/vr/ - Retro Games

It's tryhard Doom with boring level and enemy design.

>>6336745
The latter.

Definitely Macfag Doom clone. The level design is so fucking bad and the enemies are so fucking boring.

It was Doom for people without a DOS computer but had a Mac.
Still a pretty good Doom clone though.

>>6336745
2 and infinity really needed music cues

the games are fun but they feel too long

>>6336745
Well the company eventually made Halo.

So that's a fucking problem.

>>6336745
a shitty vomit inducing doom clone

I remember the first time I played this. It was the PC port.

The game started in a dark dungeon, sort of. The music creeped me out. The sound of the stone door creeped me out. Then there was that demon thing in the middle, and I totally freaked out.

Little did I know this one minute or so will be the only memorable thing about the game. Not only that, it turns out this wasn't even present in the original Mac version.

>>6336989
I freaked out later in the first level. You get to this maze-like area and this guy with a cloak was right behind me and as soon as I turned around to see him he made this shrieking noise as he attacked. I haven't played the game since. This was maybe 10 years ago.

>>6336989
>>6337010
that sounds like the 1st one

>>6337010

>>6337034
Yep, that's him. I can't be the only one who got scared shitless by that, right?

Playing through Marathon 2 Durandal for the first time at the moment, only a few levels in... the floatyness of movement is intentional right? You seem to just glide over gaps and slowly fall to the ground when running off something to the point that it feels intentional like a simulation of lower gravity.

I know some later missions take place in vacuum and you use the swimming movement to float around but these are just the standard running around shooting shit missions I am referring to.

I am fully aware this could probably be answered by googling the manual or something but don't wanna

>>6336745
Extremely based. Most floatlets cannot handle the amazing controls and wide, non-linear level design.
>>6337473
It's intentional. It makes grenade/rocket jumping much more controllable, and also means that you can make yourself airborne by just running up a couple of steps and making a sharp turn.

>>6337498
Yeah I am seeing the benefits in movement to it but it also feels weird as fuck coming from Doom and Dook

>>6337498
Also since you seem to know about the game, I saw the look left and look right buttons but didn't think much of it but then read about something called "viding" where you move in one direction and use those buttons to turn 90 degrees and shoot enemies while moving? Seems like it could be interesting mechanic for combat.

>>6337580
I think "viding" just refers to the Vidmaster Challenge, which basically just means to play on the hardest difficulty and not be a scrub (e.g. no backtracking to reuse shield stations). One thing to remember is that not only does facing-direction matter when shooting (e.g. shoot a grenade looking down to have the recoil propel you opposite and up), but also look into the sky while strafe-running up stairs before jumping off the edge.

>>6337664
It's going to take a while to get used to the movement and all the potential it opens up but its exciting to have different dynamics in this kind of early FPS space. I think I actually heard the viding shit in the Marathon episode of the Retronauts podcast so they could've been way off

>>6336745
>marathon thread
>not even one post about the storee
anyway Rubicon is better. Played the shit out of these games because Aleph One is 4free.

>>6336745
It sucks that's why its free. Capitalists cant make a profit from a product nobody wants.

>>6337940
>not even one post about the storee
Guess why...

>>6337940
Story is a mess

>>6336745
Marathon is one of the best FPS games ever. Better than doom, goldeneye. In the same tier as the first halo.

In fact I'd say that Halo 1 is more like marathon than it is like the other halo games, which had really lackluster campaigns.

>>6336745
Not great.
Poor pacing, poor level design with obtuse switch-triggers, enemies that don't pose the remotest threat and just serve as padding with weapons that suck. The entire game drags on forever.
Has its moments, music was nice and the atmosphere shines at points, Durandal has some good lines, but eh.

It's not just a Doom clone, though, aspires much higher than that. It'll resonate with some people. Didn't do much for me.

>>6338720
A beautiful mess full of betrayal, mystery, world-hopping adventure, alternate realities, and time loops.
>>6338835
>poor level design with obtuse switch-triggers
I always felt like the iDTech games had this worse for the most part. For example, the infamous switch level in Colony Ship for Sale, Cheap wasn't annoying because it was obtuse (the switches all had windows to see how the platforms were moved), it was annoying because it was centered around a trial-and-error jumping puzzle. When a switch did open a door in the opposite side of a level, one of the AI's usually had a terminal showing an image of the map with a circle indicating where to go next.

