Quake 3 hits the iPod touch, makes for portable LAN party

Future generations will most likely divide the timeline of history at this point: when Quake 3 achieved motion-sensing, wireless network play on two iPod touches. Just think, less than a year ago we were salivating (or at least mildly enthused) at the prospect of rocking Doom on this thing, and now Quake 3 Arena is yours for the taking -- or at least will be once we get any sort of hard info on this app.

[Via PMP Today]

[Andrew @ Apr 5th 2008 4:53PM]

omfg...

are you kidding me?

I need a new pair of boxers, cause I definitely crapped myself...

[clak @ Apr 5th 2008 5:21PM]

Now we can shut up all those idiots asking, "But does it play Doom? Ha ha." I'm wondering if John Carmack knows about this? That iPhone/iPod Touch gaming market is looking kind of lucrative right about now. I wonder if it will be possible to port Counter-Strike for this thing? Hey, Gabe, baby, are you listening?

[ssuk @ Apr 5th 2008 6:34PM]

clak is right. This is the 21st century. Fuck Doom.

Does it play Doom II?

[CUBSWILLWIN @ Apr 5th 2008 8:33PM]

Dude, I need to get a new desk seat! Worse than you man :P

[Ty @ Apr 7th 2008 1:20PM]

John Carmack helped make this happen.

[Maurik @ Apr 5th 2008 4:53PM]

No freaking way! SWEEET!! Sony HAS to release an official SDK for the PSP now. I can't believe Q3A is on the itouch before PSP. Ridiculous.

[ssuk @ Apr 5th 2008 6:44PM]

Keep dreaming. A game console's revenue stream comes from licensing games. You give a SDK away, you aren't doing much to encourage developers to seek licences and give a company money. Sure, you cover a fair chunk of hardware costs when you buy a console, but the company usually looses a lot of money on each hardware unit sold. It's why the 360 is so cheap, MS make back that cost from licensing games on the console. (The exception being the Wii, which has made Nintendo a sea of green for them to swim in, they make raw profit off every console sold.)

The iPhone/iPod Touch wasn't created to make money off software licences, it was made to cover it's cost at purchase, not to mention the money they're getting away from AT&T, O2 and the others who hold iPhone service exclusivity around the world... It's viable for them to make their platform more attractive by opening up the platform to developers.

[greg @ Apr 5th 2008 4:55PM]

man, this must really drain ur battery...but still freaken awsome. I know whats on my christmas list...now I just need to figure out how to speed up time.

[clak @ Apr 5th 2008 6:34PM]

A company called Mophie released a battery sleeve for the iPhone a few months ago. http://www.mophie.com/products/juice-pack/?pod=iPhone

[Sam Winter @ Apr 7th 2008 4:09AM]

not necessarily.. OpenGL ES runs on an integrated coprocessor which doesn't strain the main ARM core (and obviously makes it way faster)... I can't wait for firmware 2.0!

[Smart People Play Tuba @ Apr 5th 2008 4:57PM]

. . . or you could get a job.

[ShadowMaker @ Apr 5th 2008 4:58PM]

That really isn't too difficult. Just get in a spaceship accelerate to lightspeed, return and you'll find that time indeed has sped up. Of course by the time you'll get back there probably won't be an iPod touch anymore, but at least you've had a fun trip.

[Smart People Play Tuba @ Apr 5th 2008 4:58PM]

That was supposed to be a reply to greg. Stupid no-replying engadget comments section . . .

[EROZ @ Apr 5th 2008 7:45PM]

I can reply, sucka.

[Jack @ Apr 6th 2008 12:47AM]

If Eroz was a helpful soul, he would have informed you that reply works if you click on the date/time stamp.

[LiQuiD_FuSioN @ Apr 5th 2008 5:00PM]

Hey, I've got an iPod Touch! Where can I sign up? :D

[ChaosWeevil @ Apr 5th 2008 5:01PM]

This may seem rather cynical, but haven't we seen rather impressive things done with videos before?

You know, like the iPhone Magic Show ( http://youtube.com/watch?v=lcB8CKa73B0 )?

[The Dude @ Apr 5th 2008 5:01PM]

Cool, but not the most optimal way to play. Kind of hard to kick ass in Quake 3 when you're constantly messing with your viewing angle in efforts to control the player. Glare and washout ain't no fun when you're trying to pwn.

[clak @ Apr 5th 2008 5:12PM]

Well, the major problem is that the guy was playing with one hand for each iPod Touch he was holding. I'd imagine that it would be much easier to play using two hands to move and a thumb or finger to fire.

Now if they could only build in a way to jump or is it "skip?" Perhaps the left pane of the screen could be for jumping and the right for firing. So your left thumb could activate jump by touching the screen, while your right thumb fires. I wonder how difficult it will be to implement that kind of interaction.

[mike @ Apr 5th 2008 5:01PM]

Oh god, this makes me want a 3G iPhone _so hard_.

[The Dude @ Apr 5th 2008 5:38PM]

"_so hard_."

Obligatory: That's what she said.

[Chris Macdonald @ Apr 5th 2008 6:11PM]

dude, I can understand if it's a perfect setup, but it's not an obligatory..

[Sylvanus @ Apr 5th 2008 5:02PM]

what do you mean you can't reply?

[Sauerkraut @ Apr 5th 2008 5:02PM]

I misread it at first as Doom 3 :p

[JLTate @ Apr 5th 2008 5:04PM]

Wow! Now you can play a game I got sick of nearly a decade ago on a phone I got sick of hearing about nearly a year ago. Amazing! Convergence is finally happening at last!

