Aleph One 1.0 Released

First time accepted submitter treellama writes "Nearly 12 year since Bungie released the source code for Marathon 2, the Aleph One team is thrilled to release version 1.0 of the Aleph One game engine. Aleph One is a Free software, cross platform game engine that supports all three original Marathon games with enhancements such as OpenGL and Internet play; as well as numerous third party mods known as 'scenarios.' Easy to install full versions of Marathon, Marathon 2, and Marathon Infinity, now featuring high resolution graphics and modern widescreen HUD support, can be downloaded for free from the project website!"

Comments

Heard about Marathon

[BigSes]

Ive been hearing about this title for years, and I have never had the opportunity to play it. Now that I finally got around to trying MineCraft, I think its time to give this one a shot too. Catch myself up a bit.

Re:Heard about Marathon

[Pope]

It's a Doom-like shoot-em-up, albeit with a pretty decent plot/story behind all the bang-bang. It's pretty out of date from a gaming engine perspective, but still fun as heck to play IMO. I played all the original games on the Mac back in the day, as well as a lot of the 3rd party expansions/conversions like Devil In A Blue Dress, Red, Evil, etc.

I think one of the funnest things to do was make subtle mods to the physics engine, like creating exploding rounds for the pistol or my Bruce Lee-inspired "Super Fist."

Again, it's all completely old school when compared to Modern Warfare and things like that, but sometimes a few rounds of nostalgia will satisfy a bit more than a modern game that's far too serious. Multi-player rocket arena play is a must!

Re:Heard about Marathon

[Joehonkie]

It was out four years before Unreal. The last game in the trilogy was out 2 years before Unreal.

Re:Heard about Marathon

[lakeland]

One criticism I have of Marathon is that as you get better with the shotgun it becomes more powerful than everything else.

My favourite was a game we played where everyone would start at the same time with computers next to each other , put the game in kindergarten mode and race to the finish with the rule that you are not allowed to save the game at all. The no-save adds an interesting dynamic that you have to be careful with the rocket launcher or you'll have to go back to the start, but generally the best approach was to weave past everything without bothering to shoot.

Re:Heard about Marathon

[0100010001010011]

Other way around. Halo took place before Marathon. And that at the end of Halo 3 MC goes into stasis and the 1st person in Marathon is actually MC 250 years later.

Marathon=Halo?

Re:Heard about Marathon

[quacking duck]

Just want to clarify your "Doom-like" comment, in case anyone mistakenly thinks this meant it was a Doom clone for Mac.

Bungie's Marathon was based on their Pathways into Darkness game, which came out before Doom. Marathon is also credited as the first FPS to have vertical aiming and free-look/mouselook controls, and multiplayer deathmatches.

Marathon and the Halo Series

[Spencerian]

As someone already noted, the Marathon series was made by Bungie.

By the time Bungie was bought by Microsoft, much of Halo's building blocks were done, a game originally designed for both Macs and PCs.

There's plenty of Marathon homages in the original Halo (haven't yet played 2 or 3 myself). First, look on Captain Keyes's uniform for the Marathon symbol at the game's starting adventure on the bridge. Just as you leave the captain, look on the bulletin board at the entrance: An ad there says "Colony Ship for Sale" (a reference to a Marathon game level). Cortana, the AI, is another name that parallels the name of another mystical sword, Durandal (Marathon's sassy AI). See http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Marathon_references_in_Halo for more.

Marathon was among the first (if not the first) FPS with multiplayer support (thanks to the Mac OS local networking) as well as establishing the convention of using the mouse for head-target movement. The concept of the Vidmaster (See http://marathon.bungie.org/vidmaster/ ) (using the weakest weapon at the game's highest difficulty to completion) was a Marathon first.

Re:Marathon and the Halo Series

[don.g]

Doom on DOS had multiplayer LAN (and dial-up modem, IIRC) support. Ages before Marathon. With all the horribleness of IPX -- but it had it, and it worked.