Well, John Romero left Midway

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/07/13/news_6128946.html

Good 'ol Johnny boy...Wonder what he will do now...

 

''hey john, it's so nic to finally meet you in person! i'm one of your biggest fans! i have every games you worked on. my fav is difinitivly doom, damn! i played this game to death! So, anyway, i'll take a big mac with a coke, and a combo no2. ''

:smt042

 

if he could just make another good game, but no, mister's too good for that or something.

 

Completly off topic, but what anime is you avatar from Giel? It looks entertaining.

 

:smt043 :smt043

 

Aw, come on - you can't say that even the legendary John Romero would have been able to help yet another Gauntlet rehash - maybe that's why he left in the first place. Who knows - maybe we'll get to see the rumored Daikatana 2 now? (And yes, for all its flaws, I DID like the original.)

 

Wasn't he gonna make me his bitch some ten years ago? The videogame rockstar, him... Heh, If nobody else is going to, let me be the first to laugh at Daikatana in this topic. You know, just to obey protocol.

On a largely off topic, scary as hell note, his name + surname is only 3 letters different from that of my first girlfriend - and his initials would be the same. For the record, she did not make me her bitch either.

 

http://www.planetdaikatana.com/dk2/

what's so bad about daikatana anyway? i must warn you i've never played the game before, nor heard of it.

 

Was that game made by the co-founder of DOOM? Sorry, I know LITTLE about Id and the makers of DOOM, even though I have heard it before somewhere, but is escaping me...

 

it really wasnt that bad of a game. the hype machine jus got waaay ahead of it before its launch and dissapointed alot of people (read: killzone).

decient game, but using the QII engine in the days of unreal gave it a very 'dated' feel.

 

Well, I thought being able to walk through the wall into nothingness in the N64 version was a bit odd, to name something.

 

See, it could have been recalled as a decent game, or simply faded into nothingness because of its irrelevant quality. Hell, it was probably even good if you took the hype away from it.

But... it was SO overhyped by this rock star of gaming that was gonna make us all his bitches that not even a good product, much less the overly delayed and technically inferior Daikatana, would have measured up to the life-changing qualities advertised.

In short, bad marketing and bad programming made Johnny their bitch.

 

I did not know that Romero was in Midway. The latest which I knew of him was that he was in Monkeystone, a company creating games for handheld devices like Pocket PC, Palm, mobile phones etc.

http://www.monkeystone.com/about.php

 

Monkeystone went out and Romero and Tom Hall both joined up with Midway to work on this Gauntlet rehash.

Mr. Casual, John Romero and John Carmack were the two original founders of id Software, creating the Catacomb 3d series, Commander Keen, and Wolfenstein 3d before finally moving on to Doom. Romero left id with Tom Hall shortly after Quake was released to form Ion Storm, arguably known best for Warren Spector's Deus Ex.

Daikatana isn't really a bad game per se, but the combination of amazing pre-release hype, spectacular delays surpassed only by Starcraft Ghost and Duke Nukem Forever :smt043 and - as MasterChief noted, a game engine one generation behind the standard at the time all ensured that it didn't fare so well. This is all in a general nutshell, but the Daikatana story has become a sort of inside joke in the computer gaming industry. The truely funny thing is that far less than half of the people willing to make a witty crack have actually played the game.

 

There was a time when every FPS really gave the world something fresh and unique, while now developers are merely intent on copying ideas. Apart from Killzone (which owes its very existence to a certain Bungie-created series), I've not been entertained by a FPS since GoldenEye, which - although brilliant - is never going to compete against the likes of the classics in a definitive list of the genre's best moments.

While it may seem annoying that id gets credited for inventing the FPS phenomenon, a proven track record incorporating Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake firmly cements the names of Carmack and Romero as leaders in the movement, regardless of how lacklustre their recent efforts may have been to some critics. Even the upcoming fourth installment of Quake doesn't seem able to match the benchmark set gameplay-wise by its predecessors, and despite glowing reviews it's unlikely that neither Half Life 2 or Doom 3 will do the same for their respective franchises. The whole Unreal series has lost its way, and there was never any chance that a more realistic-looking Wolfenstein would surpass the original, which leaves Far Cry, Pariah and the upcoming Black to offer a glimpse into the future of a once thriving scene.

