[rzt]

I was a Mac kid, so my world was Marathon, but I think a lot of the lessons are the same. I remember building my own custom worlds, really screwing up the physics, and then deleting en masse.

Whenever I play shooters now, I still think, "Man, I should just get a copy of Doom and play that instead." Too much noise in some of these games –– I just want to blow stuff up.

[wsc981]

I preferred Marathon a lot over Doom. Some reviewers have called it "the thinking man's" shoot-em-up and I think this holds some truth. Of couse Marathon was released almost a year after Doom's release, so Bungie had plenty of time to improve the genre in many areas. Not just in looking up and down, the game also featured:

- weapons with multiple modes and reload mechanics

- advanced lightning effects

- "5D" space (one of the multiplayer levels used this)

- physics (e.g. grenade hopping and missile ballistics)

- neutral and allied npc's

- more varied elevator / switches system (e.g. in the "Colony Ship For Sale Cheap" level)

- motion tracker in UI

- nifty level mechanics, like the levels without air (e.g. "G4 Sunbathing")

I still wonder if Jason Jones could have become an equal to Carmack if he kept his focus on coding games ...

[ptr]

Another Marathon guy here. Spent some summers ago just playing the first two games through, they're still great. I especially like the music. The Marathon community is still alive with AlephOne (http://marathon.sourceforge.net/), an open source port of the Marathon engine, with multiplayer support.

[lostlogin]

I also played Marathon. I still occasionally hear the alien chatter. The way you could aim up and down was something that made Marathon way better for me - especially in multiplayer.