i'm gonna sing the doom song now

wagner james au's salon review of masters of doom, a biography of the founders of id software, is in that fine tradition of reviews that largely uses the book as a pretext for exploring the topic on its own. the book comes off as something like a late-’90s dotcom puff piece, whereas james is much more critical of id's real impact outside of the hardcore gamer community.

reportedly doom iii features less of the huge-horde-of-creatures battles for which id games are known. it will be interesting to see if that's really happens, and how well it works.

i remember when the original doom came out, and crippled some machines on our campus network. the first version used ipx broadcast messaging for its networking support, and that caused enough network traffic to overwhelm slower machines on the same network segment. needless to say, they got that sorted out in the next release.

(oh, you'll probably need to jump through hoops to read the full review. i decided to spring for a salon premium account a while ago.)