![]() ![]() The gameplay proper starts after you narrowly avoid this fate, in a scene where you're immediately drawn in by one of the game's big fixtures: computer terminals that keep you supplied with news, objectives and advice from the AI that's still friends with you, and other random cosmic background information. As you are about to dock inside the eponymous colony ship, badly in need of your services, you're promptly given a taste of your own medicine as one of the three onboard AIs, Durandal, attempts to cleanse you of your own slimy life signs. In cleansing space ships from signs of slimy alien life, to be precise. As you'll learn from the short introduction in the manual, you are a specialist in cleansing. As a college-grad scifi story with player participation, it absolutely stands on its own even today, and launches the trilogy on its interstellar journey at the kind of speed you would want a colony ship to be traveling to get more worlds colonized before the cryo-chambers fail or the AI goes rampant. And it didn't do a poor job of dressing its levels up in ways evoking the kinds of spacey spaces you're meant to be exploring, making it probably the second game after Shock to earn that award. To name some: a modern-style mouselook option multiple fire modes allied fighters more than one kind of level objective low-gravity areas a motion sensor health recharge stations impossible spaces well before any other liked shooters did them ( System Shock and possibly Ultima Underworld were more 3D than it though) a top-notch eight-player multiplayer extravaganza. ![]() Bring a camera and try to capture all of the various innovations that it brought into the genre amongst the great forerunners, especially considering the breakneck speeds the ludological evolution was striding at in the 90s. The first of the Marathons is a game you are adviced to approach as a narrative, without needlessly swamping yourself in the not-as-illustrious gameplay. Let's make sure we put this game on its appropriate pedestal before we start the inevitable scoffing over things the later entries went on to remedy. This is, then, a thinking man's – even a philosophical man's – first-person shooter first, and frankly, foremost. More so, I'm referring to the secrets of the game's story, some of which are belied only by a very close inspection of the game's novel-esque in-game script, which is also all delivered in the same way, in written text instead of voice-overs. And when I say "secrets" I'm not talking about what you might first think of in this context: secret doors and corridors (though those are also much less obvious than most shooters you're familiar with). Home of the underdogs windows#I say "cult-like" because unlike many other cult classics, the only reason Marathon has ever been a resident of the gaming underground is its exclusivity on the Macintosh until more recently when a supremely accurate Windows source port named Aleph One, capable of running any of the three games in the trilogy (all graciously made freeware in the year 2005), bubbled up from the life-giving primordial soup the games were left floating in. ![]() This has been due to an actually quite significant cult-like following gradually prying open its rather well encrypted secrets and subtleties, as well as Bungie's people themselves coming forward with whatever they happen to remember about the whirling development cycle. Unlike many other old video games gradually falling to bit-rotting oblivion, the door closing more and more with every passing year on discoveries that hadn't already been made, in a local reversal of entropy there has been a steadily increasing amount of information wrangled from the knuckle-dustered fists of Bungie's first pure 3D shooter, Marathon, the more time has passed since its 1994 release. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |