With Doom and Quake already ported, a pair of developers stepped up their game and brought Quake II and Quake III Arena to Android phones.
Both of the classic first-person shooters were ported with the Motorola Droid in mind, but they'll run on other Android phones (with the exception of the Nexus One for Quake 2). Best of all, if you've got a Droid, you can check out the games today, but you'll need a copy of the games for PC to complete the installation. Here are the pages for Quake2Android and Kwaak3.
Both games use a combination of touch screen and physical keyboard controls, and they also support networking with other computers or devices for deathmatch.
Android and Me, which prompted the development as part of a contest, checked out both games on a Droid and was fairly pleased with the results. Quake II held steady at 30 frames per second, and got even smoother in small areas of the map. Quake III Arena was more problematic. Small two-player maps hovered between 20 frames per second and 30 frames per second, but the frame rate dropped considerably in larger arenas. A video of the games running on the Droid can be seen on YouTube.
It dawns on me that someone should make a business of porting classic video games to Android phones -- perhaps an online outlet like Good Old Games, which already deals in selling the classics for play on modern computers. They've already got the rights to sell the games without DRM; Android just seems like a huge, untapped audience. If Quake and all the other hits from the 90s were available, I'd look to dump my iPhone as soon as possible.
