Classic Marathon Systems: Windows, macOS Release Date: May 10, 2024 / December 21, 1994 Publisher: Aleph One Developers / Bungie Developer: Aleph One Developers / Bungie Time Spent: 18 Minutes
Sadly, 15 minutes was all I was able to spend in Classic Marathon and if you're familiar at all with my time playing DOOM II, then that's essentially the same reason here. I first wrote about this 12 years ago back on our other side and occasionally this still holds true. It might have something to do with how much the hand/gun bounces while moving, something that doesn't come across in still images. If you watch my short video below, you'll see me back out of the game specifically to see if there was a setting to reduce bobbing/wobble, but there wasn't anything specifically worded for that kind of setting, so I went back into the game to give it a second go, but only eight minutes into that run did I start to feel the first twinges of nausea, so I decided not to try to power through and quit out of the game.
This made me a bit sad because I first heard of Marathon from the third season of Red vs. Blue during a series of episodes where Church was nuked back in time and once I started getting the urge to play Halo I had looked into playing through Marathon first only to find out that it wasn't readily available on most modern (at the time) systems. Then sometime in late 2023, there was an announcement over on Steam that the Marathon series was coming back in some capacity and as it turned out, it was a port of the original 1994 release being released for free. You can see in the video that I did tinker a little with the controls since I wasn't about to use the arrow keys to move around and even in-game I couldn't remember how antiquated the controls were with no ducking or, I think, no manual reload button.
I do have a couple of thoughts during my eight minutes in Classic Marathon though, and that it actually felt a lot like the first stage in Halo, "Pillar of Autumn," where after a series of backstory introduction tutorials, you start fighting a bunch of aliens who've infiltrated your ship. You then talk to a computer AI system (and yes, I read it in Cortana's voice) that gives you your objective which leads you through a series of backroom/hidden passages while making your way around the UESC Marathon. Again, I only made it so far before I became nauseous, so I wasn't able to fully explore the ship and complete the first level.
So now that that's all out of the way, here's my 18 minutes attempting to play Classic Maraton.
I do have the other two Marathon games, Classic Marathon 2, and Classic Marathon Infinity and I'll likely give both of those a go to see if there were any updates to gun wobble/bobble. But if I end up not playing either of the other games in the Marathon Trilogy, then I won't feel too bad (at least for about an hour if I have to stop playing) since the games were all free and I know that plenty of other people out there have been enjoying them. Just not me because of my weak little stomach when it comes to certain first-person shooters.
P.S. I should probably come up with a better name than "A Stage Select Start Attempt," maybe something a little more positive, but still informing the viewer that they're not about to watch an 18-minute speedrun of an 8 1/2 hour game. But for now, I kinda like using "Attempt" in the title in the YouTube video, but for here, I think I'll keep the "First Impressions" title too.
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