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Re: Marathon mentioned in Outside Xbox Video
Posted By: VikingBoyBillyDate: 2/25/21 6:12 p.m.

In Response To: Re: Marathon mentioned in Outside Xbox Video (Lion O Cyborg)

: It's sad because the Mac ports of some classic games like Prince of Persia
: 1+2 or the original System Shock ended up looking and sounding better than
: their DOS counterparts, similar to the Amiga vs DOS vs the Apple II before
: Windows & Mac came out. I guess if the trilogy started on Mac but all
: three got ported to Windows back then as well to compete with Doom 2,
: Final Doom and Strife, DOS & Windows gamers may not have missed out.

: Thankfully a lot of us could still accept reading in our shooty games since
: we had Strife and System Shock (the floppy disk version of the latter had
: no voice acting so "audio logs" behaved like terminals instead),
: but they were still very obscure compared to most 2.5D FPSs or System
: Shock 2 because Strife came out between Duke Nukem 3D & Quake, and the
: original DOS release of System Shock 1 (not the Enhanced Edition for
: Windows) had similar controls to Ultima Underworld i.e. god awful.

: Despite using Windows all my life, I always wanted to play Marathon when I
: first heard of it in high school, because I loved Halo and wanted to see
: Bungie's inspiration game for it (I didn't know about the Windows 95 port
: back then) but as far as I know, Aleph One wasn't out at that point and
: being 12 to my early teens, I didn't know what emulators were.

Let me try and give a perspective from the other side of the fence. It wasn't as great as you think; at least, it didn't feel that way at the time. Only in hindsight do I fully appreciate how special Mac OS 9 and below were in the 20th century. The problem was that it was the 20th century.

This might be a foreign concept for the younger babies of the new millenium to grasp, but back in the 90s, we didn't have much to do, and web 2.0 wasn't realized yet (this forum is a living fossil of early web 2.0), and emulation of different environments was very young and virtually unplayable. I had a feeling of FOMO because it looked like a majority of state-of-the-art games were heavily focused on windows and there was a stigma about macs being no good for gaming. I think part of this stigma came from most school computer labs being filled with macs for some reason, and of course you wouldn't see games like Marathon in the school mac lab unless the staff were incompetent and there were some smart, sneaky kids. The TL;DR was there were a lot of edu-tainment games that are mostly forgotten now, but I can say they were more fun than the CD-i and Mario's handful of attempts at teaching typing and making you do homework.

The Mac versions of Prince of Persia and Lemmings and Odell Down Under are the way I remember them, and seeing the DOS variants (and hearing the General MIDI) feels weird to me. It was a lot like the SNES vs SEGA situation; one was legitimately better hardware in almost every way, but the other had BLAST PROCESSING, and despite all our obsessing over realistic graphics, you need a good processor to play an action-focused game and enjoy it. It took some years into the second half of the 90s to get some mac ports of Quake, Descent, and whatever else you want to name, but before then, the iconic game that came from Mac's exclusive library was Myst (and the other broderbund/cyan games nobody talks about like spelunx, riven, cosmic osmo, and the manhole, which I played a lot more of because I couldn't get anywhere in Myst). And it capitalized on Mac's strengths and weaknesses: an Extremely good looking adventure game that didn't even attempt to pretend to have fast-action gameplay. In the Microsoft corner, on the opposite end of the spectrum, was Doom.

I think Marathon and Pathways into darkness did a good job at finding a balance between those extremes, and you all already played them so I won't explain how they do it.

Once upon a time, my dad got a new G3 and a ZIP drive, and they had a few games on them; two of these were demos of Marathon and Pathways into Darkness.

And having been exposed to them at a time "before they were cool" (right around the summer of '95 when I begged dad to buy this new game called Earthbound), I can agree that "ahead of their time" is an apt description. I mean that in a good way, but also, I was too young for these games. I would spend a lot of time wandering around and getting lost, and for some reason that fabled "15 aliens" closing screen never got me to beg my dad to buy it, and it wasn't because of the $70 price tag because I had no concept of dollar value back then.

It's not that I didn't like it; I would spend many bored afternoons wandering around the vents in Arrival and my cousin would attempt to scare me to break my concentration by immitating the aliens' sounds or repeating "they're everywhere." Did you know there was a BOB on arrival? I remember that and I was so confused that I didn't see any of them until The Rose when I finally got the full version. It might sound stupid now, but it was hard for me to figure out how to finish those levels. A major roadblock was that platform bridge thing on Blaspheme Quarantine, which they made Map 3 for some reason because I guess they wanted Durandal to make an appearance, but that was a huge difficulty spike. I think I finished it eventually, and I think the ending was just the same "order the full version" screen. PID's demo was another beast that took me until, humorously, 2012 I think.

Several years later in highschool, I was at a friend's house playing halo, and he pointed at this mi=agnifying-glass-looking symbol and say "that's a marathon thing," and I was like "oh, Marathon. I remember that." The next weekend I let him play that marathon demo and he didn't seem impressed by it.

Years later Aleph One would come out and I'd get to play it for free, and dosbox existed so I could play a lot of the dos games I missed out on. And Man, Marathon was way more than I was expecting, and I can confidently say I needed time and adult-level intelligence to appreciate the narrative (and 5-D space) bungie crafted in it.

So it was ahead of its time (as was Earthbound), but there's a happy twist; it's getting better with age. And as much as I'd want to be an purism elitist and rant at all the newbies about how it was in the old days, I really think aleph one making it more accessible and attracting new fans is a good thing.

