fileball.whpress.com
1999

November 1998

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December 1998

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Timeline

Spooky

A nicely done outdoor canyon. Frenetic at first, because of the baddies waiting for you, but once they're gone, it's quiet again...There's a fast-moving river through the middle, with access to an underground cave, and plenty of nooks and crannies. A single manmade room overlooks the field, with teleporters to various high points. Probably needs three minimum to obtain decent carnage rates.

Duality (SPN)

Bungie's Duality, modified with Bobs that shoot grenades or lava globs. The idea is to give people without access to a network the challenge of a net game. (SPN stands for Single Player Network.) Works okay, except that bobs will never shoot like real people... and not much care was taken with the physics model. (Although the shots are right, the sounds aren't... sort of strange when you hear pistol shots,and turn around to see lava globs coming at you.)

The Marathon Sound Set v1.2

Not technically Marathon sounds, but rather a MacOS 8.5 SoundSet. Pretty well done, overall... a few sounds are rough, but so were the originals.

Kill the Player (SPN)

A small mazelike map, with an embedded physics model that keeps you on your toes. (It's designed to be played solo-the SPN stands for SIngle Player Network.) You get one magnum (and, if you kill the infrequent vacubob, a fusion pistol), and your job is to kill as many bobs as you can. (There is no end.) Good for target practice... the bodies really pile up. Enough recharge canisters appear that you can keep going as long as you want to.

Nuthouse of Idiosyncrasy

A small level with a pit reached by two long mirrorimage corridors. You got enforcers, you got vacuexplodabobs, you got a jug... you gotta kill 'em all, and still find your co-players. Would be horribly crowded with more than two or three.

The Sons of Ludd

A six-level, action-packed solo scenario. This was released (and announced on alt.games.marathon) last fall, but there wasn't any active archiving going on at the time.

Stacked Walkways

A pretty neat demo of two walkways on top of each other. The technique uses scenery items to fake the look of the walkway, so you don't look like you're floating... it seems pretty clear that with a little bit of artistry, the proper scenery items could be created to make the upper walkway look nearly flawless. Also contains an intriguing extension of the author's untextured wall experiments.

Not a Good Landing v1.1

A four level solo scenario. Mostly well-built, with nice architecture, and decent gameplay. Play would be better, I think, if it weren't quite so predictable.

3rd and 7

A large football field, surrounded by seats (?). Nicely laid out, if a little bare... but ammo is really sparse, probably for anything more than two people. Gets a little better once you find the entrance to the control booth, but it's still not enough for bigger games.

Descent into Death

A huge arena surrounded by rising hallways. With big groups, this might be fun, but smaller groups would have a hard time getting close enough to kill. There's a switch in the central pillar which I don't understand at all... all it seems to do is make the upper hallways vulnerable from below. Since only those in the upper hallways can flip the switch, it seems, well... pointless. (I suppose it also makes the area around the hill targetable from above... but there is much more freedom of movement down below, so it's more dangerous to those in the passageways.)

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