Day 79: Damascus rest day

I just experienced ‘missing time’ playing Doom: Resurrection on my iPhone. I have bought 3-4 other 3d shooter titles, and have thoroughly disliked each. While some stunk for other reasons, they all stunk because they had a crappy control scheme. I was pretty sure that noone would ever make a quality fps shooter on the iPhone. When Id software released Doom I thought perhaps they could figure out a way to make it work. What they did surprised me.

They made a shooter on rails that doesn’t play like an Id game, but has the high level of quality you’d expect. They did away with the ability to move around in the environment, but gave a depth of tactics by adding dodge and strafe controls when appropriate. The variety of enemies, based off the doom 3 enemies, is true to the Doom game mechanic, even in such a limited control scheme. By combining different enemies and environments Id has created a depth and complexity that keeps you 100% in the zone from beginning to end.

The only thing that sucks is that you need to re-calibrate your control a lot. While the controls are much improved over other games, it’s still the iPhone, so the accelerometer is still a crapshoot sometimes.

In non-doom news I’ve been enjoying relaxing in Damascus. I did laundry. Silicone treated my tent bottom. Bought a spare tube. Worked on Mustaches. I did some work on Poe. I’m at the point where he is being introduced as a person, instead of an abstract malevolent force.

I went to the library to relax and find some good research material for drawing Cthulhu style monsters. Since I’d prefer not to be derivative of other artists(not that I don’t, constantly), i like to use reference from photos. I thought deepsea creatures would be great. Lo and behold they had a truly fantastic book called The Deep. I’m pretty certain this book is going in my library when I get back. The creatures inside are more imaginative than most monsters I’d dream up. I easily got lost browsing the fascinating and bizarre things that live in the ocean. I was able to eak out a couple drawings of my favorites while reading, too.

And tomorrow I’m back on the road. I took a look at my next map and it turns out that not all of Virginia is hilly. I have maybe two more ‘heart-attack hills’ to go. The first is two 1000′ climbs. The other is a doozy, four miles of super steep grade. The rest is sweet sweet downhill!