Marathon - back when Bungie was nobody

No, it's not the Tau dammit...

Way back when personal computers were still getting started, there was a game made for the Mac called Marathon.  I actually played it, way back when, I think it may have come with out first computer.  Anyway, at the time I didn't really appreciate it, as FPS games were basically unknown to me.  Still, it was cool, had some neat aliens and such, and just generally seemed like a cool game.  Years and years later, I decide that maybe I should look up that old game, see if it's still around.

Oh momma, it's still around.

dual-wielding double-barrel plasma shotguns?  Why thank you, yes I will.

First of all, as you can guess by the title, this game is by Bungie, makers of Halo and starting what's been called a rebirth of First Person Shooters.  It appears that Bungie has always been dedicated to the craft of cool games, as Marathon is not just a neat shooting game, but a rather complex one as well.  It's not just a "shoot the demons" game, even though there is a lot of that.  There's a actual, real storyline, and your place in it is slowly revealed, bit by bit.

It seems Earth has fallen on hard times, and one of the moons of Mars has been converted in to a massive colony ship: The Marathon.  With everyone tucked in for the long haul, the colonists are happy to leave the war-torn wreck of the Sol system behind...that is, until multiple alien races decide to attack the Marathon, and the AI systems that run the ship start going rogue.

The Love Boat this an't.

See, unlike most of the shooters at the time, there's a real ongoing story here.  Computer terminals let you communicate with some of the AI, give history lessons, and just generally flesh out the world you're in.  It's not just a throw-away couple pages in the instruction manual, either.  The story plays with concepts of freedom and awareness rather well, not to mention that the aliens are not a cohesive force.  There's infighting and rifts between them as well, which can be both fun and useful to exploit, now and then.

Any race that can charge plasma weapons with a spear and still do pretty well deserves respect.

The guns are cool as hell, too.  They feel...right.  That is to say, they feel organic to the world their in, not too advanced or too primitive.  Plus, they look cool, and many of them can be dual-wielded for maximum bad-assery.  The controls are maybe not as great as I would like, but it's more of a personal gripe then anything else.  Some of the jumping/switch puzzles feel a little unnecessarily hard as well, and I HATE the "keep the humans alive" missions, as they have a tendency to wander in to my line of fire.  Always.

The aliens are neat, too.  Many of them are pallet-swaps of each other, but they all have different behavior.  Some hang back, some will charge, others will attack their fellow aliens if left to their own devices.  What's more, they look and behave alien.  Their speech is some kind of odd chirping and squeals, and it makes their silent attacks look less like cheap programming and more like a concentrated effort to unnerve the enemy.

runrunrunrunRUNRUNRUN

Plus, like most old-school shooters, the modding community has made tons of stuff to keep a already cool game fresh and interesting.  They run the gauntlet from single level bursts, to massive sweeping epics of sci-fi goodness, to the...well...odd.

OH GOD, I THINK IT'S KICKING IN

If you want to see a piece of history, or just want to check out something you may have missed from back in the old days, just over to the Aleph One project, where they've been working hard to bring this sweet game to the modern era.  It may seem like another sci-fi shooter, but trust me when I say it can even give some diehard FPS fans a challange.