Marathon 2: Durandal

The Good
Marathon 2 is one of the great classics of Macintosh gaming. Upon release, Mac publications ate it up with lots of 90%+ scores. It managed to retain everything that was good about the first Marathon, while telling a significantly different story and adding a host of technical improvements and new modes and features. It was not only more advanced than its predecessor, but well ahead of anything on DOS or Windows at the time, which hadn't yet moved past the Doom engine.

On top of that, it told a damn fine story. Durandal, an insane computer and a villain of sorts in the first game, has kidnapped you and hauled you to the S'pht homeworld in hopes of uncovering a lost civilization there. The plot is largely separate from the first game, so you needn't have played it to follow things. It's very well written with conversations with various characters where you get your marching orders and move plot along, all of whom are distinct, and none of whom are stereotypes along with various bits intended to give you background information and add to the atmosphere.

Many people think of Doom when first seeing Marathon, especially back in the day before first-person shooter was an established genre. There is a superficial similarity. They're both sprite-based first-person games with similar graphical capabilities as far as resolution and color depth. However, the style is quite different. While Doom seems to draw from heavy metal album covers as its primary inspiration, Marathon is far more colorful and science-fictiony and far more technically adept.

It's somewhat more complex as well. Doom is deliberately simple in design. You find keys to get to the exit and kill anything that gets in your way. Marathon: Durandal has much more variety. Granted, a lot of the this variety amounts to finding and flipping a switch, but there are exploration missions, extermination (where all enemies must be killed) repair missions (which amount to finding a chip and putting it in a socket) as well as the standard opening doors to the exit.

The real variety comes from the environments. Levels can be cramped hallways like “For Carnage, Apply Within,” expansive pump stations that you drain and flood like “Bob’s Big Date” or the complex lava works of “All Roads Lead to Sol,” a cathedral of sorts in “Ex Cathedra,” the internals of a giant computer in “This Side Toward the Enemy” or some sort or underground mechanical works in one of the game’s most memorable levels, “What about Bob?”.

The architectural variety is made possible not only by the dynamic fluids, but by four texture sets that manage to be rather robust even with only thirty-odd textures each and an engine that allows relatively (for the time) complex room-over room structures without trickery, though no true bridges.

Enemies don't just rush you and attack. This isn't to say they have terribly complex behaviors, but it isn't just you against them. Some creatures are your allies. There are several distinct groups of enemies that fight with each other. Even allies can get pretty pissed off over misunderstanding and start attacking over friendly fire. This applies to you and your enemies.

One of Marathon's better points is the guns. While not as balanced as Bungie's later efforts such as Halo, it avoids the common system of the time of constant upgrades where each weapon you find is more powerful than the last. There are eight total weapons. Unlike many games in the genre, your melee attack (fists) isn't a nigh-useless weapon of last resort. Its damage is based on your forward momentum and a single solid hit will kill many of the weaker enemies. It's also fast enough that you can twitch-lock a lot of the stronger enemies if you catch them alone. Even the fairly standard weapons are given a novel treatment. Pistols and shotguns can be dual-wielded for twice the killing. The rocket launcher has two barrels, making for unique timing, and then there are the weapons you won’t see in most games, like the chargeable fusion pistol, the assault rifle which is a grenade launcher and machine gun in one, the very effective flamethrower, and most bizarrely, the alien weapon which shoots fireballs and has no ammo display.

Marathon 2 is a proto-Halo in many ways. Many of the weapons are very similar, the storytelling sensibility has much in common barring technological differences; it deals with an alliance of aliens looking for the ancient wisdom of a different group of aliens and, most importantly for gameplay, features a cybernetic badass with recharging health in the lead.

More than any other feature, Marathon's health system makes it play differently than its contemporaries in the genre. In most games, you have a health counter which you drain by getting hit and fill by picking up health items from the environment. In Marathon, you still have the health bar but for the most part, you do not recharge by finding items. Rather, there are recharge stations built into the walls you can use. There are several types and can recharge your health to 1X, 2X or 3X. This means you have a health supply which is not limited by amount, only geography, freeing you to behave in a far more reckless manner, so long as you are ready to retreat. This focus on retreat is not seen in other games of the era in this genre. Essentially, rather than killing your way to the exit, each level becomes about finding a health station and pattern buffer and using them as a home base to clear the level.

