Marathon 2: Durandal

The Good
The Mac has never been an incredible games platform, and back in '94, aside from the noteworthy Lucasarts productions, there was basically nothing to play. Then Bungie dropped Marathon on us. During the Marathon era of Mac gaming, ie from the time Marathon was released to its second sequel went gold, it was a good time to be a Macintosh gamer. Marathon was everything Doom was, with knobs on, and it started off with a chain of features that for the time were real innovations, ranging from dual firing modes for weapons and ammo clips/reloading through advanced enemy behaviors with multiple attacks to an incredibly elaborate storyline that's still being sifted through for secrets today. Marathon was also one of the most modded games of its time, with Bungie releasing community created mods way before the PC had heard of Halflife and CS. Marathon was, if not technically, a far better game than Doom ever was from a design point of view, and Marathon 2, though substantially less impressive than the first, continued this trend of innovation and limitpushing.

Marathon 2 introduced an updated graphics engine, serving players dynamic and exciting environments with such features as pseudo-dynamic lighting, moving water with currents, spritebased props rendered from 8 directions (wheras doom had one direction; this step toward real 3d was later put into great use in Ken Silverman's Build engine, used for Duke Nukem 3d, Blood and Shadow warrior), and an incredible story taking the player from planetside exploration and conquest to boarding and taking alien battleships. Marathon and its sequels had true objective based missions, one particularly memorable one tasking you with breaking safety valves in an underground installation, flooding the place with lava, thus forcing you to make a desperate run for it to avoid being cooked.

One severely overlooked element of Marathon 2s gameplay was the extremely visceral battles. In a foreshadowing of Bungie's Halo, combat followed a flow of enter and retreat, going in with guns blazing and retreating while reloading and reevaluating the situation. In Marathon 2's sometimes chaotic battles of bouncing grenades, charging staff wielding aliens, flying drones with rapid fire lasers and roaring sewer beasts, keeping a keen eye on your surroundings often meant the difference between life and death. Another element of gameplay accented in Marathon but downplayed in its contemporaries was strafing, with dedicated keys for left and right sidestepping, making Marathon one of the first true "circle strafers".

Marathon's weapons deserve special mention. The rapid fire assault rifle/grenade launcher is still one of the most versatile weapons ever balanced for an FPS, and the multitude of weapons and uses made picking the right tool for the job a game in itself.

If Marathon 2's single player wasnt a great experience, the multiplayer features were absolutely amazing. Marathon 2 pioneered King of the hill and Kill the guy with the ball (echoed in Halo) modes now popular, and packed an extremely robust cooperative mode, with automatically adjusting difficulty levels. In the company of good friends on a company/school LAN, Marathon was the king of kings for multiplayer action of any sort.

The Bad
The PC conversion is very accurate as far as the gameplay goes, but it features a host of incredibly annoying bugs, including crashes to desktop and a save system that often refuses to let you name your own games. Another problem is the jittery mouse support, making playing the game in the newschool fashion of mouse/keyboard a bit of a hassle, particularly as the camera autocenters. Playing M2 the oldschool way of keyboard only can be strange to some, but no issue for those used to playing first person shooters with console controllers.

The Bottom Line
For its time, strikingly original and groundbreaking, but painfully overlooked by a PC community hellbent on graphics-over-gameplay. Definitely worth checking out for any fan of Halo, and a great source of inspiration for game developers looking for seeds of originality.