by Dan East » Apr 9, 2002 @ 3:16am
I also don't want to beat this to death, but I want to add something else. If you look back on id Software's success, you will find it revolved around 4 innovative things:
1) Cutting edge games that did things never before seen on the platform (PC).
2) The use of a Shareware marketing scheme.
3) Allowing a huge amount of modification and extension of both the game engine and the game data / levels.
4) Releasing the source code once the game was a couple generations old.
Okay, let's see how Machine Works expanded on this successful combination:
1) Pocket PC / PSPC / HPC DOOM ports have been available for several years. DoomPDA is not faster, nor does it render the display any "better" than any of the existing free ports. There is nothing new or cutting edge about this port. There is a degree of novelty and entertainment to replaying dated games like Wolf and Doom. However, I personally have a hard time finding any real replay and long-term enjoyment out of any FPS games pre-Quake 1. I play modern FPS games on my PC, and games that are a decade old just too dated for me personally. I'm sure there are others that disagree, and could play a Pocket PC version Doom for weeks straight, over and over again. However, this is certainly not anything groundbreaking, and is hardly the definitive, must-have Pocket PC game.
2) There is no demo or shareware version available. This is the antithesis of everything id Software has ever done. Machine Works' purpose in this is to prevent people that already own Doom from using their engine to play the data they have legal access to.
3) Apparently, you cannot use custom WADs, or even the original, unmodified WADs with this engine. The reason for this is the same as #2 above. This greatly reduces the value of the software, as it reduces to a huge degree the replay-ability, and the ability to protect the initial investment by utilizing free modifications and levels produced by others. Machine Works has basically broken id Software's WAD convention in order to force people to buy their version of Doom even if they already own the PC version.
4) Obviously they are not going to release the source code to their port. Actually, there is no loss here - their port does nothing that hasn't already been done before. In fact, for all I know, they may be "borrowing" some PQ and PQ2 source code. To put things in perspective (and not to be braggadocios), I am confident that I could, in one week of full-time work at most, duplicate all the functionality of the PDADoom engine (actually, I could probably do it in a day or two, as I have already ported both the successor and predecessors to Doom, so a great deal of code reuse would be possible). Thus the only "value" to their product is the fact that it is coupled with the full registered game levels. There are millions (?) of legitimate owners of Doom who can legally us their data with a Pocket PC Doom engine. Those that do not already own Doom could purchase the whole Doom series for half the price of PDADoom, which only offers the first installment.
Dan East
Last edited by
Dan East on Apr 9, 2002 @ 3:21am, edited 1 time in total.
DoomPDA-finally getting it's just rewards!
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