The pattern buffers are the save mechanism. If you only like save anywhere games, you won't be happy. I, however, always thought it was cheap to inch your way to victory a few seconds at a time. Marathon's saves are only allowed in particular locations (though without any limit on quantity).

And that’s just the single player. Marathon 2 improves both on the original Marathon and on every other game in the genre at the time in multiplayer. It’s not just the usual deathmatch. In fact, deathmatch isn’t even an option, though this port does have something called deathmatch. Rather than calculating your score as kills minus suicides and environment kills as in deathmatch, your score is kills minus deaths. As you lose points by being killed by another player, a much more cautious style of play is encouraged than in most shooters. While it’s hardly Rainbow Six, finding choke points and other defensible locations is critical.

Other games include King of the Hill, where you must hold a spot on the map for the most time, Kill the Guy with the Ball, where you must hold a ball (a human skull) for the most time, and Tag, a reversal of this concept where you must be it the least amount of time and must kill another player to make them it.

Team play is allowed and you are not restricted to two teams. There is no limit, in fact. Theoretically, you could have two teams of two up and four singles and teams are allowed in all game types except cooperative, where everyone is on a single team.

Co-op goes beyond what was commonly allowed at the time. It’s not restricted to two or four players, but eight. Obviously, this requires a second Xbox and TV. It’s isn’t just throwing more players into existing maps either. More enemies and items are added to keep the game balanced for however many players you have. A few days after getting this I played a five player co-op game most of the night instead of sleeping and got most of the way through the game. It will hook you.

One character deserves special mention: Bob. Bobs are friendly characters who fight alongside you. They only say a couple dozen things, but have memorable delivery all around, though an annoying habit of claiming credit for your kills. Even better are the robot impostors that will rush you and explode why saying ludicrous things like “Frog blast the vent core.” In “God Will Sort the Dead” you have a pit where you can get these guys going in a chain reaction like popcorn. Of course, they look just like the regular ones, leading to misunderstandings and hurt feelings.

All the monster types come in several varieties, meaning the twelve types go a lot farther than they otherwise would. There are orange/red, green, blue and purple varieties with most monster types having at least three of these. The variants may just be tougher or have more firepower, but some have different abilities. For instance, the orange and blue fighters have projectile attacks and the green and purple only have melee. There’s a blue hunter head-and-shoulders taller than the others that explodes violently on death and so on making for an actual line-up of thirty-two monster types.

So it was a great Mac game back in 1996, but is it a great Xbox 360 game in 2007? Much has been done to bring it up to date. The most immediately obvious aspect of this is the graphics. Marathon 2 used 256 indexed colors per collection with 128x128 textures and characters that were about 100 pixels tall. Everything has been (optionally) redone in beautiful full color and about four times the resolution, which is good, because it's also running at four times the screen resolution. Between this and the hardware rendering, nothing ever gets blocky nor does it even get blurry unless you're right up against something, and it's not too bad even then. The pseudo-3D trickery of the original has been replaced with a true 3d engine, though this is a subtle difference.

The interface has been revamped as well. Marathon 2 was always a widescreen game, with the interface taking up the rest of the screen. You could play in 4:3, but you would lose the interface to do so. Now, the interface has been moved up onto the play field and made semi-translucent so as not to waste so much space. Also, optional crosshairs have been added so you no longer have to guess at where the center of the screen is. Each weapon has its own cross hair which represents its firing characteristics. These are small tweaks, but make the game more playable.

The multiplayer was good to begin with as I said, but you are no longer limited to LANs, which with their requirement of hauling a bunch of people and computers within a few dozens meters of each other are not exactly convenient. Now, you have all the options of the original in split-screen and online (with Xbox Live Gold) and whatever combination you desire. I had never actually managed to get an eight-player game together before this version and now it’s as easy as waiting a few minutes in the lobby.