>>6338819
>Marathon is one of the best FPS games ever. Better than doom, goldeneye.
99% of the people out there clearly thinks otherwise.

>In the same tier as the first halo.
Implying Halo is anywhere as awesome as the hardcore Bungie fans pretend it to be.

>>6336745
cringe

I've been playing Marathon 1 and it's such a slog, I'm like 1/3 the way through and I have to force myself to continue. The story told through the email logs is cool and the only thing keeping me going. Ultimately Marathon would work better as a netflix miniseries or a comic series or even a visual novel than a game, let alone an fps lol

>>6336745
It's worse than Doom in every aspect that matters
Too bad for Macfags, but story is not important for an FPS.

>>6338819
Halo is gay as fuck bro.

Marathon 2 is pretty cool, I hear fans of the series really also like Infinity but I didn't really care for it. First one is an historical curiosity but not worth going back and playing for any other reason than that.

The Marathon trilogy is certainly the best thing Bungie ever did, it's been downhill and consistently more watered down ever since.

>>6339208
Try Durandal, the second game, before you give up on the series, its based.

>>6339537
>It's worse than Doom in every aspect that matters
Aiming is a pretty important aspect of FPSs, and Marathon was the first FPS to have locked-perspective non-hitscan physics-based projectile gunplay. In Marathon, you want to hit an enemy with a rocket at the other end of a tunnel, you just have to aim well. In Doom, good luck not having the rocket auto-lock on some other enemy and then driving itself into a surface.

>>6339706
>The Marathon trilogy is certainly the best thing Bungie ever did, it's been downhill and consistently more watered down ever since.
Marathon is a watered down doom clone, halo redefined FPS and has yet to be surpassed

>>6339706
pathways was also really cool and it should really get a remake to make it into a better immersive sim

how you go from light ultima underworld clones to halo is a mystery

>>6339753
>halo redefined FPS and has yet to be surpassed

>>6339769
nice reddit image, doesn't change the fact marathon was shit and halo was a hit

>>6339753
>Marathon is a watered down doom clone
More like a pumped-up Doom clone. More advanced engine and level designs, more advanced physics, more advanced plot, etc. Marathon and some of the Build games were the only ones to really achieve more complex gameplay within a 2.5D framework.

>>6339787
Marathon is objectively the better series but I am not going to dispute the fact that there are alot of people with shit taste in the world and they distilled FPS down into a very easy to consume form for normies and got rich as fuck as a result.

>>6339793
>More advanced engine
Elaborate. (No, don't say the "ability to look up/down" bullshit. You can't actually do it, it's just faked by stretching the viewport, and both id Tech and Build can do it.)

>>6339806
How about rooms above rooms? Movement physics are also much more advanced

>>6339806
Guess you've never played the game then. You absolutely can look up and down, and shoot projectiles in the exact direction you're looking, unlike Doom where it just hitscans or draws a line for a projectile to follow. Marathon requires that you actually look directly at enemies up on ledges to shoot them, while Doom doesn't really give a fuck as long as you're on the proper X and Z. Additionally, this means that aiming at enemy 2 behind enemy 1 is handled the same as any modern game, whereas in Doom, you will almost always have to kill enemy 1 first before you can hit enemy 2.
>>6339819
And this, thanks for saving me the typing

>>6339819
>rooms above rooms
On which level can you see such structure?

>Movement physics are also much more advanced
Again, how exactly? It always felt completely floaty and spongy.

>>6339828
>On which level can you see such structure?
Take your pick, it's pretty common in the series.

>>6339826
Doom, as the game, is not the most advanced game running on what we call the 'Doom engine'. The argument wasn't about the game. It was about a supposedly 'more advanced engine'.

>You absolutely can look up and down
No, you can't. It's not perspective correct.

>>6336890
Halo 1 holds up anon. At the very least it's much more playable than Goldeneye64/PD or something

>>6339829
No, thank you, I don't feel like downloading the game just to look around. Tell me a more or less exact spot and I'll look it up.

