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Classic Mac FPS Marathon Turns 10
Mjolnir Mark IV writes "Dec. 21 marked the 10th anniversary of the release of Bungie's classic Mac first-person shooter Marathon. Back then, the game was notable for besting its contemporary Doom in the areas of graphics, gameplay and story, all the while giving Mac gamers something to brag about. Today, the game's notable for its connections to the Halo franchise. When Bungie was bought by Microsoft they released the source code, and the game lives on in updated form."
Red vs Blue rocks my socks!
Check it out.
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
You're an idiot.
Doom's Story: There's some human colony on Mars. Or something. There *are humans*, we do know that...
Oh yeah, and hell opened up or something inside the base. It doesn't really *tell* you before you play, or even while you're playing. You're just shooting stuff the whole time.
Also, Marathon and Doom play in a very similar way, with the 2.5D graphics and sprite-animation. In doom, both you and monsters move faster than in Marathon, though.
Marathon has a much deeper story than Doom. Marathon has pages and pages of terminal instructions from the AIs, and your missions vary from rescue to sabotage to fixing radio transmitters. You even watch as one AI goes insane and commands you!
In Doom, there are no plot changes or even really a plot at all. You just blast aliens that come out of some portal or whatever.
Remember, Halo and Oni were originally going to be Mac-only before Microsoft bought them out.
No they weren't. You need a Bungie history lesson.
Bungie's first PC game was Marathon 2. It mostly fell flat on the PC side, but that was their first foray into the Windows world.
Next up was Myth, which was a simultaneous Mac/PC release. Myth 2 followed the same tradition. Oni was simultaneous or nearly so for the Mac and PC, and also came out for the PS2. All of this was before the Microsoft Unpleasantness.
Halo was originally developed on Macs and intended for the same simultaneous Mac/PC release as all of their other stuff until Microsoft bought them out. Bungie hadn't been Mac-only for a long time at that point, and Microsoft's big change was making it an Xbox exclusive, and then finally allowing crappy ports to the PC and Mac worlds.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Solarian II is available for OS X now.
The 3D game was spectre. BZflag sorta captures the gameplay but not the level design.
Another classic of the time period, updated for OS X, is Oids.