One small change I liked is that the minor compilers (the red ones with the yellow attack) have had their character designs put back in Marathon 1 style, which a lot of people liked better. There’s also a postscript on a secret credit terminal with info about the port.

There are a few tweaks to the saving system that affect gameplay. In the original, if you died, you went back to your last save, or if you hadn’t saved, the beginning of the game, no exceptions. Here, you go back to the beginning of whatever level you are on if you haven’t saved in the current level, saving you some annoying repetition. Additionally, if you die a bunch of times in a row, you go back to the beginning of the level, making it harder to get stuck in an unwinnable situation.

There is a brand new mode called survival where you are spawned in one of four random levels. The overall structure of each is unique, but all of them have all the weapons, occasional health canisters and start with fighters and as you kill them move up to stronger and stronger enemies. The object is to stay alive as long as possible. This is a whole level of insanity you won’t find in the main game, which because of technical limitations of the original platform is limited to about four enemy types per level and about a dozen at a time. Here, you could find all twelve at once with about forty total all around firing at you.

Like any 360 port, we now have achievements. They have managed to include a great deal of variety in their limit of 12. We have the usual ones for things like beating the game or winning a multiplayer match, one for wracking up impressive kill-counts with several weapons (easy to do really cheaply on local games, though) and a few esoteric ones for things like killing your allies or beating the games on the highest difficult while flipping switches with your fists instead of the action button and killing your allies. The only one that requires Xbox Live Gold is a zero-point viral.

The Bad
Some of the replacement character graphics aren't nearly as nice as the texture replacements. The main offenders are the fighters, who seem to be wearing skirts, and the Bobs, who have had all color drained from their jumpsuits. I also wonder why, as long as they were going HD, no one went the extra mile and rendered the characters from eight angles instead of five. This has the effect of any asymmetrical character (except the S'pht'Kr, who were done from eight angles) popping from left-handed to right and vice-versa as you circle them.

A lot of the finer points of the game aren’t explained to the newbies. This is a game from an era where you were expected to read manuals and it doesn’t have one, so it can be problematic. It does have a help file, but it contains considerably less information. It doesn’t explain the weapon functions, for instance, and has less backstory.

Several long-standing bugs are retained. Marathon 2 came from a day where 32 MB was a lot of memory and 8 MB was the minimum requirement. This was rather tight and there were lots of memory-budgeting features added. Some of these have stuck around, even though the Xbox 360 has 64 times the memory of the old minimum system. The main annoyance is the limit on the number of active monsters. You often end up with a monster just standing around not attacking because the limit has been reached and it isn't very good at deactivating the old ones. This is particularly the case in large co-op games on high difficulty levels as both add extra monsters. Each monster has a specific requirement to be activated and sometimes these aren’t counted as met for whatever reason even when you aren’t at the limit, leading to monsters that just stand there until you walk up and punch them. Punching their buddy standing right beside them doesn’t do the trick, even when their boots get splashed with his blood.

Other design flaws from the original are retained. For instance, in co-op games, there may be one guy with a rocket launcher and he falls in the lava, leaving no way to get it back. In some levels, you can lose all switch-flipping weapons in this manner and get stuck. You'll find yourselves constantly respawning with nothing but a pistol, three clips and your own two fists. Also, you're always back at the original starting place, which in a few levels means spending three or four minutes hiking back to the place you died. 6000 Feet Under is a big offender here. This is one of the places where the most improvement was needed. They did make all carried weapons always drop, which helps, and online play is a big deal, but they needed to go farther.

Co-op has other, related problems. You are only allowed to start at the first level or “Big House,” where you lose all your weapons, so it’s essentially a fresh start. I can see what they were going for here. In all other levels, you would normally be entering with weapons and they want to make sure you aren’t coming in unprepared. However, this happens when you die anyway. The game is quite long. It’s 28 levels and most are not trivial. There is no saving in multiplayer. Unless you and all your friends have six or seven hours to kill in a single sitting or know the levels pretty well, you won’t be able to get through the first segment. The original lets you start on any level in co-op and it gives you extra weapons throughout to compensate. The extra weapons are still there and everything. Out of all the changes, this is the one I liked least.

