 2017. With the buzz around Project Natal, Microsoft has recently been talking about a longer shelf life for the Xbox 360.

But, all of this is still unconfirmed and merely speculation on Carmack's part. In the rest of the link below, Carmack offers his opinion about more futurey stuff as well.

Carmack talks next gen consoles... and beyond [Digital Foundry via GamesIndustry]

id's Doom 3 side story puts players in the role of a Marine, aided by a flying 'bot named Sam, as he makes his way from point A to point B, shooting anything that looks vaguely demonic. Borrowing familiar settings and enemies from its 2004 inspiration, Doom Resurrection whittles the experience down to something more appropriate for an on-the-go re-imagining.

Without the benefit of access to a keyboard and mouse, Doom Resurrection relies on accelerometer and touchscreen control to get all that first-person shooting done. The interface is simple, with portions of the iPhone's touchscreen dedicated to attacking, dodging, reloading, switching weapons and pausing. To your ever present reticule, just tilt.

With those concessions, was Doom worth exhuming on the iPhone?

Loved
As Good As On-Rails Shooters Get: Gaming snobs may turn up their noses at the prospect of a first-person shooter being hobbled with an on-rails guide, but Doom Resurrection remains surprisingly fun. Honestly, I didn't miss keycard hunting, updating my PDA security clearance levels or straining to see without a flashlight during my play time. I was more interested in the often frantic light gun-like action. Smartly taking cover and perfecting headshots adds depth to a relatively simplistic arcade-style game. Having my performance graded after each level, based on things accuracy and the number of secret items found, compelled me enough to revisit many of the game's stages.

Technically Impressive (Or Hey, That's A Pretty Good Doom Impersonation): Doom Resurrection doesn't look nearly as good as its five-year-old PC forebear—it's on a phone, people—but generally runs at a good clip. It's the control scheme that impresses most, with a tilt to aim function that actually works—mostly thanks to a quick calibration setting that lets the player recenter the reticule on the fly.

Hated
But Not Without Its Quirks: Doom Resurrection does comes with its share of frustrations. The hitbox for enemies is generous to a fault, so you may be pointing directly at an exploding barrel, but hitting the zombie standing just to the left of it. And you're probably going to recalibrate that targeting reticule a bit too often. And you're going to roll your eyes at bad guys that teleport right behind you all the time. And you're probably going to miss some health or ammo items when the touchscreen doesn't register your taps.

Doom Resurrection will let you have a great deal of fun with it—if you overcome your iPhone game phobias and let yourself have a great deal of fun with it. There's depth of play here, thanks to a suite of weapons that includes shotguns, plasma rifles, the trademark BFG and even a chainsaw, as well as smart, simplified touch controls.

What sometimes detracts from that fun is Doom Resurrection's asking price (which seems just a few dollars too high), a handful of dusty old design decisions, and its occasionally mystifying touchscreen quirks. As far as first-person shooters on Apple's platform go, it's not quite a head shot, but it's definitely a kill.

Doom Resurrection was developed by Escalation Studios and published by id Software on the iPhone and iPod Touch on June 26. Retails for $9.99 via iTunes. Played through main campaign on "Marine" difficulty, replayed multiple missions on "Veteran" difficulty in Free Play mode.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

First thing I'll be playing in the virtual world this weekend is the iPhone version of Doom: Resurrection, in anticipation of an upcoming review. Probably should update the firmware on that thing so I'm up to speed on all my iPhone needs. I'll also be giving BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger another crack, once the TV, Xbox 360 and all necessary audio-visual equipment is hooked up.

This weekend, I'll also more than likely be picking some games to sell off and give away. There are a half-dozen Sega Saturn games—Shining Force III, Guardian Heroes, Burning Rangers—that will get more use at someone else's house.

What will you be playing this American holiday weekend?

QuakeCon festivities were previously announced to throw down at the Hilton Anatole Hotel, but it appears that id Software and company have had a change of plans. That means, if you've already booked a room, it's time to book a new room, now at the lovely Gaylord Texan Hotel & Convention Center. Trust me, if you haven't been there, say for previous QuakeCons in 2004 and 2005, it's a fantastic facility. You never need to leave the place and experience dangerous sunlight!

"The Gaylord Texan is a perfect venue for QuakeCon and we're excited to have even more space and greater resources to deliver a bigger BYOC, better exhibitor area, and totally new events and entertainment for everyone that joins in the excitement," said Todd Hollenshead, president of id Software. "We know the magnitude of this announcement, but we haven't lost a step in planning for the biggest and best QuakeCon yet."

The Bring-Your-Own-Computer LAN is still planned, with spots for 3,000 gamers to play Quake, Enemy Territory and/or Quake Live. Nothing appears to have changed, save for the venue. Refer to the official QuakeCon web site for additional details.

