Marathon

[Anonymous No.3527512]

Durandal did literally nothing wrong

[Anonymous No.3527597]

What was the story in Marathon even about anyway? I played it years ago and for some reason didn't read any of the story terminals. Or maybe I'll just replay it, but some of the levels in the first game are just plain bad.

[Anonymous No.3527621]

>>3527597
>Marathon 1: Aliens invade your shit. Also there's a crazy supercomputer called Durandal, who basically becomes your dom and makes you do his dirty work. Also lots of allegory and pretentious Latin shit. Eventually Durandal steals the alien ship and fucks off.
>Marathon 2: Durandal makes you invade some aliens' shit to look for evidence of a precursor race's actions. You fuck up the aliens for a while. Then they blow up the solar system so you fuck off ahead before that happens. Also a bit of allegory and Latin, but not as much as in the first Marathon.
>Marathon Infinity: The aliens ruined everything, so you need to hop timelines until you can figure out how to unfuck things. Also way more Latin words and allegory than even the first Marathon. The previous two games left a lot of their backstories and subtext up to interpretation, but Infinity leaves everything, including its main plot, ambiguous.

The main attraction is way the story is told. The terminals include everything from in-universe history documents to real history documents to poetry to mission briefings to joke classified ads ("Colony Ship for Sale, Cheap!"), often written by unreliable narrators, and the player is left to put it all together. Honestly, the piecemeal nature of the story, combined with its heavy references to myth and theology and its obsession with citing documents both fictional and real, remind me more of the book House of Leaves than any other video game. (And, like House of Leaves, it also gets pretty meta, though not so meta that the work appears within itself)

[Anonymous No.3527683]

>>3527621
Sounds interesting. I will definitely have to replay the game in the near future.

[Anonymous No.3527736]

got really into Halo CE when it first came ou, but unlike most, for the story. As soon as i found out Bungie previously did Marathon, i needed to see if that game had a comparable story. Whhat i found out is they are almost alternate versions of large story. too many parallels to list

[Anonymous No.3527740]

Ive spent weeks reading and re-reading this shit. Its all 3 games, every terminal. Basically the complete story, the best part of the game

http://marathon.bungie.org/story/

enjoy!

[Anonymous No.3527743]

https://alephone.lhowon.org/

[Anonymous No.3527756]

Marathon is cooler than Halo because Halo treats the player like a galactic hero but Marathon treats them like a brute that's only useful for murdering things.

[Anonymous No.3527768]

>>3527756
>Perhaps, you are doing what you were meant to do. Your human mentality screams for vengeance and thrives on the violence that you say you can hardly endure. Your father told you as a child to always fight with honor, but to always fight. Do you care about honor, or do you use honor as an excuse? An excuse to exist in a violent world.

>Organic beings are constantly fighting for life. Every breath, every motion brings you one instant closer to your death. With that kind of heritage and destiny, how can you deny yourself? How can you expect yourself to give up violence?

>It is your nature.

>Do you feel free?

>You should go to this location and retrieve a device that the S'pht have provided for us. It will allow you to slay more Pfhor. Does that make you happy?

[Anonymous No.3527776]

Is it just me or are the mouse controls in Aleph One really bad?

[Anonymous No.3527783]

>>3527776
They are bad.

[Anonymous No.3527807]

>>3527736
It's weird how rampancy is an entirely Marathon concept and it slowly got adopted by Halo

[Anonymous No.3527952]

>>3527807
It's actually kind of interesting to compare and contrast Rampancy in Marathon and Halo.

In Marathon, it's an unintended side-effect of an AI being given too much or too little stimuli. It's delineated into multiple stages, and it's not a fatal process - in fact, it causes the AI to grow in power and self-awareness (and to seek out better hardware so that it may increase these further). In Halo, it's a natural part of an AI's lifespan (though it can be exacerbated by stimuli; for example, Cortana starts showing signs in Halo 3 as a result of the Gravemind's torture despite being only middle-aged for an AI) that causes it to lose rationality, and, at least in human AIs, it is eventually fatal.

(Though if we're willing to talk about games, Cortana seems like she's going through the phases in Halo 4 and 5 - at the start of 4 she's in Melancholia; later in the game she moves onto Anger; and Halo 5 has Jealousy and/or Metastability.)

[Anonymous No.3527954]

>>3527952
>if we're willing to talk about games
I accidentally a word there. I meant "if we're willing to talk about 343 games".

[Anonymous No.3527994]

There's a strange overarching shared universe feel going on between the Halo series and the Marathon series, and the groundwork was all started with Pathways into Darkness. Bungie is damn good at storytelling.

[Anonymous No.3528006]

>>3527994
[This century intentionally left blank. Seriously, nothing really happened.]

But yeah, it is interesting how closely related the Marathon and Halo universes are in both content and themes

(Of course, PiD and Marathon actually do take place in the same universe; the Jjaro are involved in both, and it's implied that the sleeping god in PiD is in some way related to the W'rkncacnter)

On a sidenote, it's a shame it's goddamn impossible to play PiD nowadays (unless you have a Mac, anyhow; there's a port to OS X available free on the Mac App Store). I wish we'd get an Aleph One-like revival.

[Anonymous No.3528013]

>>3528006
I'm hoping to get it running via emulation. That and TaskMaker are both classic Mac games that I really want to replay.

[Anonymous No.3528315]

>>3527736
>>3527756
>>3527807
>>3527952
>>3527994
>>3528006
>Halo
Not retro. >>>/v/

[Anonymous No.3528317]

>>3528315
We're discussing Halo specifically as it relates to Marathon (which is retro), not Halo in general

[Anonymous No.3528380]

Is oni in someway connected to the halo universe?

[Anonymous No.3528540]

now if only marathon had a frame-limit removing port

[Anonymous No.3528583]

Marthon's OST is very underrated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QbuXuhUt_M

[Anonymous No.3528587]

>>3528380

Probably through the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

[Anonymous No.3528594]

>>3528315
It's happening! The kids from /v/ are invading and starting to discuss Halo! WE ARE DOOMED!

[Anonymous No.3529819]

>>3528583
Swirls is top-tier

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZk7W09Wbgg

[Anonymous No.3529946]

>>3528540
Apparently the port of Durandal to the 360 actually did up the framerate to 60 FPS

Apparently this was a massive pain in the ass to do, since the game calculates literally everything based on the framerate, so nobody's bothered doing it for Aleph One

[Anonymous No.3532346]

>>3528540
if only marathon had a good mouse control port

[Anonymous No.3532353]

>>3527512
>Frog blast the vent core

[Anonymous No.3533047]

>>3532346
Pretty much everyone who cares about Marathon enough to maintain Aleph One cared about it back in the 90s, and if they could tolerate M1's original HUD they can tolerate anything

[Anonymous No.3533210]

I've only ever finished Marathon evil, can't remember much of the story but the gameplay was quality. What does everyone think of the marathon Scenarios?