In December of 1994,a small group of dedicated wire-heads produced a game called Marathon. Marathon took the Macintosh
gaming world by storm and has been called the best Macintosh game ever by more than a few people.
Well, the guys at Bungie have not been sitting on their butts counting money since then. Nope, they have been hard at work on their next project, Marathon 2. Marathon 2: Durandal looks to be a vast improvement over the original.
In a partnership with PowerComputing, Bungie released a preview of this game on a CD-ROM that was given to all takers at the recent MacWorld: Boston and to anyone requesting a copy through PowerComputing’s World Wide Web Site. The preview gives us a few sneak peeks into the amazing work Bungie has done on this new game. Marathon 2 currently has no firm release date, but is rumored to be out by Christmas of this year.
In the preview, you play the same space marine seventeen years after the ending of the first Marathon adventure. The rampant Artificial Intelligence Durandal has kidnapped you and taken you to the alien home world of the S’pht. While there, you go on various adventures and perform tasks to advance your cause. Your cause amounts to turning aliens into dead aliens by whatever means necessary. Along the way there are sure to be many mysteries and surprises to keep the game interesting for the thinking set of gamers.
To aid you in this adventure, Bungie has added a new weapon to your arsenal, a double-barrel shotgun with the triggers wired together. This is no doubt the result of Bungie heeding the cries of 'thoners the world over. As an added bonus, you can carry and fire not one, but two shotguns, reloading along the way just like Arnold in Terminator 2. The addition of shotguns has been one of the most popular features of the preview. It is accurate and extremely deadly. The two weapons on the front cover this issue are shotguns.
Another new feature is the use of ambient sounds, similar to the game Myst. With ambient sounds, sounds are associated with locations. When you are near water you can hear the water lapping up against the nearby platforms, when you are near a water fall you can hear that as well. As you walk away from the waterfall, the sound diminishes. The use of ambient sounds really adds to the realism of the game, especially when you are under water. Under water?!?! That’s right.
Marathon 2: Durandal adds the capability of playing in and under a variety of fluids. Water and lava are the two we see in the preview. There is no word on what additional fluids might be included in the actual game.
Add new aliens, new weapons, and new higher resolution graphics and sounds to these features, and you have a game that is surely going to overshadow the original game in many ways. I gave the preview only a four-and-a-half since the CD jacket
said there were four levels and there are actually only three. The network level was left off for some reason. Also, the preview is not "officially" available on the net right now. By the time you read this though, a demo version of the game should be available for download from a variety of internet sources. The demo should have that missing network level as well. Be sure and check out Slurpee's Unofficial Marathon 2 Home Page for the latest Marathon 2 info <http://www.amug.org/~marathon/slurpee/marathon2/index.html>. Also, Bungie has a web site under development at <http://www.bungie.com>. Stay tuned to Life OnLine for further Marathon 2 developments.