QuakeCon 2009 Venue Info [QuakeCon]

id Software's John Carmack is one of the masterminds behind some of the greatest first-person shooters of all time, often referred to as a father of the entire genre for his work on games like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. Lately, however, John has been taking id's properties in different directions, creating a roleplaying game version of Doom and now this title, Doom Resurrection for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The game began as a test. Carmack supervised the development, which was carried out by the team at Escalation Studios, in order to see what sort of iPhone game could be created using more resources and a larger budget than your average iPhone title. That is the reason we didn't hear about the game until earlier this month - Carmack wanted to make sure they had a viable product.

Gamers will of course question the viability of a game that takes one of the world's greatest first-person shooters and transforms it into a simple rail shooter. Carmack addresses such concerns, explaining that sometimes freedom must be sacrificed for the greater good.

"Freedom is great. There's no doubt about it that one of the major aspects of FPSs is that you're exploring this world and if you want to you can look down between the cracks in the floor and see something cool...but in a high-end game we can spend literally hundreds of thousands of dollars creating this awesome thing only to have the player turn their head the other way and never seeing it. That's extraordinarily frustrating

"That's what we traded off in this game. You don't have the free roaming freedom...but it guarantees that the game will always look good."

Despite Carmack's clear vision for Doom Resurrection, another issue reared its ugly head in the middle of the development cycle that nearly caused him to pull the plug entirely. The game originally featured the standard shooter controls we've come to know and grudgingly deal with in an iPhone shooter, with the player touching the screen to shoot.

The game still looked great, but there was never a challenge...and therefore it wasn't fun. The player's thumb would cover the screen, and it really didn't feel like you were inside the experience. On the verge of scrapping the project, Escalation came up with the solution - the accelerometer.

"It was only halfway through the project, after I had already served notice that we were going to scrap the project that (Escalation) completely scrapped that control metaphor and came up with this different paradigm where you aim with the accelerometer, tilting around. It was am overnight difference, where build one I was about to scrap the project, and build two, all of the sudden we were still a long way from done but it had that kernel - this is a game we could make fun."

How confident is Carmack? So confident that he believe that imitators will soon start showing, with the accelerometer aiming technique perhaps becoming the default control scheme for iPhone shooters.

So now the game is on the verge of release, and players will be able to get their hands on Doom Resurrection for the first time. What can you expect? Well it depends on which iPhone you have. Carmack noted that the original iPhone experienced significant slowdown but was still playable; the iPhone 3G offered a very smooth experience, and the game runs like butter on the 3GS, with improved loading times to boot.

Smooth gameplay and low loading times will also be a boon in the coming weeks and months, as id gears up to add multiplayer support to the title, starting with 2-player cooperative peer-to-peer, with Elevation looking to extend that to 4-player competitive in the future. Unfortunately the game was too far into development when the 3.0 software was introduced, but the features will be patched n, with new downloadable level being looked at as well.

It's probably best to look at Doom Resurrection not as a version of Doom for the iPhone, but as something completely different with a familiar look and feel. id and the team at Escalation have made some bold choices with the title, and should they pay off it could very well lead to other developers devoting more resources and bigger-budgets to iPhone titles in the future.

Two of the most acclaimed game development studios of all time are joining forces. ZeniMax Media, parent company of Fallout 3 and Elder Scrolls development studio Bethesda Softworks, announced today that it is purchasing legendary Doom and Wolfenstein studio id.

In an interview with Kotaku, id co-founder John Carmack, id CEO Todd Hollenshead and ZeniMax CEO Robert Altman said the purchase will change none of the principles or principals of id and Bethesda but will allow id to grow like it never has before. The purchase does not affect plans for previously announced games from id that are slated for release through other publishers, including the Activision-backed Wolfenstein and the EA Partners-planned Rage.

Why did id sell?

"We're really getting kind of tired competing with our own publishers in terms of how our titles will be featured," Carmack said. "And we've really gotten more IPs than we've been able to take advantage of. And working with other companies hasn't been working out as spectacularly as it could. So the idea of actually becoming a publisher and merging Bethesda and ZeniMax on there [is ideal.] It would be hard to imagine a more complementary relationship. They are triple A, top-of-the-line in what they do in the RPGs. And they have no overlap with all the things we do in the FPSes."

Hollenshead said ZeniMax's acquisition will allow id to grow its internal teams, staffing up the groups working on the next Doom — which will now be a ZeniMax game — and the Quake Live team, for starters.

The goal, explained Carmack, is for id to handle all of its own IPs. "We can build the pipeline and have a regular pipeline of releases."

Altman described the deal as a "win for fans of id." He said the deal came about when Hollenshead approached him. ZeniMax had been looking to acquire developers and wanted id, but didn't know it was available until approached. The merger had been in the works for months, according to the men on the call today.

