Bungie's Marathon (& mods)

So who here's a fan?

I found out about the series through a friend and started playing it using Aleph One. Too bad I don't have a Mac—I'd love to make levels.

First game is rather boring. Marathon 2 has tons of nifty things. Infinity has one of my favorite final levels of all time. It's incredible architectural porn for something on such an old engine.

Rubicon X is amazing, if somewhat too different in tone from the original games (less easy to justify the dream levels, for example).

Red is fucking intense but the map glitches can be a pain in the ass. Still, Ian Mcconville did good work. Whoda thought a game running on 1997 code could make you shit your pants so well?

Evil is cool.

Eternal X...Didn't like it.

Tempus Irae, despite basically just being a level set, just feels nice and polished. The new juggernaut graphics freaked me out the first time I saw one.

I downloaded this a while back, played the first level of the first game, and haven't touched it since. You're saying the sequel's the one to start with?

I won't kill you if you do, at least. It has dual shotguns!

Yeah, the first one is a tedious romp (or at least I think so) through two different scenery types (human ship and Pfhor ship). The second game is a major step up.

I'd recommend playing Marathon 2 before Marathon Infinity. Infinity is a dangerous place for the novice.

I died a thousand deaths on the first Marathon. I figure I'm not cut out for this sort of thing.

What was it that kept getting you?

Half of it was the jumps (or equivalent) over lava. The other half was the sheer amount of enemy fire, even on the lowest difficulty setting (if it existed; it's been a while, and I always play on the easiest difficulty, so if it's there I played on that).

Doom taught me to play like a craven coward, so that might be it.

I've been meaning to replay the original trilogy sometime — the latter two games had excellent atmosphere, especially for being a decade old when I first played them. (Though I never did finish Rubicon....)

I have it downloaded. I die, a lot. A lot a lot.

@dkellis: Never, ever, ever, EVER play Marathon RED, then. It's Nintendo Hard AND utterly terrifying.

Tze Tze might be interested, though, for obvious reasons.

What, no love for E:MR? I mean, what other game lets you fight a t-rex with a sword? Also, so far as licensed mods go, ZPC and Prime Target were kinda average, but Damage Inc. was absolutely great.

I found out about them a few years ago while reading through the Halo Story Page on HBO. I didnt mind the first game, maybe because I was playing through more for the story and the connections to Halo (plus I have a fairly high tollerence for mediocre gameplay.)

Yes, Durandal, Infinity and Rubicon are amazing, Eternal is OK, RED and Evil are enjoyable if obnoxiously difficult sometimes (I'm looking a you, homing-bomb cyborgs! *shakefist*).

I find the series is like Half-life 2, in that the faceless/voiceless-ness of the PC makes it easy to imagine that it's actually you running through the game world, not just some remote-controlled shmuck in green tights.

Okay, I'm trying to extract the Rubicon X folder to the desktop on my dad's Vista laptop and every time I extract it says that "file X" is already the name of a folder and refuses to do anything correctly, forcing me to abort the attempt.

Is this a Vista problem, or...?

Feh. I'll deal with the glitches on my Windows XP. Stinkin' technology is inconsistent and unreliable.

Anyway. One thing I do like about Eternal is the music. The piano rendition of "Swirls" brings tears to my eyes.

Either there's a dearth of save points in Marathon 2, or I suck at the game. Possibly both.

What difficulty are you playing at?

Default? I couldn't find the difficulty setting in Preferences.

Oh. You go to the Player menu to find the difficulty option. Unless something's borked with your exe.

It was at the very top. (facepalm)

Normal. Are savepoints and health/air rechargers taken out at higher difficulties?

Savepoints are constant regardless of difficulty. Same goes for shield and oxygen stations. Oxygen canisters and shield canisters stay the same between difficulties too, IIRC.

The big difference is lots more enemies, and they'll be shooting a HELL of a lot more while the Bobs shoot the same. (Critical weakness: Bobs remain immobile while they have target lock, whereas Pfhor and other foes will fire-move-fire-move.)

edited 19th Aug '09 1:38:40 AM by Charlatan

Huh.

I've only gotten as far as the fourth level, so restarting on Easy shouldn't be too much of a hassle.

I think you can change the difficulty when you're not in-game.

I think I'll stick with Normal for the time being.

Just raced the rising lava, and now I appear to be stuck. Gamefaqs time.

Wow, I really do need to come to the video game topic more often. Hanging directly above my head at this very moment is the original disc for the first game. I bought it at a garage sale years ago and now have neither the registration code nor a Mac old enough to run it anymore, but I couldn't bring myself to throw it out.

Ah, so many memories of running backwards while unloading my dual pistols, screaming, "crap crap crap! Don't wanna die! Don't wanna die!" And that was just on Normal difficulty, on account of my infinite suck and all. Experiments in Total Carnage mode were always extremely short.

Tried to play online with Aleph One against my cousin in Arizona a few times, but never got it to work. At least, according to him, HE had a lot of fun on it.

Guides with level maps (press "M" to open up the auto-map — you can even move while looking at it...).

Aw, dammit. I was supposed to break two panels, and I only did the one that made the lava rise. I don't suppose there's a Restart Level button anywhere?