: I was thinking... if bungie ever remade marathon, how would they change
: terminals and stuff like that? post your ideas...
I'd imagine that they would use something like System Shock 2. That's such a great game, more of an RPG survival-horror that happens to be first-person (whereas Marathon is more of a purebred FPS with a great plot.)
Anyway, in SS2 the "terminals" are logs left by dead crewmembers that you find on discs. The best ones are found on corpses in locked rooms, and usually end with "But they can't get me in here. Someone please help me. What was that." But you can just as easily find these discs lying anywhere, in drawers, on desks or shelves, or even on the floor in the middle of a hallway (dropped by running crewmembers) and they can have anything on them (for example, personnel reports, equipment manifests, diary entries) and it all builds up the plot.
These discs are done really well. To read them you have to bring up your inventory (which occupies the top 1/3rd of the screen) and access your PDA (which occupies the left 1/3rd) so you can still see the world, and monsters are still spawning and stalking you, but you can see them coming. So like in reality, whipping out your PDA and listening to and reading these discs as you are running down an unexplored hallway is a bad idea. Better to do that in a room with one door, with a couple friendly blaster turrets pointed at the door. If you want to listen to the audio-only, you can press the U key to play any recently acquired discs. If a group pipe-wielding alien-human hybrids jumps out and attacks you, the log will drone on as you fight for your life. It makes the game feel so surreal.
The characters' voices read the text very well, and they did a good job of relating the text to their voices. Static is represented by random strings of numbers, symbols, and letters. Major breaks happen in the text, and are represented by the annoying shipboard AI chiming in with "System Error, Please Re-record Log." or something similar, and equally annoying (as you scream "NO, TELL ME THE DAMN ACCESS CODE. NOOOOOO. YOU GODDAMN AI, I'LL KILL YOU DEAD.")
I always imagined the terminals in Marathon to be like the SS2 logs.
