Two of id’s recent iPhone releases can now be had for cheap, with Wolfenstein 3D marked down to $US0.99 and Doom Resurrection marked down to $US2.99.

If you consider that to be appropriate pricing for an iPhone game, then you’d better make those purchases snappy. Those mark downs will only last as long as QuakeCon does. It’s all over Sunday.

id’s other new iPhone release, Wolfenstein RPG, can be had at the regular price of $US4.99, if your pockets go a little deeper.

Keep an eye on the QuakeCon liveblog for more exciting news than this.

id’s Doom 3 side story puts players in the role of a Marine, aided by a flying ‘bot named Sam, as he makes his way from point A to point B, shooting anything that looks vaguely demonic. Borrowing familiar settings and enemies from its 2004 inspiration, Doom Resurrection whittles the experience down to something more appropriate for an on-the-go re-imagining.

Without the benefit of access to a keyboard and mouse, Doom Resurrection relies on accelerometer and touchscreen control to get all that first-person shooting done. The interface is simple, with portions of the iPhone’s touchscreen dedicated to attacking, dodging, reloading, switching weapons and pausing. To move your ever present reticule, just tilt.

With those concessions, was Doom worth exhuming on the iPhone?

Loved
As Good As On-Rails Shooters Get: Gaming snobs may turn up their noses at the prospect of a first-person shooter being hobbled with an on-rails guide, but Doom Resurrection remains surprisingly fun. Honestly, I didn’t miss keycard hunting, updating my PDA security clearance levels or straining to see without a flashlight during my play time. I was more interested in the often frantic light gun-like action. Smartly taking cover and perfecting headshots adds depth to a relatively simplistic arcade-style game. Having my performance graded after each level, based on things accuracy and the number of secret items found, compelled me enough to revisit many of the game’s stages.

Technically Impressive (Or Hey, That’s A Pretty Good Doom Impersonation): Doom Resurrection doesn’t look nearly as good as its five-year-old PC forebear, but it generally runs at a good clip. It’s the control scheme that impresses most, with a tilt to aim function that actually works—mostly thanks to a quick calibration setting that lets the player recenter the reticule on the fly.

Hated
But Not Without Its Quirks: Doom Resurrection does comes with its share of frustrations. The hitbox for enemies is generous to a fault, so you may be pointing directly at an exploding barrel, but hitting the zombie standing just to the left of it. And you’re probably going to recalibrate that targeting reticule a bit too often. And you’re going to roll your eyes at bad guys that teleport right behind you all the time. And you’re probably going to miss some health or ammo items when the touchscreen doesn’t register your taps.

Doom Resurrection will let you have a great deal of fun with it—if you overcome your iPhone game phobias and let yourself have a great deal of fun with it. There’s depth of play here, thanks to a suite of weapons that includes shotguns, plasma rifles, the trademark BFG and even a chainsaw, as well as smart, simplified touch controls.

What sometimes detracts from that fun is Doom Resurrection’s asking price (which seems just a few dollars too high), a handful of antiquated design decisions, and its occasionally mystifying touchscreen quirks.

Doom Resurrection was developed by Escalation Studios and published by id Software on the iPhone and iPod Touch on June 26. Retails for $US9.99 via iTunes. Played through main campaign on “Marine” difficulty, replayed multiple missions on “Veteran” difficulty in Free Play mode.

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As a matter of fact, Wolfenstein RPG has been completed for quite some time. As id’s John Carmark explains it, his excitement over getting Wolfenstein 3D Classic on the iPhone screwed up EA’s release plans a little bit.

“I was disappointed that EA decided to sit on it, but they kinda freaked out when I did the Wolfenstein 3D Classic, as it wasn’t a carefully planned thing…I just thought “Hey, This is cool and fun, let’s release it!” That blew their planned rollout – they were worried about selling people two Wolfenstein titles at once. Hopefully they’ll release it soon.”

In the meantime, id Mobile is working on finishing the Doom II RPG for cell phones, after which they’ll be doing that for the iPhone. Carmack himself is running the classics line, which will see the release of Doom, Quake, Quake II, Quake III, and then there will be more from scratch titles. One game he mentioned specifically was Rage, which would be “a destruction action thing”.