>>6339828
To be fair, it's not so much seeing multiple rooms on top of each other. But it's possible to layer rooms in a '5D space' way which is used regularly through Marathon, but not on original versions of Doom because it breaks the latter.

Marathon has more realistic momentum and incorporates the Y-axis into it. For example, if you shoot a grenade at an enemy's waist-level, you'll cause him to get pushed parallel to the ground, whereas if you shoot at his feet, you'll cause him to arc upwards according to the physics of the game.

>>6339837
Playable is a vague term, yes it's playable and probably more accessible to the average person today but in my opinion Goldeneye is still the better experience and thus could be said to be more "playable"

>>6339835
>No, you can't. It's not perspective correct.
Didn't say anything about "perspective correct"ness, I know it's not a true 3D engine, but it has more stuff under the hood to simulate a strong approximation. Are you going to argue with the game manual, where they explicitly point out that you must aim to hit enemies?

>>6339842
You might be right, I'll look into the game's code later on. But one thing is for sure, I cannot remember any extraordinary physics/damage technology.

(Mind you I was practically forcing myself through the entire trilogy, looking for that "amazing experience" some people were bitching about. Spoiler warning: I couldn't find it in the end.)

>>6339851
What you describe is free aiming, not looking up/down. Pretty much anything that came after Doom could do it (and even the Doom engine is capable of doing so with some minor tweaking, as used in Hexen).

>>6339797
>Marathon is objectively the better series
not with that enemy and level design lmao, not even in story. Definitely not musically. Multiplayer? Marathon's a joke.
You're a hipster, kid

>>6339867
>What you describe is free aiming, not looking up/down. Pretty much anything that came after Doom could do it

>>6339868
I'm 34 years old. Never liked Halo, sorry. I don't know what it is about it but it has never appealed to me. Indeed, it always repulsed me in some way.

>>6339872
Sounds like a personal bias problem

>>6339860
Here's an example of what the game's physics allow the player to do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF-kEUhb0bc&t=966s

The player, looking at the ground, propels himself first by shooting a grenade at his feet, then shooting a second grenade for a little additional recoil boost, then a third grenade at the wall to his left causing him to move rightwards, then perfecting the land by aiming his momentum. While people can criticize the floatiness of the game for how weird it might feel in general, it gives the player a lot more control over their movement.
>>6339867
Don't understand the distinction you're trying to make. I mean, the manual explicitly says 'Look Up'/'Look Down'. When you say free aiming I imagine System Shock, where there's a non-fixed crosshair used to shoot enemies arcade-style.
>>6339868
The enemy diversity isn't quite as strong as Doom's, but I'd say it was a strong second place for the genre in that era. And the levels have some really neat and unique aspects too, albeit also some annoying jumping puzzles.

>>6339881
It's not good.

>>6339882
>Here's an example of what the game's physics allow the player to do
Okay, I get what you mean (rocket jumping, kind of). To a certain degree, this certainly happens in Doom, but by enemy projectiles, as you can't aim freely.

>When you say free aiming I imagine System Shock
I meant more like in Build games. Fake view perspective, true aim vector. But again, something similar can be achieved in Hexen.

>>6336745
It's a lot of fun, the weapons are cool, and it has interesting ideas like the health system and vacuum which make a distinct experience. The story is fascinating in an I-can't-believe-the-devs-weren't-Russian kinda way.

It's also weird and ugly as fuck and a lil janky, like you'd expect an oddball unique series like that to be.
Nothing sucks but it ain't perfect.
Its biggest problem is fucking macintosh retards insisting it's a better or more important game than it is. It's understandable that kids who grew up with the wrong computer would adore the one decent FPS they had, but nobody likes you faggots and you make good things seem worse by association.

>>6339912
didn't doom receive a mac os port?

>>6339904
Just to be clear, I'm certainly no programmer or enginedev and am not trying to make a purely technical/mathematic argument in comparing them. It may be possible that the base Doom engine can do all of that and more, my point is that at time of release, Doom and Doom 2 did not allow a player to have those aiming and physics perks that Marathon did.
>>6339912
It did, but we the proud 90s Mac gamers refused to hold it up to Marathon's glory.