In a press release for today's news, Altman laid out a vision for a robust id: "We, along with many others, consider id Software to be among the finest game studios in the world, with extraordinary design, artistic and technical capabilities. They have demonstrated, repeatedly, that rare ability to create franchise properties that are critical and commercial successes. Our intention is to make sure id Software will continue to do what they do best – make AAA games. Our role will be to provide publisher support through Bethesda Softworks and give id Software the resources it needs to grow and expand."

No co-developed games are planned at this time. But, they joked, getting those Fallout bobbleheads into Rage would be fun.

Next week, id Software will release Doom Resurrection, a new iPhone and iPod Touch game profiled by Venture Beat. According to details on the first-person shooter, expect a "next-generation" level of 3D graphics from previous iPhone games.

id's John Carmack calls Apple's phone platform a "real game platform" and has his own Doom, dubbed Doom Classic, in the works. Doom Resurrection development was handled by Escalation Studios, which, with Carmack's help, got the game up and running at 30 frames-per-second in six months.

Look for it to hit next week, with a Kotaku review to hit soon after.

Next-generation iPhone game Doom Resurrection debuting next week [Venture Beat]

Carmack goes into exhaustive detaill on how the game has been nipped and tucked to both work and look good on the handheld, but the gist is that it looks great, and should be out next month.

Wolfenstein iPhone controlled surprisingly well, so I'll be looking forward to this one.

Doom Classic [id]

Speaking to GameSpot, the id boss said:

It's not a sequel to Doom 3, but it's not a reboot either. Doom 3 was sort of a reboot. It's a little bit different than those, and if I told you why, I would get my ass kicked when I got back. So I'll just have to leave it at that.

Know what it should be? A sequel to the original. Do "Hell on Earth", except this time, actually make it look like Earth, and not Mars with a different sky texture. 2009 (well, 2010, more likely) needs rabbit heads on a spike!

Hollenshead Rages about PC gaming, E3 surprises [GameSpot]

It was a time of mullets, when CRT monitors dominated, when Shiny's Aladdin for the Sega Genesis and Bram Stoker's Dracula for MS-DOS captured the imaginations of the id Software staff. It was also before Doom was 100% complete, with John Romero shown playing a version of the first-person shooter before the majority of the public had a chance to see the game in action.

The video follows...

A Visit to id Software [Vimeo]

Strong words coming from the star of Race To Witch Mountain. Johnson tells MTV News' giggly Josh Horowitz that the "writing and material" just wasn't up to snuff, with Doom a good example of "what not to do" for a video game adaptation.

Mr. Rock also calls himself "the best Madden player... ever." While we can trust him on his Doom assessment, we seriously doubt he'd last one quarter in a scrub match at Madden Bowl.

Dwayne ‘The Rock' Johnson Honestly Discusses Infamous ‘Doom' Movie [MTV Multiplayer]

Crafted lovingly by gaming legends John Carmack, John Romero, and a host of other people, some of who weren't named John, Doom is credited with pioneering networked multiplayer PC gaming, immersive 3D graphics, and the ability for players to create and share their own custom-built expansions. The game is estimated to have been downloaded by over 10 million players over the first two years of release, with ports spanning 16 PC platforms and 11 different console gaming systems, not including source ports.

It's been a rocky road, what with the controversy over the title's satanic imagery and violence and one of the most horribly movie adaptations this side of Uwe Boll, but fifteen years and multiple sequels later, Doom still remains one of the most important franchises in the history of gaming. Here's to another 15 years of hell on Mars!

Sound is a little wonky — there's no music either — but we can't lodge complaints against this version of Doom. If you've never powered through the thing, here's just one more option for the pile. It's as promised. Doom. Flash. Playable.

Doom [Newgrounds]

So i wanted to buy Duke Nukem 3D from arcade store and surprise "THIS ITEM IS NOT AVAILABLE FROM YOUR CURRENT LOCATION". Sorry, but when is Bulgaria became Germany, Japan and Korea? On Major Nelson blog i read this "Availability: Not available in Germany, Japan and Korea". I tried to buy DOOM too and guess what? That's right, born at the wrong location again. What do i have to do in order to buy and play that game? Anyone? Anyone?!

Alex from, that's right, Bulgaria continues after the jump.

The other thing I'm very frustrated is that Microsoft Bulgaria (this mean that Microsoft too, right?) doesn't care for XBOX at all. I never saw any advertising of the XBOX/XBOX360/Zune or whatsoever. They not sell the consoles nor the games, they not provide any technical assistance/help. When something happens to your console, you will get it repaired if you go to Greece. Come on, WTF!?! Bulgaria is a small country i know, but is that the attitude and strategy Microsoft chose to win new costumers? I have to depend on some importers to buy from them the console or games and i have to pay more that retail price ofcourse. Good job Microsoft, this is the way you will win the console war.

Because dammit, Bulgaria decides the console winner. And right now, Bulgaria is so pissed at you, Microsoft.