And DOSBOX introduced me to stuff like Commander Keen! But the mac os 9 emulators aren't as on-the-money as dosbox, understandably because the environment is a lot different from DOS, and while you can play the games archived on macintosh garden on basilisk II or sheepshaver, it has problems. More than I even know about, but one that I think I can wrap my finger around is the sound. The quicktime midi player had a neat feature of letting the software have their own samples for each instrument, but it doesn't really work well on the emulators. There is a noticeable difference between the .oggs on aleph one and how you hear the midis playing marathon in sheepshaver. It just doesn't sound the way it's supposed to. Lemmings, confusingly, will have music playing in some levels and not others, and hexen fails to play any tracks at all. A guy trying to recreate a hexen soundfont based on the mac music is having a lot of trouble working with those sample files and recreating them. I really wish the classic OS environment and its games could be perfectly preserved, but apple doesn't seem to want to support their legacy content and are pushing for new technology (and to empty our wallets). Fun fact: I took my old, dead CRT imac to a FIRST robotics group hoping one of the mentors and I could fix it, but they ended up throwing it away thinking it was garbage, so apple is doing a good job pushing this mindset on the populace.

So in TL;DR, I appreciate the immense amount of love and work that went into making aleph one, and the PID OS X port. There was another game called realmz that got ported to OS X, but I never got the .mod music to work on it and now it won't start at all thanks to outdated X11 and I don't think the author is going to update it. So this, and a lot of other games, are lost to time for the time being.

Thank you for putting up with my long ramblings, and now I need to go to bed.

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Pre-2004 Posts

Replies:

Marathon mentioned in Outside Xbox Video *LINK*Tim "Mordeir" Branin 2/23/21 6:48 p.m.
     Re: Marathon mentioned in Outside Xbox VideoSharkie Lino 2/23/21 7:01 p.m.
           Re: Marathon mentioned in Outside Xbox VideoGodot 2/23/21 9:52 p.m.
                 Re: Marathon mentioned in Outside Xbox VideoSharkie Lino 2/24/21 3:29 p.m.
           Re: Marathon mentioned in Outside Xbox VideoVikingBoyBilly 2/24/21 4:40 a.m.
                 Re: Marathon mentioned in Outside Xbox VideoSharkie Lino 2/24/21 3:32 p.m.
                       Re: Marathon mentioned in Outside Xbox VideoGodot 2/24/21 10:01 p.m.
                             Re: Marathon mentioned in Outside Xbox VideoLion O Cyborg 2/25/21 7:20 a.m.
                             Re: Marathon mentioned in Outside Xbox VideoSharkie Lino 2/25/21 12:09 p.m.
     Re: Marathon mentioned in Outside Xbox VideoGeneral-RADIX 2/24/21 2:30 p.m.
           Re: Marathon mentioned in Outside Xbox VideoVikingBoyBilly 2/25/21 2:34 a.m.
                 Re: Marathon mentioned in Outside Xbox VideoGeneral-RADIX 2/25/21 2:57 a.m.
                       Re: Marathon mentioned in Outside Xbox VideoLion O Cyborg 2/25/21 7:44 a.m.
                             Re: Marathon mentioned in Outside Xbox VideoVikingBoyBilly 2/25/21 6:12 p.m.
                                   Re: Marathon mentioned in Outside Xbox VideoLion O Cyborg 2/26/21 9:40 a.m.
                                   Old Mac EmulationDurandal_1707 3/1/21 4:29 p.m.
                                         Re: Old Mac EmulationVikingBoyBilly 3/21/21 2:23 p.m.
                                               Re: Old Mac EmulationDurandal_1707 3/21/21 6:36 p.m.
                                                     Re: Old Mac EmulationVikingBoyBilly 3/22/21 4:36 a.m.
                                                           Re: Old Mac EmulationDurandal_1707 3/22/21 3:11 p.m.
                                                                 Re: Old Mac EmulationVikingBoyBilly 3/23/21 7:42 a.m.
                                                                       Re: Old Mac EmulationDurandal_1707 3/23/21 8:11 a.m.
                                                                             Re: Old Mac EmulationDurandal_1707 3/23/21 8:12 a.m.
                                                                                   Re: Old Mac EmulationVikingBoyBilly 3/23/21 3:31 p.m.
                                                                                         Re: Old Mac EmulationDurandal_1707 3/23/21 4:59 p.m.
                                         Re: Old Mac EmulationVikingBoyBilly 9/24/23 4:58 a.m.
                                               Re: Old Mac EmulationBob-B-Q 9/24/23 5:45 a.m.
                                                     Re: Old Mac EmulationVikingBoyBilly 9/24/23 7:02 a.m.
                                                           Re: Old Mac EmulationBob-B-Q 9/25/23 7:12 a.m.
                                                                 Re: Old Mac EmulationVikingBoyBilly 9/26/23 4:33 a.m.
                                                                       Re: Old Mac EmulationVikingBoyBilly 10/1/23 3:24 a.m.
                                                                             Re: Old Mac EmulationIritscen 10/2/23 8:03 a.m.
                                                                             Re: Old Mac EmulationVikingBoyBilly 11/8/23 6:09 a.m.
                                                                                   Re: Old Mac EmulationDurandal_1707 11/8/23 3:13 p.m.
                       Re: Marathon mentioned in Outside Xbox VideoSharkie Lino 2/25/21 12:14 p.m.
                             Re: Marathon mentioned in Outside Xbox VideoGeneral-RADIX 2/26/21 4:40 a.m.
                                   Most "failed" media......Durandal_1707 3/1/21 4:30 p.m.
                                         Re: Most "failed" media......General-RADIX 3/3/21 9:00 a.m.
                                               Re: Most "failed" media......Bob-B-Q 3/4/21 7:53 a.m.

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Pre-2004 Posts

 

 

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