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I'm tired of people making comparisions of the Halo 'installations' of Bungie's to the Ringworld of Niven.

Apart from basic shape they have nothing in common. The Halo's most apparant ancestor would be the orbitals ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_(The_Culture) ) from Ian M Banks' "Culture " novels. It's rather apparant that Bungie drew much more inspiration from Banks' work than from Niven. http://www.marathon.org/story/halo_culture.html

There is a PC emulator for M.U.L.E.

I think that most people know what RvB is because it's achieved cult status.

Put briefly, it's a short set of video captures made in the popular first-person-shooter videogame Halo that are then dubbed with the voices of the RvB people. Basically, they make sitcoms.

The content is actually pretty amaturish, and frequently not very funny, in my opinion. However, RvB is notable for several reasons:

* It is a video series that is free. There are not many sizeable series of video files that are available for free on the Internet (well, legally).

* It is somewhat funny. Every now and then, RvB comes up with a really, really funny joke (the babies/pacifiers joke seems to be very popular). Their pacing is very uneven, though.

* It is notable in that it is an example of amateurs without the ability to either film the video in real life or to model and render this to be able to create a watchable show. It's used as a bit of a herald of the future, where easy-to-use tools will let people easily express their ideas -- as much as computers have improved ease of writing, so do we expect them to improve ease of video composition.

* Halo is a good game. People like watching Halo characters.

* Halo is made by Bungie. Everybody loves Bungie. Bungie made a series of great games and had the most amazing conspiracy theories and story analysis surrounding them -- no other game company has ever even come close. After they were bought by Microsoft, their "It's done when it's done" philosophy had to go (which didn't help the quality of Halo at all). Their current conspiracy theories are weak attempts to be as interesting as the earlier ones (the new ilovebees.com is blatant and in-your-face rather than just hinted at). However, there's still a lot of love for Bungie left out there.

I wonder if they've figured out the 3-D problem with Pac-Man. I made a Pac-Man level for the old Bungie game Marathon, and it's totally a different game in 3-D.

In the original game, you, as Pac-Man, can see the entire field, but in 3-D, you can only see some very narrow, cramped hallways. It's kind of frustrating, because there's no way to know what dots you've eaten, and you have no idea where the ghost-monsters will be coming from. Unless your Pac-Man's packing a rifle, you'll be dead just as soon as you saw the first ghost-monster. Not fun.

click

A while back I made a Marathon 1 & 2 map of the original Pacman maze. For any Marathon fans out there, you can download it at the Marathon Hyperarchive. Look for "Pacmap".

Hmmm... Maybe this is a good excuse to learn Qed...

As others have pointed out, this study ignores the incredible designs of warren spector. But it also ignores the insanely obsessive and incredible technological advances brought by Bungie. The marathon series was FPS taken to the level of an art form.

They used portal based map rendering (which draws only what you can see) which would be fantastic if adapted to "real" 3d engines. They had a cohesive story with imaginative characters a near psychopathic obsession with the number 7. They included speech over internet/modem/lan from their first game. That was an industry first! Never before did you opponent actually talk with you. Type, maybe, but talk? never. All this from a tiny company that made mac games in their basement.

Now, I understand the whole doom "culture" that exists on the web today. Especially after the ridiculous hype from columbine. But it wasn't a very revolutionary game, especially considering the ignorance of the aforementioned ultima underworld. it was barely a step up from Wolf 3d (which, when you get down to it, was really really repetitive and boring after the first chapter).

When he discusses where we are going with it he is going somewhere.. but its his grasp of the history (which seems like he just skimmed some "classic gaming" sites for) which is a tad flawed. Of course, I think that was already pointed out by a celebrity already.

skye

Other relevant links (also available from Marathon):

Bungie.org

Bungie Source Code

The Marathon Story

Other relevant links (also available from Marathon):

Bungie.org

Bungie Source Code

The Marathon Story

Other relevant links (also available from Marathon):

Bungie.org

Bungie Source Code

The Marathon Story

The Marathon Trilogy had, IMNSHO, the greatest story line of any game I've played. I'm not going to claim that it's Hugo-quality SF, but it's the only game that I still go back to after four years just so I can read the terminals and try to piece together the remaining mysteries. It's certainly the only game I play solely for the story. (As well as the only reason I'll touch a Mac these days.)

And I'm not the only one. The Story Page has spent the last three years or so disassembling the storyline, the secrets and mysteries and trying to figure out just what was happening while we were punching our way through hoards of Pfhor. (Literally punching in some cases.) Several hundred MBs (!) later we're now diving through the source looking for comments that may shed some light of an interpretation of garbled text we've been mulling over for two years. Marathon fans are dedicated, to say the least (in the least insulting way ;-).

And for those who think that Marathon is long past, just a Mac game from the Doom era that a handful of the obsessed are keeping alive, why don't you stop by the Story Page and grep for "Halo". Consider it backstory.

(This little bit of insight into the Marathon fanboy mind, such as it is, was brought to you the number 7 and the letter Durandal. Beginning mocking...now.)

As someone who not only played but worked on maps and a map generator for the Marathon 2 engine, I'm wondering why they didn't release the Marathon Infinity code. (The Marathon series was a trilogy, with Marathon Infinity being the third and final chapter.) Infinity can load M2 map files, although there are some subtle differences in the engine and the texture sets were reworked. The main difference was the fact that Infinity allowed you to embed a physics model with each level in a map. (With Marathon 1 & 2, the phsyics model was stored in a separate file and was the same for all levels.) This allowed you to change the rules of the game from one level to the next, which was pretty cool.

P.S. For anybody who doesn't know, the best part about the Marathon series is it's story. I've always found the id games to be a real bore because they were missing this key element. I guess Bungie spoiled me.

I remember when the original Marathon came out (Mac only, of course - Bungie, at that time, developed only for the Mac), and it was great - like a thinking man's Doom.
Bungie were always very relaxed toward third-party maps, hacks, etc. They even released their own in-house level editor with Marathon Infinity, and carried on that tradition with Myth II, as well. Truly one of my favorite game companies.
To check out more information than you could possibly want to know about the Marathon series, see here.