In a blog post from May, Carmack says he loves that players port Doom to every device imaginable, but he’s disappointed that there’s rarely any real effort to build a new, functional control scheme on platforms without a keyboard and mouse. In other words, he’d rather that instead of everyone stopping at “Does it run Doom?” they ask “Does it play Doom?”

That’s why he personally developed the controls for the iPhone version, and according to early reviews, the iPhone can now play Doom. Users are saying controls as good as you would expect from Carmack. Not to mention the other enhancements like 24-bit lighting.

Sure, you might have put the game on your jailbroken iPhone years ago, but graphical upgrades and tighter controls might make it worth the $US6.99 admission price. [Recombu]

As the first trailer seemed to promise, yes, this is a very impressive game. Graphics and sound are top-notch and the production as a whole befits its price. The main issue with Resurrection is the control scheme: even though other iPhone FPSes have pulled of decent free-movement control systems—including id’s own Wolfenstein port—this game is, strictly speaking, on rails.

To be honest, this can be frustrating, especially given how well the environments are rendered. I mean, they’re right there, in full, detailed 3D, and you can’t explore them. The gameplay’s saving grace is accelerometer support, which at least lets you aim and shake off zombies in an intuitive way.

As for the claims that this is a totally new installment in the Doom franchise, they’re technically true: the story is fresh, and so are the levels. But aside from the new story meat and new gameplay dynamics, Resurrection borrows liberally from Doom III, looking, sounding and, to an extend, feeling like its 2004 predecessor. Impressive? Sure. Worth $US10? If so, then barely. [via Will Smith's Twitter]

Some are already hailing it as a “true next generation game” for the iPhone, and it does have some fairly impressive graphics, as far as the platform goes. But with iPhone 3GS on its way, with a more powerful graphics processor and support for a newer version of OpenGL, isn’t this an odd time to market an iPhone game on its up-to-the-minute visuals and performance?

iD head John Carmack doesn’t think so, telling Venturebeat that the game, like other Doom titles before it, will grow into new hardware. He specifically mentions the possibility of multiplayer with OS 3.0, but doesn’t talk about whether or not the game content will adapt to the 3G S. [Venturebeat, Talking About Games]

The current H1N1 Swine Flu pandemic headlines read like those flashing through the intro sequence of a post-apocalyptical movie. Now you can see the cases spreading in real time—as the WHO declares them—in Google Maps.

In case you have not been paying attention to the news during the last few days, there’s a pandemic going on. A spike of infections of the H1N1 Swine Flu—a mutation of a pork virus that jumped from pigs to humans—happened in the city of Mexico (103 dead already) and it is quickly spreading through the world now, thanks to airline connections.

Reading the map is very simple: We are all going to dieThe pink markers are suspect, the purple markers are confirmed, and deaths don’t have a black dot in the marker. The yellow markers are negative, but I don’t see any.

Have fun watching. While you can.
View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map

P.S. Stupid Apophis can’t reach us in time! Hahahaha. Ha. But it looks like pigs are getting their revenge for all these centuries of crispy bacon and pork buns. [Google Maps]

Bonus post soundtrack:

Energy could be harnessed from eternal sources, like the sun, the wind, or the seas. But there is only a limited amount of elements in planet Earth and—what’s worse—bringing them from other planets will prove impractical with our current technology (and the technology that will be available in the next century).

In the meantime, copper—which is everywhere around you—will be gone in about 61 years; antimony—widely used in medicines—will be depleted in 20 years; while indium, rhodium, platinum, or silver—which are present in many essential consumer electronics—won’t last much longer. And those estimations are only valid if we manage to consume half of what we are consuming now.

So, unless we really push technology forward, dramatically increase our recycling rhythm, or something extraordinary happens first—like Apophis obliterating us or the Large Hadron Collider blows us to another dimension, or Nazi zombies getting out of their crypts to make bacon of all of us—we and our children are going to have a really hard time pushing the world forward.

I guess we will have to keep taking life one weekend at a time. [New Scientist via Dark Roasted Blend]

Following Erica Sadun’s article on how to enable the iPhone’s undocumented TV-out features, Troughton-Smith came up with the idea of avoiding the iPhone screen except to draw the controls necessary to navigate through Doom’s corridors. [Infinite Loop]

The small team at id means that the company can only work on one game at a time, so they are toying with the idea of pairing up with a publishing partner to get a game running on the iPhone. However, Hollenshead is taking a cautious approach. He explains that games on the iPhone “are going to be competing with all of those other things you can do on the iPhone that are pretty cool” and that “It does raise the bar on what you need to do from a game standpoint.”

So, when analysing statements from Carmack and Hollenshead together, it seems that id Software definitely wants to bring games to the iPhone, but the two leaders have different viewpoints on the situation. Carmack is gung-ho and talking exclusive titles that are a “graphical tour de force” while Hollenshead is cautious and talking about porting titles that are already in development. We will just have to wait and see who gets their way. [Kotaku]

[The Big Picture]

To do their particle-colliding business, the LHC’s magnets must be kept ultra-cool–close to absolute zero in fact, which is a frosty -459.67 degrees F. And by the looks of it, many of the magnets are near operating temperature already. To keep them that cold, liquid helium is used, which is only liquid at extremely low temperatures. The highest temperature scale on the status website only goes up to 100K (-279.67 degrees F), so we’re not really watching for “meltdowns” in the strictest sense of the word. But if the temperatures start rising to near the top of the scale, you know something is afoot. No doomsday scenarious, but still, feel free to shout out SECTOR 7 ARC MAGNET TEMPERATURES RISING! [LHC Cooldown Status via Bad Astronomy]

The asteroid in question is the Apophosis. If it runs into one or more of the earth’s 40,000 satellites as its path brings it closest to our planet on April 13, 2029, the collision could be enough to alter its trajectory and send a 200-billion-ton ball of iron and iridium our way in 2036. The impact would be followed by tsunamis that would destroy coastal and inland areas around the Atlantic Ocean. To top this disaster-movie situation off, a thick layer of dust would blanket the Earth.

So how did NASA get it wrong? Perhaps they did not take into account the possibility of that trajectory-changing first collision—either that or they forgot to carry a digit somewhere, because 450 and 45,000 do look vaguely similar. I am guessing that young Nico’s project, “Apophis — The Killer Astroid” won the regional science competition that it was entered into. [Yahoo! News]