>>6339904
>Okay, I get what you mean (rocket jumping, kind of). To a certain degree, this certainly happens in Doom, but by enemy projectiles, as you can't aim freely.
It IS rocket jumping and it is more advanced than Doom.

>>6339912
>The story is fascinating in an I-can't-believe-the-devs-weren't-Russian kinda way.
Kek

>>6339912
>The story is fascinating in an I-can't-believe-the-devs-weren't-Russian kinda way.
good way of putting it. It's so far up its own ass.

>>6339935
>it is more advanced than Doom
See the entire discussion above. But we got it, you love Marathon.

>>6339949
KEEP TALKING SHIT ABOUT MARATHON MOTHERFUCKER

>>6339949
The game on a sheer mechanical, player-control level is much more advanced than Doom. The enemy AI might be simpler though (e.g. you can find analogs for basically all Marathon enemies except for simulacrums/roaches in Doom, but there is nothing like the chaingunner, the archvile, the pain elemental, etc in Marathon).

>>6339960
But Anon, what's the use of being sligthly more advanced if everything just feels awkward? Again, there is a reason why these games didn't really take off. It wasn't the platform it ran on. If there would have been interest, they would have ported it to other platforms.

>>6339991
Marathon 2 was ported to PC and Xbox 360. I believe Infinity was on PC as well.

>>6340007
Yet still, nobody cares about them, apart from a small group of hardcore fans.

>>6340021
You're clearly seething that you missed out on the experience at the time.

>>6340037
Yes, I was busy being a newborn.

>>6339991
It felt natural to me, but I played them before playing Doom. There are probably a lot of reasons that they both didn't take off and weren't widely ported. First, Bungie was still a pretty tiny company in 1995, so having a hit on only a small platform only counted for so much. By the time the M2 port for Marathon came out in 1996, same year as Quake, it was obviously too-little too-late. Additionally, Bungie was doing some fucky stuff with Steve Jobs, like the Super Marathon port of the first two games for the Bandai Pippin, a failed Macintosh console crossover attempt. Jobs himself was touting how Halo was going to be the big Macintosh killer app in 1999 (until Bungie sold themselves to Bungie a year later).

The Marathon series is niche, no doubt about it, but that doesn't change the fact that the games had some impressive aspects that were ahead of their times, including the Doom games themselves. I mean, Ultima Underworld was far from a blockbuster success, and it was more technically advanced than Doom while coming out 18 months earlier, so success isn't everything. On the flipside, I wouldn't say that its niche is any smaller than, say, Shadow Warrior or Hexen. It still gets some attention and fan content to this day, albeit a hundredth that of Doom.

>>6340064
>to Bungie
*Microsoft, derp

>>6340047
Gas yourself zoomer scum

>>6339840
A lot of the levels do that. The standout example would be "The Hard Stuff Rules..." from Marathon 2, one of the most vertical levels in the series.

>>6340120
Yeah, I've seen it on the video linked above. It's sector-over-sector, not room-over-room (if you want to stack rooms above each other, you can't build a structure where you could see more than one of them at the same time).

But indeed is not directly possible in the Doom engine due to its binary space partitioning system.

>>6340132
>But indeed is not directly possible in the Doom engine due to its binary space partitioning system.
NOW SAY IT'S MORE ADVANCED AND BETTER

>>6336745
>>>>>6339764

>>6340132
>>6340139
SAY IT
>>6340330
Fuck off shill

"When I first saw Marathon, I was completely blown away. These guys had managed to surpass what I had accomplished with Doom and taken it to a whole new level. Inside I was kicking myself for developing for PC instead of this obviously superior platform."
-John Carmack

>>6340443
The transition from Eat it Vid Boi to The Hard Stuff Rules was pretty classy for its time if not seamless. I remember as a kid I'd like out the windows in the latter and wonder if it was somehow possible to jump out back into the lava moat. And then Where Some Rarely Go/Thing What Kicks did it even classier.
>>6340459
I laughed, I'll admit it. But has Carmack ever praised really any game of the last 20-odd years that he didn't have a direct hand in?

>>6340480
Not a game per se, but he held Ken Silverman (the creator of Build) in high regard, and even offered him a job back then.

>>6340496
I thought Carmack said Build Engine was a bunch of gimmicks held together by string and paperclips.