[Chris Macdonald @ Apr 5th 2008 7:27PM]

dude it's frackin' awesome

[clak @ Apr 5th 2008 7:48PM]

Damn, you Apple haters wouldn't use an iPhone to call 911 if your mother was dying of a heart attack and there wasn't another phone in a 50 mile radius. Outstanding!

[JLTate @ Apr 5th 2008 8:26PM]

Clak: Yes, and?

[LiQuiD_FuSioN @ Apr 5th 2008 5:07PM]

Very true, I can tell it will be a pain. From my experience, playing Doom on my iPod Classic wasn't the best, but it was the idea of playing my favorite FPS that got me enthusiastic to try it out.

[LiQuiD_FuSioN @ Apr 5th 2008 5:09PM]

And yes, the reply system does seem to be quite buggy. :s

[LiQuiD_FuSioN @ Apr 5th 2008 5:11PM]

Oh wow, what an error. Pardon my little "flood" comments! I meant to say "..playing Doom on my iPod 5G..", not the Classic. As far as I know, the Classic isn't hacked yet. Unless someone can tell me otherwise! ;)

[bob @ Apr 5th 2008 5:15PM]

that would be syncing your motion in two hand simultaneously, the touches and the videos themselves, not likely, not to mention why would it be fake? the sdk is out, the iphone / touch has twice the processing power of a psp and a lot more ram.

[LordZargon @ Apr 5th 2008 5:18PM]

Theoretically it -could- play Half-Life then as its based entirely upon the Q3 engine; now THEN I'd buy one!

[clak @ Apr 5th 2008 6:52PM]

@Steffen Jobs

Well, to answer your question, there are already companies making battery packs for the iPhone. I'm surprised Griffin hasn't made one. A company called Mophie released a battery sleeve for the iPhone a few months ago. http://www.mophie.com/products/juice-pack/?pod=iPhone

[phobie @ Apr 8th 2008 12:27PM]

LordZargon, you are wrong! Half-Life is not based on the Q3-engine.
Half-Life uses a modified "id Tech 1"-engine aka. Quake-I-engine...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Quake_-_family_tree.svg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_tech

[Steffen Jobbs @ Apr 5th 2008 6:37PM]

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2008/03/20/iphone-20-sdk-video-games-to-rival-nintendo-ds-sony-psp/
You just check out this article and you'll see exactly how lucrative the iPod Touch/iPhone gaming platform can be. Running far better hardware than either the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP, the iPod Touch/iPhone can dominate if games are developed for it. I don't know how many of users are playing games on this platform now, but the iPhone does have at least 4 million devices out there. With movies, music, corporate usage and games, iPhones sales should just explode once SDK games are released. There should be no problem selling 11 or 12 million iPhones this year.

My only worry, as you mentioned, how will the puny battery manage to take the stress. When my PSP runs low on juice I can just pop in another battery. iPhone users won't be so fortunate.

[Luke @ Apr 5th 2008 5:23PM]

@ ShadowMaker...

Time, in theory, does NOT speed up when getting closer to light speed; it slows down.

[Tom @ Apr 5th 2008 7:35PM]

You need to take a physics course again...while your time slow down, the surrounding time goes faster, get it?

[Luke @ Apr 8th 2008 6:46AM]

@ Tom

.... I'm aware of that. But it's only relative.

Regardless, I WANT THIS ON MY iPod touch!

:)

[Lein @ Apr 5th 2008 5:26PM]

Weren't Windows Mobile-powered Pocket PCs doing this over a year ago already? Nice to see, but certainly nothing new.

Oh, and wasn't that Pocket PC a DELL of all things? And isn't 640x480 > 480x320?

[clak @ Apr 5th 2008 5:55PM]

Christ, you Apple haters are so negative. You would piss on a Dasani truck if you were dying of thirst in the middle of the Sahara desert.

[Abuzar @ Apr 5th 2008 7:52PM]

My piss tasted better than Dasani water.

[Nohone @ Apr 5th 2008 8:45PM]

Clak, as someone who makes negative post after post in treads about Microsoft tech (see the Surface thread for example, as well as other slams against the XBOX, Zune, etc), you whining about somebody being negative about Apple is just a sad attempt to defend everything Apple. If you think that other people should not be making comments such as Lein's, why don't you follow your own advice?

[Abuzar @ Apr 5th 2008 8:58PM]

Thank you. I'll be here all night.

[clak @ Apr 5th 2008 9:13PM]

@Dohone

How DARE you expose my hypocrisy!

[Scott @ Apr 7th 2008 11:55AM]

The new thing is this port looks to actually be FLUID unlike the slide show you get on a Pocket PC or Windows Mobile.

Here's a video showing this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxf4oTaxPv8

Now look again at the iPod touch version...

[Peter @ Apr 11th 2008 5:25PM]

Yeah? And apple's first handheld (let's forget the newton) can do it to? What's your point? The point here is that this is cool and that's what matters. Besides, I can't think of any other handhelds that could do than AND had an accelerometer.

[esecasco @ Apr 5th 2008 5:28PM]

LordZargon

Half-Life was "loosely" based on the Quake 1 source.

But, any machine that could run Q3A decently, could definitely run CS.

[Wwhat @ Apr 7th 2008 7:31AM]

And with WiFI can they can feed in crappy ads too, isn't it greeeat.

[lanejasper69 @ Apr 5th 2008 5:31PM]

will it work on iPhone?
thx
Faslane