The first salvos in Bungie's anniversary news assault have been fired, and one round has a decidedly Pfhorlike flavor.

Bungie is announcing that Daniel Blezek has ported Marathon 1 to iOS; efforts started in 2010 and apparently the app is ready now-- I don't see it in the iOS App Store just yet, but I'm going to keep looking.

If you're looking to get your Marathon on and you don't have the XBLA port, the open source project Aleph One is still going strong. The latest update makes changes to the Lua scripting engine and adds HUD enhancements similar to the one in the XBLA version.

Aleph One runs on Macs, Linux, oh, and Windows, too.

Slashdot is reporting an "explosion" of emulators running under Yellow Dog Linux on the Sony Playstation 3.

What does that have to do with Bungie?

Because with Linux running on the PS3, you can install Aleph One on it and play Marathon.

MacWorld has mentioned Marathon as one of the best games on the Mac, as part of their commemoration of the Mac's 25th anniversary.

Heard about Marathon or Myth, but haven't played them? Played some solo Marathon or Myth, but haven't had a chance to check out multiplayer?

Then check out For Carnage, Apply Within, a group of fans dedicated to arranging regular multiplayer games of these classic Bungie titles.

Thanks for the heads-up to urk on Bungie.net.

Thanks to Louis Wu who wrote in to Bungie.net about Coldnose Sloth, who successfully recreated the serial number generator for Marathon. Wu has tweaked it, massaged it, and given it a web interface, for those times when you need some extra serial numbers for multiplayer.

What, you mean people don't keep stuff like this anymore?

Still ten shopping days left, but Aleph One has left all the old school fans a present to open early: a new version of the open source Marathon engine for playing Marathon 1, Marathon 2, Marathon Infinity and third-party scenarios on PCs, Macs, and Linux computers.

From source.bungie.org:

This is a minor feature release of Aleph One, which includes Windows improvements and support for the Unimap 2 format. It is network compatible with Aleph One 0.20.x

Go get it.

Hippieman sent me a message on XBL a couple days ago.. the two downloadable netmap packs for Marathon:Durandal, the XBLA version of Bungie's classic Mac and PC scifi shooter, the grand-daddy of Halo, are now online in the Xbox Live Marketplace.

The Escapist has a short article up on methods to combat various forms of motion sickness sometimes related to video gaming.

Bungie fans will recall some of the problems fans had with the XBLA version of Marathon:Durandal that caused motion sickness in some players. It was speculated that the problems were related to the field of vision and framerates being different between computers from the era in which M:D was originally developed and the Xbox 360.

Version 0.20.2 of Aleph One, the open source engine for playing Marathon games on MacOS, Windows and Linux, has been released.