@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
Hello fellow vidmasters-to-be. I started Marathon 1 today.
For the first half hour I hated it. It's a dumber, uglier Doom. And though my opinion hasn't changed, for some sick reason I enjoy it now lmao.
I just can't believe they built a screenshot walkthrough directly into the game as a replacement for level design. One of them even tells you to make sure you save your game!!!!!! Unreal.
The specific thing that turned me from āI don't know about thisā to āoh maybe I like thisā was when I figured out that the punch does more damage with a running start. I donāt know old fps games well enough to say whether thatās a novel mechanic, but I had a lot of fun running around superman-punching aliens.
This strategy stops working once stuff gets stronger, but when the low-tier cyan guys show up I always pull out the fist because you can one shot them with it.
@Hyper-Guts-Shooter I think that's the intended experience
Honestly, reading the terminals is what will probably win you over on Marathon 1, not the action. Marathon 2 has action worth recommending, but Marathon 1 it's all about atmosphere and text terminals.
@marurun I feel totally the opposite! I thought the action was great. I like how ambush-oriented it is, there's a few big battles that are cool, and the lighting is used really well (in particular your muzzle flash).
I thought the writing in the terminals was kinda corny. The narrative overall is okay, but the terminals themselves were not compelling to me.
The writing style is a little corny, but Bungie does a really good job building a mythology of sorts of events. So taken together thereās this really cool mystery element to whatās going on. Bungie have historically been good plotters.
Wow, those videos by MandaloreGaming summarize the insane complexity of the Marathon series quite well. I still think they are unmatched in terms of their embedding of deep stories in an action game.
@Mnemogenic I honestly thought that the enemies were going into a āblock stateā if I just beat on them, and if I kind bobbed and weaved that they were letting their guards down.
Running making punches stronger makes more sense.
I loaded up Marathon 1 and after fiddling around for a few minutes with settings I ran around the first level and the door that Iām pretty sure Iām supposed to go through only opened halfway, and the controls don't seem to list a crouch button.
@rejj You are correct. About the door and the crouching
I had this same exact experience lol
longtime marathon series fan here, everything about the series is great except for the part that involves playing a video game. it hasn't really aged well IMO and even back then it was more āimmersiveā than āfunā to me. but for those of you who are soldiering through, good luck and thank you for your service o7
I skipped ahead and played a couple levels of Infinite. Crushed to discover the terminals are still Like That and the shooting feels just as stiff. So unfortunately my journey to Vidmaster status ends here.
I definitely wanna check out the channel @marurun recommended cuz very frankly I could not bring myself to read the full text of a single terminal I encountered lmao. In my time playing I found they alternated exclusively between assigning mundane, videogame-y chores ("activate these three switches") and describing events or technology that have little to do with my chores. Feels clumsy to me.
These are the only games I know to contain the full texts of their own paperback novelizations.
With you on that one. I will say, the terminal I read about The CRISTs and what they represent to people was pretty neat lore. I start to glaze over when they talk about the AI however
@KingTubb I also latched onto that specific terminal. Really loved reading about how the Marathon, devised as an ark for the dying colony, instead became a symbol of oppression as its construction dragged on.
I got stuck on a āpuzzleā in the first marathon and moved on to the next two to see what was going on. Just an FYI, you can press buttons with grenades.
_Durandal_ is a marked improvement visually, but I found the first level to be even more labyrinthine and confusing than anything that I experienced in the first game. _Infinity_ has a higher fidelity than the first game and waaaaay more textures, I found the textures they were using to be disorienting and _bad_ for lack of a better word. I felt like I was staring at a magic eye in the sunday paper.
Also, I didn't experience any music in the 2nd and 3rd game, which was disappointing. From a moment to moment perspective, I didn't really notice any difference. They all play the same way; fast-slippery-doom-esque. Not sure if I'm going to jump back in to try and complete any of these, but I'm really happy I played them. There was a lot of stuff worth seeing and this has me pretty excited for the new one.
Is anyone here a real freak and playing the games on a PPC Mac? Do I have to be that freak?
lol they get pretty wild with those grenade button puzzles. There's one (maybe the last level?) where you've gotta touchdown pass the grenade across a big hallway.
This was my experience with Durandal as well. It seemed to pick up more or less where 1 left off, except now they've added water to the mazes. I only played a few levels before I got tired of it.
So, it was a big of a slog but I just about finished the first game in this series under the wire.
There's a lot to like here, it's mindboggling how much innovation there was in this game. When I first played this Aleph One version, I thought the mouselook was a mod but it was actually the first game to have it. The gunplay is decent too, and the weapon variety is nice with most of them serving a unique purpose. The rocket/grenade jumping is cool if a bit tough to pull off.
I actually quite liked the terminals for the most part, the idea of all these super powered AI going "rampant" and scewing people over to suit their own agenda is pretty cool, and quite current as there is a good amount of AI panic going around right now. I thought the dystopian future they constructed for this game was quite believable and well thought out, and I can see why it has fans to this day.
What brought the game down for me was the mazelike level design, some of the more obtuse puzzles and - most of all - the ridiculous save system. About halfway through the game I started doing a bit more reading online about how to play/proceed (at which point I discovered I had been playing with the original HUD and map system when a far superior modern version was available), but until then I had been bumbling my way through the levels. The one in a vacuum took me so long to find a way through. The level that broke me was the apparently infamous one with the central puzzle involving platforms you need to raise and lower, having to trudge pretty much all the way back to the start just to push a button, walk across the map again, realise it's not quite right, repeat. Which brings me onto the save system: not having savepoints at the start of every new level is an absolute travesty, and this incredibly tedious puzzle is followed by a level that I died on before I managed to save - so I had to do it _again_.
I took a break for a several days at that point, but I did come back and hammer my way through the rest of the game. Several times I was similarly demoralized by the awful save point placement. I suspect I would feel a lot more positive about the game overall if that one aspect was improved.
Still, a lot of cool/interesting stuff here and I'll probably check out the sequel(s) in future.