Marathon 1 and 2

After the release and demise of Marathon the Extraction Shooter, I decided that after all these years I would play through the Marathon series. Years prior I would play a few levels of Marathon 1, get bored, and then quit. Aleph One releases mean that you can play these games for free on any platform, with a variety of "quality of life" changes such as increasing the FOV to be not terrible and also making the HUD of Marathon 1 look better. 

So, "does it hold up?". It's brainier than Doom or Quake, the cast of characters includes mostly AIs and shifting factions as well as disposable NPC's known as BOBs. You're at the mercy of your AI masters as they warp you from one scenario to the next. This is some very early FPS adventuring, and so the 3d spaces and encounters don't exactly make sense. Half the time I have the map open and I'm running around the maze like levels looking for the next exit.

I must admit I succumbed to temptation and enabled cheats. Cheats allow you to do things such as "jump" which allowed me to get past the very bad "Colony Ship For Sale: Cheap" Jumping section. There is a lot of backtracking and hitting switches that open up doors on the whole other side of the map. 

In one mission to advance you have to find a door hidden behind a pillar, and walk over lava to get it. That's how the game teaches you that walking on lava is survivable and also something you have to do once in a while. In nearly every videogame lava is insta-death but not here. It's an interesting mechanic to play with if it were done a bit better (you do a lot more lava swimming in Marathon 2). 

Eventually you are warped to an alien ship, and it feels genuinly disorienting, because the level layout and visual design is so different from the boxy hallways of The Marathon. Save and Healing stations also look different, and each level feels like you shouldn't be there and feel generally overextened. You want to go back to the "safe" hallways of The Marathon again.

Marathon 1 wraps up with Durandal, the AI that controls the ship doors, stealing the enemy's spaceship and going on a galactic road trip. Marathon 2 begins with him kidnapping you again to use for his own nefarious purposes - leading a rebellion against an alien race.

The jump in visual fidelity from 1 to 2 is pretty striking. the first level - Waterloo Waterworks - has a lot of ambient sound which makes the level feel really alive. The expansive skybox hints at the world outside, and the circular level feels like a lived-in space used for things.

Marathon 2 is where most of my memories of the game pick up, specifically the level where you have to flood a basement with lava, and have to outrun the rising tide of lava. 

Marathon 2 is also where I started using cheats extensivly. Mainly to give myself more health during long stretches of gameplay where the game throws tons of enemies at you, doesn't give you much health or ammo to work with, and makes save points farther and further apart. One real big flaw of Marathon 1 and 2 - save points are not always at the start or end of levels, so you end up replaying whole sections of previous levels to get to the next level and the point you died at. This is just frustrating, so I made liberal use of the cheat script's "Save anywhere" function, only once in a while using the invincibility cheat to get past some real bad spots. 

Story wise there's more meat on Marathon 2 - Durandal falls, then you start working with Robert Blake and the scores of maroon colonists fighting to escape. Tycho - an angrier AI - begins to antagonize you. You wake up an ancient AI - Thoth - who helps you and then helps the enemy. By the time I had finished it felt like a pretty decent Sci-Fi paperback, which is way better than most games even today could manage. 

Reflecting on both as I play Marathon Infinity, It's pretty apparant that there's a lot of appealing things in the original Marathon trilogy that Bungie have ignored in their quest to make this extraction shooter - and if they included those things it could be a much more interesting game. The protagonist of the original trilogy is a Cyborg built using technology nobody understands and has shifting memories from eons ago, controlled by muiltiple god-like computers that can control fleets of starships and have lived for centuries - all while under the shadow of a universe ending force that may or may not be awakened. Maybe this might be tapped later on in Marathon - the extraction shooter - as it has subsequent seasons and Bungie uses it's patented FOMO form of seasonal storytelling. I feel like they'd get a lot more positive attention from the gaming world had they made more nods to the origninal trilogy out of the gate. 

Regardless, playing this game makes me want to make a doom wad - i find the simplsitic level design and use of consoles to tell storys something that's accessible for me to make something out of, and the gameplay of older FPSes feels crunchier and easier to pull off - all the ingredients are mostly there.