Aug '23 Monthly Game Club - Marathon Series

Brett

August’s game club is to play the Marathon series, the first-person shooter by Bungie with the first entry originally released in December 1994.

Nominated by @captain, here’s what they have to say about it:

I don’t understand it. And it’s free! https://alephone.lhowon.org/

Is it a classic? Revered because of what Bungie went on to do later with Halo? Let’s play ‘em and discuss!

Mnemogenic

Looked up the manual for Marathon 1 and it’s also quite the artifact from 1994 (there’s some story stuff in there too)
http://archives2.bungie.org/manuals/Marathon_Manual.pdf

Excited to play this. I had no immediate plans to do so and kinda forgot it existed.

Brett

Based on feedback in the main Monthly Game Club thread, I’ve revised this to include the entire Marathon series so people can check out any of the games in the series and share their experiences here.

deepspacefine

We should do a multiplayer or coop thing together!

yeso

essential reading for those new to the series

https://marathon.bungie.org/story/

Mnemogenic

Found the door manual

Kez

Anyone looking to play these games on Steam Deck - Aleph One does run on Linux and on the releases page there are flatpak versions. So if you download those flatpack files on steam deck and then install them from the terminal with:
flatpak install --user <filename>

Then you can just add them as a non-steam game.

I found a community config for the first game which seems like a lot of effort has gone into it. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any for the other two!

captain

And it’s free!

oops

Reverse Kaiser

My only memory of this game is spending about 20 minutes playing and reading and then forgetting which direction I was walking and spending the next 40 minutes lost in a maze with no idea where I was going

KosherSalt

Reverse Kaiser I think that’s the intended experience

Nemoide

I just want to share that Marathon is a series I have a lot of nostalgia for. One of my childhood friends came from a family of Mac owners and it was one of the few exciting games we could play on their Mac.
We used to play “2-player” by which I mean one of us would move and the other would shoot and open doors, then we’d switch places after a while. I wasn’t all that interested in reading the in-game text, satisfied by the summaries my friend would give me, but he was dyslexic so I definitely have some incorrect facts about the game in my mind and am missing large gaps of the story. We played through large portions of all three games but not necessarily in order, so a lot of the games are jumbled. I really would like to revisit the series but I’ve got a lot of headache-inducing real life stuff going on in August so I don’t see myself participating.

But Marathon is cool! I remember really liking the BOBs.

Mnemogenic

I wanna put this Durandal jerk in a locker

buy-frank-lewd-mags

After watching the Mandaloregaming video for these games, I have to say I lost any and all interest in exploring them. He goes into so much detail about the experience, I feel like I got all I needed to know.

KingTubb

FYI- The entire Marathon series is also available for free on iOS with controller support. That’s how I plan on playing it!

ninjapresident

Just wanted to say if it wasn’t for my hand injury I’d totally be in on this! Been interested in these games for a while; hopefully after things get better I’ll get around to it in the future.

Mnemogenic

Marathon 1 really pulled me in, and I ended up finishing it today. I can totally see why people would not want to play that game, but I had a real good time shooting aliens and solving inscrutable mazes. When you ally with the S’pht near the end to finally chase the Pfhor out, I thought that was a cool narrative change and it was genuinely odd to be fighting alongside them. And you can’t feel too triumphant, because you’re helping AI Elon Musk get an FTL spaceship.

I also thought the soundtrack was really cool. Lots of space-y synths with some more rock sounding tracks in there too.

But yeah, I thought Marathon 1 was pretty good! I’ll probably check out 2.

tomjonjon

Last week a played an hour or so of Durandal on Xbox. I bought the XBLA version back when it initially came out in ’07 and never got around to it. Can’t say that I was into what I’ve played so far. The level design is very confusing and I find the graphics to be off-putting. I will give it some more time though and I might try to install the other games in the series on an older Mac I have set up.

KingTubb

This game is spooky as hell man. The music in combination with the enemies being poorly(?) animated that I have trouble really parsing what they’re supposed to be has added a ton of tension. Pair that with the maze like level design and the breadcrumb story telling method, I’m having a pretty good time. If Halo was more like this, I’d of played it more

marurun

I could never beat any of them. They’re hard games, and the maps can be pretty confusing. And then Bungie let someone make Marathon Infinity and FML.

KingTubb

marurun the iOS ports have difficulty options, not sure if that was in the original game. Easy has been pretty breezy thus far, but the maps are still very labyrinthine