...the lazy do news roundups. Here's what didn't quite manage to slip past us in the past few days, hours, or even weeks:
The Marathon Trilogy Release site at Bungie.org has added .zip files especially for Windows users who want to play Marathon 2 or Marathon Infinity using the Aleph One engine on their PCs. To play Marthon 1 using Aleph One, you need to get the M1A1 scenario conversion by Raul Bonilla.
New Bungie fans who wanted to experience Bungie's earlier science fiction shooter classic, Marathon, up until now were out of luck. The vast majority of stores simply didn't have it for sale, and only a few copies turned up now and then on Ebay. And although a marvelous new project, Aleph One, would allow the game to run on modern operating systems, you still needed the data files from a retail copy of the game to make them work, and only the files from Marathon 1 were available online, in the form of the M1A1 scenario download.
Mjolnir Mark IV has submitted the Marathon's tenth anniversary to the games section of Slashdot, with links to the Marathon Story Page, the Halo Story Page's area on Marathon connections, and Aleph One. So if any of those sites go down today... you'll know why.
As further celebration of Marathon's tenth anniversary, James Willson has added code to Aleph One enabling users behind NAT firewalls to join TCP/IP network games. Test Windows and Mac versions are being hosted by Gregory Smith.
Between Marathon's tenth anniversary and this Christmas thing coming up, there's lots to do, necessitating Yet Another News Roundup:
Anton P Nym pointed out on our news page yesterday that Reiginko has announced a contest; participants will be asked to contribute an essay, polem, or joke and top winners in each category will receive a complete, signed set of Marathon disks.
[image:8947 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] December 21, 2004 marks the tenth anniversary of the release of Marathon, the first in a series of three science fiction first person shooters published by Bungie in the 1990s. The games were primarily made for the Macintosh platform, despite a port of Marathon 2: Durandal for Windows and the ill-fated Super Marathon port for the even more ill-fated Mac-based console by Bandai called the Pippin.
I have been Roland, Beowulf, Achilles, Gilgamesh.
I have been called a hundred names and will be called a
thousand more before the world goes dim and cold.
I am hero. She has been nameless since our birth,
a constant adversary caring for nothing but my ruin,
a sword drenched in my blood forever, my greatest and
only love. She is the dark one, the enemy and lover, without
whom my very existence would be pathetic and vulgar!
Our relationship is complex and perhaps eternal.
We met once in the garden at the beginning of the world
1Up has a Bungie retrospective up, covering in detail Pathways into Darkness, the Marathon trilogy, and Halo 1, with a tip of the hat to earlier games as well. Interestingly, the Bungie-published but not developed side-scroller Abuse gets a mention, while the numerous Marathon licensees and the unmentionable Weekend Warrior do not. Thanks Louis Wu at HBO.
GamesRadar has put up a two-page piece on Halo 2 from EDGE magazine, talking about how great multiplayer is, and repeating the complaints of journalists worldwide who wanted a peek at the single-player campaign and haven't been able to cajole any information out of Bungie. Editor's Note: longtime Bungiefen might recognize the "grey, hairless" beast pictured in concept art in one cubicle that's mentioned in the article. Another Marathon-Halo crossover?
Gary "BattleCat" Simmons reminds us that April 4, 2004, was a special day to fans of Bungie games, especially fans of Marathon: Pfhor Pfhor Pfhor Day. BattleCat runs an archive of Marathon material called The BattleCat's Litterbox.
Jason Snell, editor of MacWorld, has a column up recounting the good times he had playing network games of Marathon while working at MacUser, and insists that Marathon is really at the core of what Halo is:
This news is a bit old, but we missed it the first time around, so here goes.
Loren Petrich has said if there's interest, he will modify the MML (that's Marathon Markup Language) used in Aleph One (the open source version of the Marathon engine) to support models made by a program called DimAnimator.
The reason? Spnkrghol has been cooking up some great models for use in Aleph One.