Because of some sort of oddity in how it checks to see whether you're standing on solid ground, when going down stairs or an elevator, you can’t get traction with the floor and slide around under essentially air control. This happens even on elevators moving at moderate speeds. This is made more irritating by all the platforms that will crush you because you didn’t slide out in time and when you trip going down the stairs and get roasted by whatever that Pfhor goo is.

Another design annoyance comes in the level “What About Bob?” Bungie apparently thought it would be cute to put a save terminal in a place you can't leave if you didn't follow instructions earlier. The instructions warn you of this, so it's purposeful design. This isn't the days of Sierra adventures. Trying to make avoiding unwinnable saves a part of the challenge is bad design. This is even worse now than it was eleven years ago when the game was originally released.

This isn’t the only such situation. Anywhere in the game, you could save with a sliver of health and a grenade a meter from your back or an empty oxygen tank and no way to get to a recharger except swim. Having you restart levels if you die repeatedly makes this less detrimental than the original, but you could start a level in a bad spot as well and having to save multiple drafts is not something most gamers are used to.

In fact, many of the design elements are quite dated, beyond the obvious that it's a sprite-based game. A lot of these choices I liked, but some not so much. One of the main annoyances for me was the auto map. This is a 3D game where some rooms are over others, but the map doesn't distinguish, making the more vertical levels more or less impossible to read because you just end up with a mess of wall lines and no sense what you’re on and what’s above and below. Also, the AI is very simple. Even when monster do activate, they don't lead shots, defend themselves, make any sort of coordinated tactics or really do anything except pick a hostile target and attack it. Which is to say, the AI isn’t any smarter than Doom; it just attacks things other than you. There have been complaints about difficulty, but it’s actually not too hard once you learn the ropes. Just remember this game comes from an era where difficulty didn’t come from enemies outmaneuvering you. They all follow simple patterns (though not as simple as many games of the time) and difficulty comes from their firepower, number and health.

The engine has been replaced with a new true-3D creation. For the most part, this is good and has more accurate perspective than the original. However, the characters are still 2D sprites, which leads to some issues. If you are standing right next to a character and look up, they grow much larger and if you are trying to punch them, your fists start missing. If you look down, they seem to move farther away. It still limits the degree to which you can look and down for similar reasons. Sprites would just distort worse if you could look farther.

For minor annoyances, in multiplayer, every man for himself has been given the more industry-standard name of deathmatch, but the rules are not actually the same as deathmatch, so it doesn't fit.

Marathon 2 is widely held to have the weakest multiplayer maps of the series and they are unaltered here. This isn't to say they aren't good, but the maps with Infinity and the original were better and they are missing certain options like monsters on the maps. Thunderdome is a standout, though. I hope for some map packs in the future.

For another quibble, you are now given a score in single player. It doesn't tell you how it's calculated and doesn't give you a running total, so you can't figure it out yourself very easily. It only gives a total when you die in survival or when you look at the score boards between sessions in the campaign. Presumably, you get points for killing stuff, but I have no idea how much for what and whether there are other factors.

Also, for Xbox Live play, the quick match does not seem to function. I've never gotten anything with it. Luckily, you can select custom match and just not pick any options for the same effect.

The Bottom Line
Don’t buy Marathon: Durandal expecting Halo 0, but it’s a great game for single or multiplayer if you are open to the sheer oldskoolness of it. It has probably the best story of any first-person-shooter from the pseudo-3D period, a unique graphical look, lots of memorable levels and a great multiplayer mode with game types that you don’t usually see. There are lots of ways it could have been improved, particularly the single-sitting approach to co-op. Anyone who’s enjoyed older games, which typically had predictable enemy behavior and rough graphics, should be able to look past its flaws. I do recommend this, particularly to those interested in the history of the genre, where this was quite influential, or the history of Bungie.