>>6340496
>>6340504
My bad, he apparently liked Build Engine but said it was held together by bubblegum. Looks like his praise was less for Build itself and more for Ken being the mastermind solodev.

http://advsys.net/ken/carmken.htm

>>6340512
>St. John: So you think one day Tim Sweeney might grow to be as successful as you.
>Carmack: It's hard to become successful by following in footsteps. This is probably going to come out sounding demeaning, but Epic wants Unreal to be Quake. Everything they did with Unreal, they did because they wanted it to be like what Quake turned out to be. And they're going to achieve a lot of that, because they're doing a lot of things well, but you're just never as big when you're second in line.
Hmm...
>Timothy Dean Sweeney (born 1970)[5] is an American video game programmer, billionaire businessman and conservationist, known as the founder and CEO of Epic Games, and the creator of the Unreal Engine, a game development platform.
I think Sweeney won in the end.

>>6340515
And what does this have to do with the Doom vs. Marathon discussion?

>>6340541
Absolutely nothing, just thought it was funny. I think it is officially established now that Marathon's engine was less technically hindered than Doom's at this point anyways

>>6340515
Can you link to what this is from?

Also Carmack is the more personally accomplished and skilled in what matters, tech and coding.

>>6340556
http://advsys.net/ken/carmken.htm

>>6340569
>Carmack: Like Prey, there's a lesson to be learned, something a lot of companies don't really ever learn. You hear it from the fan base a lot. "Do it right. We'll still be here. We'll wait," and it's tempting to just let things slip. But that's really not OK. If you're doing something cutting edge, you're making fundamental decisions about your architecture, and if you let it slide for a year or two, then it's just not the right decision anymore. Even if you pile on all these extras, it's not optimal. It's not targeted at what you're doing. So I have some concerns about Prey coming out this late.
>Prey
>Coming out late in 1997
Oh boy

>>6340548
>I think it is officially established now that Marathon's engine was less technically hindered than Doom's at this point anyways
That's still not the case. It's established that we're comparing oranges to apples (no pun intended).

>>6340584
>two FPS games released one year apart, one commonly considered a clone of the other
>apples and oranges

>>6340584
We have established no such thing, your head canon is not reality.

>>6340556
>>6340569
Link to the full interview that this page is citing, archived from 1998:
https://web.archive.org/web/19980130151941/http://www.bootnet.com/youaskedforit/lip_16_outtakes/lip_16_all.html

>>6340592
...with one being released on a platform that nobody would consider for gaming

>>6340605
Let me guess, you are >>6340037 >>6340087 >>6340443 and >>6340459

>>6340637
Let me guess, you're the same anti-Marathon shill from the entire thread who keeps insisting his opinion is somehow the thread consensus

>>6339730
>good luck not having the rocket auto-lock on some other enemy and then driving itself into a surface
That only happens if your horizontal aim is off
i.e. git gud

>>6339706
>The Marathon trilogy is certainly the best thing Bungie ever did
Someone's never played Myth

literally store-brand Doom

>>6336745

Marathon 2 is the tits. 1 and Infinity are garbage.

How do you get Aleph One to not looked super zoomed in and also get the damn mouse sensitivity to not feel horrid

>>6336989
I think that was some kind of bonus room referencing the other bungie game, Pathways into Darkness, something included in earlier versions of the Aleph One marathon 1 port cus the maps were remade rather than ported

>>6342432
Yeah, and they removed it at some point. New versions start where the original game started.

I guess too many people found it creepy.

>>6339912
>I-can't-believe-the-devs-weren't-Russian
So the story is shit masquerading as genius by being obscure without a reason?

>>6340515
>I think Sweeney won in the end.
Carmack was still right though, Unreal turned out to be not really like Quake, and then the companies had their own ways.

>>6342543
ah, the 2deep gambit
is an entire nation with a robust artistic heritage nothing but poseurs, or is Anon just kind of retarded?
place your bets

I brought an old mac a while ago, from what I player the engine was closer to duke 3d than doom. Seemed to play well, you could also put the resolution up a lot higher than doom, it just seemed really good.

>>6343007
Was it the first one or Marathon 2: Durandal?

2 is based as fuck. 1 kind of sucks though -or at least it hasn't aged like Doom.