Finally, Carmack is interested in creating a technical proof of concept for running the idTech 5 megatexture content creation pipeline on the 3GS, simply to warm the technology up and see what the more powerful device can handle.

All of that, plus working on id’s big titles? It doesn’t seem like John Carmack has plans to slow down any time soon.

id Software’s John Carmack is one of the masterminds behind some of the greatest first-person shooters of all time, often referred to as a father of the entire genre for his work on games like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. Lately, however, John has been taking id’s properties in different directions, creating a roleplaying game version of Doom and now this title, Doom Resurrection for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The game began as a test. Carmack supervised the development, which was carried out by the team at Escalation Studios, in order to see what sort of iPhone game could be created using more resources and a larger budget than your average iPhone title. That is the reason we didn’t hear about the game until earlier this month – Carmack wanted to make sure they had a viable product.

Gamers will of course question the viability of a game that takes one of the world’s greatest first-person shooters and transforms it into a simple rail shooter. Carmack addresses such concerns, explaining that sometimes freedom must be sacrificed for the greater good.

Freedom is great. There’s no doubt about it that one of the major aspects of FPSs is that you’re exploring this world and if you want to you can look down between the cracks in the floor and see something cool… but in a high-end game we can spend literally hundreds of thousands of dollars creating this awesome thing only to have the player turn their head the other way and never seeing it. That’s extraordinarily frustrating That’s what we traded off in this game. You don’t have the free roaming freedom… but it guarantees that the game will always look good.”

Despite Carmack’s clear vision for Doom Resurrection, another issue reared its ugly head in the middle of the development cycle that nearly caused him to pull the plug entirely. The game originally featured the standard shooter controls we’ve come to know and grudgingly deal with in an iPhone shooter, with the player touching the screen to shoot.

The game still looked great, but there was never a challenge… and therefore it wasn’t fun. The player’s thumb would cover the screen, and it really didn’t feel like you were inside the experience. On the verge of scrapping the project, Escalation came up with the solution – the accelerometer.

“It was only halfway through the project, after I had already served notice that we were going to scrap the project that (Escalation) completely scrapped that control metaphor and came up with this different paradigm where you aim with the accelerometer, tilting around. It was am overnight difference, where build one I was about to scrap the project, and build two, all of the sudden we were still a long way from done but it had that kernel – this is a game we could make fun.

How confident is Carmack? So confident that he believe that imitators will soon start showing, with the accelerometer aiming technique perhaps becoming the default control scheme for iPhone shooters.

So now the game is on the verge of release, and players will be able to get their hands on Doom Resurrection for the first time. What can you expect? Well it depends on which iPhone you have. Carmack noted that the original iPhone experienced significant slowdown but was still playable; the iPhone 3G offered a very smooth experience, and the game runs like butter on the 3GS, with improved loading times to boot.

Smooth gameplay and low loading times will also be a boon in the coming weeks and months, as id gears up to add multiplayer support to the title, starting with 2-player cooperative peer-to-peer, with Elevation looking to extend that to 4-player competitive in the future. Unfortunately the game was too far into development when the 3.0 software was introduced, but the features will be patched n, with new downloadable level being looked at as well.

It’s probably best to look at Doom Resurrection not as a version of Doom for the iPhone, but as something completely different with a familiar look and feel. id and the team at Escalation have made some bold choices with the title, and should they pay off it could very well lead to other developers devoting more resources and bigger-budgets to iPhone titles in the future.

Doom: Resurrection is perhaps the best-looking 3D game on the iPhone, and is a big step up from id’s last effort, Wolfenstein. But those good looks come at a price.

Much like Dead Space on the Wii, the unexpected graphical fidelity comes at the expense of movement, with Doom: Resurrection to be an on-rails shooter rather than a true 3D title.

Next week, id Software will release Doom Resurrection, a new iPhone and iPod Touch game profiled by Venture Beat. According to details on the first-person shooter, expect a “next-generation” level of 3D graphics from previous iPhone games.

id’s John Carmack calls Apple’s phone platform a “real game platform” and has his own Doom, dubbed Doom Classic, in the works. Doom Resurrection development was handled by Escalation Studios, which, with Carmack’s help, got the game up and running at 30 frames-per-second in six months.

Look for it to hit next week, with a Kotaku review to hit soon after.

Next-generation iPhone game Doom Resurrection debuting next week [Venture Beat]