Marathon for iPad
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DoomBatINC created this image for a SomethingAwful Photoshop Phriday feature fusing food and videogames. Certainly, the "long lasting rampancy bar" enriched with "Strauss protein blend" must be how an ordinary cybernetic security guard was able to face down the Pfhor and two rampant AIs over three games without ever once sitting down to a real meal.
The cyborg's going to have to contend with those Hunters in the background once he takes out that Phfor Elite... with the pistol? Unlike Halo's pistol, the pistol in Marathon was more of a weapon of last resort than a primary choice.
This screenshot, included at Bungie's site in the collection for the Marathon Trilogy, which includes the Marathon Scrapbook and other goodies, is from a pre-release version of Marathon.
One of the most effective methods of combating the large, armored Hunters in the Marathon series was the Zeus fusion pistol. Remarkably similar to the plasma pistol in Halo, it had an alt-fire mode that charged up over time and fired one powerful projectile. This depleted the weapon quickly, but a few such blasts could take out a Hunter quickly. Interestingly, like a phaser in "Star Trek", if the alt-fire was held down too long, the weapon would explode and kill the user. An audible alarm beeps as you charge the weapon, faster and faster, until detonation.
Here a player prepares to turn the flamethrower on a pair of Hulks and some Pfhor fighters.
A pair of security drones sidle up behind a pair of Phfor Elites. Gee, where have we heard that term before? Elites carry a particularly deadly "alien weapon" which the player could pick up from dead Phfor. Like the plasma pistols and rifles carried by Covenant units in Halo, it was an energy weapon which could not be recharged.
One of the more visually imposing, if not actually the most dangerous, enemies in the Marathon series were the Hulks, also known as Drinniol. In terms of size and shape there is more than a passing similarity to Hunters, although the Marathon series featured another enemy by that name with entirely different features.
The rocket launcher from the original Marathon. Note that almost the entire lower left portion of the screen is obscured.
The Marathon games, like Myth and Halo after it, prominently featured cooperative play. With an ethernet network, players on different computers could play through the full story campaign of the Marathon games together, something I once convinced my siblings to do, straight through, over a single weekend.
The alt-fire of the assault rifle in Marathon was a grenade launcher. The Vidmaster's Oath required players to use grenades whenever possible.