Thanks to Medal Of Honor (damn you, EA!) and games of its second-rate quality, the first-person shooter has become a stagnant trend best left consigned to a glorious past. At least Deus Ex and Daikatana tried to feature something original, though I have a feeling that the long wait (an understatement if ever there was one) for Duke Nukem Forever may a sign - is it really worth bothering to save the FPS when all new generation players care about is Halo or the inevitable next conflict to be pillaged for a quick buck?

Sorry, but I'm deeply concerned at the lack of progress the FPS world seems to be making. At least I can always go back to the "old favourites" should originality dry up for good and cross my fingers for a Carnack/Romero reunion that lives up to the hype that would almost certainly surround such a project...

Does anyone else find it shocking that FPS developers always seem to require the very latest (and sometimes even future) hardware specifications? Why can't they just stick to existing technology and try to push the gameplay envelope, as was achived with Half Life on the Quake II engine? I can imagine these modern-day programmers spending more time keeping up to date with PC technology as opposed to actually coding anything, which may explain the gaps between releases and also the reason titles like Duke Nukem Forever keep shifting platforms and being increasingly delayed as a result!

One company that didn't receive enough praise until after its closure was Lobotomy Software, whose brilliant Saturn conversions of Duke Nukem 3D and especially Quake would have been impossible under any other team (both id and GT had tried and failed). While unsuitable for a topic about the FPS, it should be noted that Lobotomy also created the fantastic DeathTank games along with the more relevant Exhumed. Their modified Build/Brew tools exposed the Saturn's hidden 3D potential and opened up a world of possibility when it came to rivalling other systems of the time for FPS performance. I'd love to see how well their incomplete attempt at a PlayStation port of Quake went, just to further prove Lobotomy's worth as a forgotten genius programming collective...

 

Midori No hibi (USA released title: midori's days) It's a pretty fun show about a girl who's in love with the guy from my avatar, and then becomes his right hand. I loved it to bits, and the dvd's 1 and 2(maybe 3 and 4 too) are already out.

 

This bitch is toast. Too bad he had that fight with carmack, cuz now is the only guy who may take the risk and give him a hand.

 

There was never really any 'fight' with Carmack, per se, Romero just had different ideas for what sort of games he wanted to work on, and they didn't mesh with what id was working on at the time, so he and id parted ways more or less amicably.

If anyone besides me is utterly fascinated by the origins of id Software, I'd highly recommend buying the book Masters Of Doom by David Kushner - it begins in the Softdisk days, chronicles the Doom era, Romero and Tom Hall's foray into Ion Storm, and ends right around the Quake 3 release, being amazingly informative the whole time.

I'd have to argue that a little bit. While Doom 3 may not have revolutionized the series' gameplay, it proved that FPS games today can be every bit as scary as many found the original Doom to be upon its release. Half-Life 2 I think is far more influental, as it really made huge leaps in storytelling inside the game (something FPSes are notoriously lacking) and had absolutely spectacular level design with a realism unmatched by even the graphically impressive Doom 3. Especially since Valve is still actively developing technologies like HDR, I think the Source engine is going to be the future of the genre, at least for the time being.

 

ill just wait for quake wars enemy territory to decide on the qualitys of the doom 3 engine

for me the problem with doom 3 was i am nearly 90% multiplayer oriented so doom 3 was a waste of money for me, on the other site what did valve do ? they just ported over good old counterstrike (which was originly developed as mod outside) with loads of bugs and now fix for months that thing to run smoothly...

iam not sure the half life 2 engine is so superiour over doom 3 it looks superiour but its bugs (in combination with steam) are sometimes not worth the eyecandy

 

if you take every little details of the source engine all togheter, the bump-maping, the specularity, the textures variations, the reflective and reflactive water, bump-maped displacement maps, volumetric effects, the details and static props, the particles effects and the freshnel reflection, just to name a few that we could see in hl2, then you can certainly say it as more ''depth'' than the doom 3 engine. however, doom3's lighting system is fully dynamic to create the best shadows you could ever see in a game, and shadows adds alot. It's especially amazing to see these shadows on an open-gl engine, since opengl standards body has yet to define a c-like shader language, doom3 uses assembly-style code analogous to directX 8 shaders, it still beats the crap out of hl2 on the shadow level, shadow visuals that are offered by DirectX 9 on hl2's side.