Looking at Marathon 1:
* Wooo, no more out-of-place Oath!
* Wooo, Static Effect is on by default!
* Wooo, easy download-and-run setup for the first time since the one-click installers on trilogyrelease were taken down!
* Wooo, QT2 music and no-PID without having to download each separately! (It still takes an extra step to enable save-anywhere for each installation, but that's true to the Bungie anti-cheat-code philosophy.)
* Wooo, classic double-swoosh startup sound!
* Wooo, transparent map like in Dark Forces so I'm not missing out on the colors when I'm trying to find where to go!
* Wooo, classic icons for each game!
* Wooo, a M1-style interface! (IIRC I used to delete the Themes folder to get an approximation of one.)
* Wooo, full-screen-with-HUD if I want it! (As a purist I probably won't, but it's still cool; I hope someone makes one for every scenario with a unique HUD.)
Now that I've hopefully shown my appreciation, I'll be annoying and note issues, reasoning that if I add the minor inconvenience of reporting them properly through Sourceforge I'll just end up not reporting them at all.
* The new icons only show up in Windows Explorer, not in the title bar in windowed mode.
* M1A1's animated textures are still there, and I don't see a way to disable them in Preferences.
* Software mode in 4:3 resolutions shows up unnecessarily letterboxed and vertically squashed when the HUD (either version) is on.
* How do I turn on the classic HUD and textures? ...Ah, by deleting Enhanced HUD and TTEP from Plugins. Or disabling them I guess.
* This mentions TrueType font rendering in terminals, so I'm not sure why they still look blurry and antialiased when they're enlarged.
* The new HUD makes terminals show up unnecessarily small.
* It seems potentially annoying to not see how many chips you're carrying in the new HUD.
* Terminals still don't pause the game like in M1.
* It took a while to figure out that my screenshots were ending up in My Documents. I've heard there are reasons why games have to do that, but it's too bad I can't play off a flash drive on multiple computers now (like I still can with Descent).
* It doesn't make sense to have Dark rather than Normal be the default gamma setting; not sure if it was like that in the original.
* The player arrow still shows up with the multiplayer color in single player, making it unnecessarily hard to see with the default Slate color.
* Still two fists in M1.
* The music still sounds quiet, even with the highest music volume setting and lowest sound volume setting and even with maximum volume on my laptop's admittedly weak speakers. I notice it with Leela and Fat Man more than Landing.
* At one point the game seemed to forget my settings for rendering options (in OpenGL Classic), but I can't reproduce it.
* Always Run is still on by default. Do people really use that?
* I still think the chase cam, zoom and crosshair are kludgey and unnecessary, but on the other hand they've been part of Marathon for more than half its life now. I'd still like to disable them by binding them to no key, though.
To end positively: wooo! IIRC I used to complain/think about complaining about a lot in AO, but leaving aside whether I was stupid back then I'm pretty sure at this point 95% of that stuff has been fixed and the project is approaching perfection.
