Every couple of years I think “I should play Marathon sometime” but I kept bouncing off this series. I wanted to complete the first two first before playing Infinity but I had an attrition problem with getting through these kind of games. So I haven’t totally completed M1 and I don’t seem to remember when I beat XBLA Durandal, but I refreshed myself some terminals and the overall story and I’m jumping into Infinity finally.
It’s fun. It’s cool to finally come across the weird stuff I’ve read about ages ago. Like I said in the games thread I feel like I missed out on the window to really get into this game, but I’m doing the best I can. The core game is still fun, I’m a little after Electric Sheep 2 right now.
The mouse control in Aleph One never felt right to me for some reason, which was a big problem in completing these games. I’m actually using the keyboard controls with turning on the number pad, and that feels much better to me.
Also auto-run in Aleph One seems to be enabled by default, I had to disable that cause I was getting totally disorientated in the levels.
If it’s possible to set up a controller might be a good medium between the two? Always felt that’s what worked best when playing original DooMs at least where even just having mouse turning kind of nullifies most of the difficulty.
That does not preclude mouselook being Marathon’s Thing, which it was, if you were playing and talking about Marathon (and esp. Marathon vs. other fps) at the time.
I played through the first half of M1 on the numpad, and it was very doable. I like having the option to play that way. There must be something wrong with my setup cause my hand cramps when I do aiming in shooters for any length of time. I’ve had to switch back to the mouse for these bob levels in Infinity though, they’re too tough without it.
So I was aware that this game was obtuse, but even while playing it I haven’t been sure what’s going on. I’ve been going back and reading through the writeups on the Volunteers series on each level here >, and that’s been giving me some more context for what this stuff is doing.
I’m a little disappointed with this game. The weird story outline that I’ve heard so much about is kinda the best part of it, and it’s been a small part of the game. Also even thematically it would have been so much better if the failure levels were the default and the success path was hidden. I’m on A Converted Church right now.
Also man Bungie was NRx the whole time, huh. This isn’t related to Infinity specifically, but as I’ve been getting back into the milieu of this series I’ve just been checking the boxes.
I knew Bungie was into war and shit, but I’d never connected the neoreactionary dots before. The battle of marathon, spartans, Charlemagne’s swords. Religious war imagery. Escaping mortality through AI. I mean I guess I totally missed the subtext of these games.
I think… those things had slightly different context in the '90s. Still not healthy, per se, but the main practitioners were greybeards on Usenet and with their obsessive pewter wargaming figurines. In the context of '90s PC, it’s fairly classy.
Like most other geek kingdoms, once it expanded into a mass culture we saw inherent pathologies expressing.
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