As if you’re going to watch a 26 minute video featuring a hoard of young game developers making one of the best all time game series for the Macintosh. Many of these same folks went on to make Halo, which even takes place in the Marathon universe.

It appears that this tiny bit of gaming history has been widely forgotten, or it was never seen much in the first place. As of this writing, there is one searchable mention of it here, which is probably where I found out about it back in the day.

Highlights include:

1. The bug list was written on a Dominos pizza box lid
2. “The Shaft”
3. Jason Jones miraculous hair, better than the average developer
4. Comments on Quake by Jason Jones
5. Crazy Mac OS 9 (aka Classic) crash dialogs we all forgot
6. Fat CRT monitors (shot with a video camera unable to sync to the slow refresh rates)

Bungie made many games beyond Marathon, was bought by Microsoft, then released to be independent again after the success of the Halo series. Many of the core individuals in this clip no longer work there. If nothing else this is a great reminder of the hard work and challenges that a small company endured to ship what has become one the more beloved games on the Macintosh platform.

Download the clip here: Marathon Home Movies

Notes: the original clip was 240×180 pixels and encoded in the now nearly forgotten Cinepak video codec. For modern playback I converted it to an iPod/iPhone/iPad/Playstation 3/etc. compatible H.264 clip.

*Yes, I still have the original Marathon Trilogy box. I never used the stickers either.

Update: Bits of footage from this appears in an hour-long 20th anniversary video.

I’ve played a little bit of Fallout New Vegas almost every day in short spurts since it launched about two weeks ago. My takeaway is that New Vegas is much truer to Fallout 1 and 2, in a very good way. The writing, environment and myriad of not-so-black-and-white factions and alliances feels like playing the original games, especially Fallout 2 where some quests had bleak outcomes no matter what choice one made.

I’m not going to comment too much on the infamous stability of the Bethesda RPG engine other than to say that I’ve played Fallout 3 on a Playstation 3 and late in the game suffered lock-ups, slowness, etc. I found my own workarounds along with the occasional console reset (something you should rarely do, if at all). New Vegas has the same engine and seemingly the same bugs, but it feels faster of the developers adjusted the timing on the UI for the better.

The game quest or script bugs are one thing (we’ve already had one patch with 200 fixes), the engine bugs are the worst part of the revisited Fallout games. Bethesda has probably developed itself into a corner by building a massive system that never got a good foundation. From what I’ve read it appears that New Vegas PC users have had the worst experience so far. Fallout 3 left the PS3 users in turmoil, so something changed with this port. My PS3 experience has had two hard locks-ups, one during loading and another early in the game when I was about engage in combat with Powder Gangers for the first time. A few cosmetic glitches have existed with some of the character meshes, but nothing that has stopped me from playing. Here’s to more patches, especially if it’s true that New Vegas has already sold 1/3rd more than Fallout 3.

On to the game itself; I’ve seen some comments on forums that the story/scenario isn’t interesting because there are no historical landmarks (other than the Hoover Dam). What we do have, and what is so much like the original games, is a lot of long walks with surprise locations that have more connection to micro quests and characters than Fallout 3 did. I’m OK with that after exploring far too many Fallout 3 metro tunnels and buildings that felt the same and had no point other than to extend gameplay without adding anything to the story. Fallout 3 was still a good game but here we have a sequel that isn’t dropping the ball.

This isn’t an urban map. New Vegas is the most urban area in the game (so far) and is much smaller than the Washington D.C. area. The shacks, buildings or camps that you stumble upon in the Mojave desert are more special or interesting — or they seem that way — simply because there is more space in this game. It’s still more of the same Fallout 3 mechanic of collecting trash to sell or use, but the sameness has a bit more going for it because of the details with the added concoctions you can make from picked flora and fauna. There is less useful junk out there too, though some of it can be used to make something useful if you’ve got the know-how.

