DOOM 4

It takes a while for me to get to the point. Hang in there.

Chris mentioned that "Hitman is the best video game movie to date" on the DVDFriend website. I countered by suggesting that Doom, Mortal Kombat, and all 3 Resident Evil movies, and possibly the first Tomb Raider movie were all better. He agreed with a lot of that, but disagreed on doom. (It seems that he was zoning in on a particular director rather than cover the full spectrum of video game movies).

I liked the first Doom movie. It's in the "crappy but good" category. I love how they didn't bother with a PG13... they just went for the R, and did anything they want.

Anyway, that got me thinking about the Doom games. I never beat Doom 3. I suppose I should play it again, but I didn't have fun with it. Doom 1 and 2 were in big open areas with lots of monsters. You could kill a lot of the monsters with a single shot.

I didn't get very far in Doom 3. It seemed that you had to shoot everything 50 times, and you were always in these tightly enclosed areas. I think I read that there could only be 3 baddies on the screen at a time. And, the infamous flashlight.... apparently your first-person self can't hold a flashlight and a gun at the same time. (There was change for that after... don't know if it was a 3rd party mod or a IDSoftware change). Half Life 2 came out about the same time. Its a FAR superior game. I later update to Doom 3 ripped off the Half Life 2 gravity gun.

Great... right. But what does this have to do with a tech'ish blog? I'm getting there.

After pondering the failure of Doom 3 for a bit, I jumped on google to find Doom 4. I learned that, at the beginning of May, IDSoftware announced that production on Doom 4 has begun.

"Swell", I thought (in first person). "it'd be great if I could post a link to that on the website".

The development project name for DVDFriend is "DVDBlog". So is the database. I approached the new design (which really isn't new anymore) in a completely different way. Everything is "blog" entries, which is to day, just a bunch of text. There's no real hierarch of data. There are other tables to bring the data together in meaningful ways, with more to come eventually.)

The DVDFriend site is broken up into zones. I can specify different things go into different zones, though I have never actually done that. Its functionality that I have to revisit, because the database and API both support my wish to show a list of NEWS links in the right margin. However, the admin site does not. Rather than jump in and manually insert the data, I'd rather write about not doing it, as I am now.

Actually, though, it would require a new zone. The right zone is currently occupied by the DVD list. I'll have to put it outside the margin. It'll give it a certain symmetry.

When will I actually get to this? I feel that simply acknowledging it is sufficient. I don't know when I'll actually end up doing it. The way this usually works is that, as I type this, I'm really not in the mood. But, it will fester, then I'll finally commit to it while watching tv one night. Will the patter repeat? We'll see.

In the meantime, I'm thinking about other things. In particular, I'm thinking about SOA, ESB, and the possibility of writing a .NET pubsub. Stay tuned.