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Hours of Classic Gaming Fun

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: June 27, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Brief reviews of each game and their good and bad points follows.

Pathways into Darkness - An amazingly deep, intricate FPS. You must speak with the dead and solve puzzles far beyond the "find the key" nonsense that plagues most FPS's, such as keeping a swarm of unkillable flying rats at bay, slaying monsters invulnerable to any conventional weapon and surviving a suffocation room without an outside source of oxygen. Of course, you will also kill, kill, and kill some more and leave hundreds of broken monster corpses in your wake as you try to track down your lost nuke and complete your mission before time runs out.
PROS: Great story, interesting (and interactive!) dialogue, nifty items and puzzles, the time limit gives a mild sense of pressure but isn't oppressive- you can still explore all you need to.
CONS: slow movement rate, ancient and cartoony graphics, limited movement options and VERY HARD. You can't duck or jump, so sidestepping is your only real option for dodging enemy fire and many passageways are very narrow.

Marthon - Another story-driven FPS. While lacking the interactive dialog and unique puzzles of Pathways, Marathon has a more developed story (far outstripping Halo's meager offering) and a few well-developed characters, most prominent of whom is Durandal, a computer intelligence who's crazier than HAL on crack and whose monologues are always interesting and usually quite entertaining. Your mission seems straightforward enough: kill the aliens and stop them from destroying the Tau Ceti colony or your ship, the Marathon. However, you'll find that not everything is as it seems with the aliens, and Durandal has his own plans...
Gameplay-wise, it doesn't have the weapon variety, realism, graphics or AI of a modern FPS, but you'll find that you still need all your gaming skills to get through Marathon. Action, plain and simple, but with a story backing it up.
PROS: Great story, cool characters, the birth of classic Bungie weapons (SPNKR Rocket Launcher anyone?) Halo took a lot from the Marathon series, including "They're Everywhere!", a charge-up energy gun, the actual Marathon symbol (all over the place in Halo) and Bob.
CONS: Annoying lighting (too dark, too flickery), one-sided dialogue, puzzles require a lot of estimation and guesswork, no jump button. Jumping can be accomplished with a painful and imprecise procedure involving explosive ordinance.

Marathon 2: Durandal - You begin to unravel some of the darker truths about the alien invasion in Marathon 1 as you try to rescue an entire civilization from slavery. Durandal meets someone who might be his match...
A much larger window grants better graphics, and your ordinance undergoes some changes and improvements.
PROS: See Marathon, improved interface, better story, some of the lighting issues resolved
CONS: Sometimes easy to get lost, hard to know if you're doing things right (do I run through this lava, or is there a bridge I need to activate?)

Marathon Infinity - A Pfhor weapon has unwanted consequences as a being of pure chaos is released from eons of imprisonment, warping reality and sending you through various universes and possible incarnations of yourself: slave of Durandal, free of Durandal, ally of your foes... The one constant throughout all of these universes is that you have to kill pretty much everybody.
PROS: About the same as Marathon 2, a few new weapons
CONS: About the same as Marathon 2, the "story" is very hard to follow due to rapid reality jumps, and my version has a strange glitch in which the game will crash when loading a new map unless I save at some point between loading the game and loading the map.

Abuse - Not as much story as the above games. You run around in your battlesuit and blow up enemies as you search for whatever secret switch you need to find to progress.
PROS: Nice weapon and ability variety. Plenty of bad guys to blow up - and isn't that why we play these games? It's a great feeling to incinerate over a dozen baddies with a single flamethrower blast, or cut through them with the Death Saber.
CONS: You'll find yourself in several seemingly impossible situations, and a few of the puzzles make no logical sense- these switches do nothing! No real "ending" - no tangible reward for beating the game, so you're pretty much left going "What the heck?! Was that it?" Still, a good game.

Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete - OLD multiplayer game. I can't give a thorough review, unfortunately, as I personally know only one person who owns this game: me.There is a single-player mode, but it's mostly for familiarizing yourself with the controls and items, there's nothing you can kill (but plenty that can kill you.)

VERDICT: If you can afford it and have the means to play it, this is a great buy. Hours of classic gaming fun are contained within, and you might even find yourself making some new friends - the Marathon series has a well-established fanbase and a HUGE website.

A neutered pack of classics..

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 7
Date: November 06, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Ahh. Some great games from my childhood. But.. some of the games lack network multiplayer play. I mean, the option is there, but it isn't clickable. Its the same on all of the computers in my house. And the network works fine with every other games. And I seem to remember testing it at a friend's house with the same result.. This could be an isolated problem, but I doubt it. But, hey. If you're willing to waste money.. My copy could just be a dud.

wonderful games, great price

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 9 / 10
Date: July 06, 2000
Author: Amazon User

The Mac Action Sack contains Marathon 1, 2, and Infinity.

Marathon is a 1st person shooter (like Quake, Doom, etc). The difference is that Marathon has a great, engaging story *and* incredible level design and art. The levels drip with suspense and dread, and it's clear that someone paid attention to every detail -- when could you ever say that about Quake? Nothing in these games is tossed in. It all fits together: ambient sound, story, levels, animation, icons, etc. etc. etc.

The graphics are fairly simple and will run on almost any Mac (certainly anything since 1995).

Note that while Marathon will run on a LAN, it will not run across the internet (it cannot handle latency).

Also, Bungie released the source for Marathon 2 (having lost the source for Marathon 1, which I'm sure is a story in itself). Anyhow, there's a community of programmers who have updated Marathon to use OpenGL and take advantage of modern graphics cards. See source.bungie.com for the latest build of Marathon Open Source.

The Sack includes: Marathon 1,2, and Marathon Infinity, Abuse, Pathways into Darkness, and Minotaur. Marathon and possibly Abuse are the one's you'll spend most of your time on.

--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu

bungie brakes barriers

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: March 12, 2000
Author: Amazon User

these games are time consuming, adictive, and habbit forming. I can remember missing many nights of sleep due to these. espeshaly the marathons. geting together with a lan, now thats where it's at. for seventeen dollars its a steal.

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