The side quests seem plentiful as well and so far there seems to be less backtracking when doing small quests. Granted, I’m really playing this game by jumping all over the place because it’s harder to get past the combat-specific quests than Fallout 3 was. It didn’t take long for me to become an invincible badass in F3, but so far I’m having a hard time keeping decent armor or ammunition for more than a few game days due to the changes in New Vegas. Sure I can make ammo or repair what I have, but you gotta have built up stats to do this, so you have to level up more even if you are toting some kick-ass weapons.

I have found some great guns early on but ammo just isn’t easy to come by so I’m using more melee attacks to get out of sticky situations such as entering an abandoned motel room only to find it full of Bark Radscorpions. As such my favorite weapon so far is a freaking huge heavy super sledge simply called “Oh Baby!”. And it is. I was about to sell that because I thought melee combat in Fallout was a joke, then I got attacked when I thought I was somewhere safe and had no ammo to speak of. Out came “Oh Baby!” and seconds later I was victorious like never before. So perhaps the melee combat is worthwhile now. There are new perks associated with it so I may give that a shot if I ever play through the game again.

Getting “Oh Baby!” came after walking a long, long way up into the mountains to deal with what seemed like a minor quest. In typical Fallout fashion this minor quest triggered several others, all in a remote area that seemed like it had little to offer. The walk was epic in first-person-shooter terms, I got attacked very little for the amount of game time I was traveling by foot – there were plenty of side paths I could have explored but I was literally miles from anywhere so I wasn’t keen on stumbling into a hidden vault filled with ghouls, especially since my best armor is a spacesuit. Somehow this was satisfying, but I know many gamers are probably hating this sort of thing (to be fair you only have to do this once). The sensory deprived long walks are really great for pacing and it’s not like you’re doing nothing, there are tons of natural ingredients to discover and you’ll need them to make chemicals.

So New Vegas is harder, which is good. The extra challenge isn’t all combat related – the quest choices aren’t easy to make sometimes. I’ve racked up more unfinished quests because I’m not always ready to commit, as if I’ll get over the thought of siding with somebody I detest later on just so I can say I completed the game (I probably will). Also, many quests get hard suddenly and have to be put on hold while you work out more than one requirement, often related to stats you didn’t think you’d need. This was true in Fallout 1 and 2 as well, so I’m feeling the love.

It’s been fun so far – bugs aside.

And one last thing, the mentions of previous Fallout 1 and 2 events are great fun, my favorite being the Deathclaw that is locked in a shed in Fallout 2 that you find early in that game and (hopefully) kill. I won’t give this away, but the explanation for that Deathclaw being there is revealed and it’s a pretty funny little story.

I’ve played the new Advance Wars – Days of Ruin for about six hours so far and it is indeed a fantastic way to take up all my free time game.

I noticed a much more responsive UI compared to the old one which is great since there is lots of animated text and wipes in the menus. It just feels nicely polished just as the previous game did. After playing for while I usually turn off battle animations in the game options for the ultra-speedy play.

The story is a lot darker but still not above being a game a younger person could play. There are no root beer parties after the battles, the environmental theme is still there but with a higher level of natural disaster being the source it feels more desperate. Everyone is starving for food and some characters are really selfish in a cold way.

The tutorial felt less invasive as well. It comes up on most but not all of the levels I played and not for very long (it also can be dismissed easily). The biggest change is that the unit-based tutorials only come up when you touch a unit for the first time, so really it’s relevant at the moment you are taking an action which I think is a great way to do tutorials in a game like this.

The new units coupled with no CO powers do seem to add enough to make it feel like there is something new to learn. The new Duster seemed a bit odd to me at first but after a few rounds I realized I was using it strategically more than as an offensive/defensive unit. That is to say that the Duster worked well as a distraction to keep other units busy or blockaded so I could strike elsewhere on the map. Other new units all seem to work great in a non-obstrusive way. The motorized infantry is a great option when the race to capture cities is on. Temporary airport/seaports can be built as well, which obviously adds some flex to refueling strategies. None of the additions or deletions have felt wrong to me – I’d even go back and play the last Advance Wars Dual Strike again if I wanted a different kind of game. This new one is probably best described as more direct to the combat yet still as addictive as ever.

Great stuff!

Here I am excited like a little kid about this week’s release of Advance Wars Days of Ruin for the Nintendo DS. I ought to be whining about the MacBook Air or something, but nope, my focus is on this game.

The last Advance Wars ate up about 100 hours of my time – probably a record for me with a game that didn’t include the words “Final” or “Fantasy”. It is an all-time favorite in the AAA class it seems. And you can’t buy it so easily now which is sad since this is the one game I tend to recommend for fellow DS’ers because it’s challenging and has meta reply value.

Initial reviews have been good and as more are published (probably this week) it’ll be easier to see that this will be another great DS game.

It’s odd how this game dropped like a bomb – it was barely announced in the Fall and now months later it’s a reality. The marketing seems to be light other than the official web site. I mean odd in the sense that many of us were anticipating another DS game in the series, especially as the last one was effectively an early launch title. Should be good – and if you’ve never played the series it’s worth a look.

With the recent news of Fallout 3 arriving I dug out my Fallout 1 and 2 discs to relive the dirt and glory once more. A bit of the way into Fallout 2 I somehow lost a key inventory item and couldn’t seem to get it back, so a little help was needed.

I remembered the Fallout 2 Survival Kit, aka F.2.S.K., a nice little OS X app for editing saved games. So hit the net to see if I could still get it. Alas, it was listed at version 1.4 at Versiontracker but with dead links to both the app itself and the developers site – so I reported the links as dead to Versiontracker.

Being the digital packrat that I am, I dug through some CD-R archives and found that I did still have the F.2.S.K 1.3.1 version from some years ago. I even had a similar app for OS 9/Classic called the Fallout Character Editor 1.0a2 (only Fallout 1 was ever released for pre-OS X Macs).

I also discovered that the same 1.3.1 version was still hosted online in at least two other places, albeit under a typo (“survuval” instead of “survival”, which doesn’t help searches). It appears that a good number of folks are looking for it still, so I’m hosting the 1.3.1 version renamed nicely for search engines here:

Fallout 2 Survival Kit + Garden of Eden Creation Kit for Mac OS X.

The software was developed by Michael Edgar at Scotiasoft Systems (which is apparently dead and gone).

I also shot off an email to the developer’s address in the read me, which so far hasn’t bounced. If I can get a reply I’ll post the results here.

April 5, 2008 Update:

I’ve located the last known version of this utility sitting on my old Powerbook. You can now download it here:

The Fallout 2 Survival Kit 1.4

PS – Versiontracker still lists the dead link for this despite my reporting it. It would seem that that feature is worthless.

While you’re playing check out the Unofficial Fallout 2 Patch (Mac & Windows + a manual install for geeks). I’ve yet to try it but it may fix what caused my need for the cheat.

October 4 2008 Update:

Just so there is some mention of this glitch somewhere, I discovered that neither Fallout 1 or 2 would launch without crashing when run from within a directory that had an “•” in the file name. I’d bet that any other special characters would also trigger this. So keep Fallout loose in your Apps folder kids.

MSFT, XBox 360 and Japan

Via Daring Fireball.

“We don’t feel like the Wii customer and the Xbox customer are the same thing,”

Hey, we all knew that already, right?

“We think that as soon as the Wii customer turns 14 they want something else.”

Wow, I have been living a lie thinking I was moving on towards the mid-thirties while playing the Wii and loving it. Actually being younger than I had planned is sweet, but what sucks is that apparently I will have to go through high school again – crap!

The other disturbing thing is that apparently there are at least 6 million 14 year olds playing with their Wiis…

Yes, I got a Wii at last. You’ll probably be hearing a lot of people saying that for a few more weeks or months.

Last Friday I finally got it – and I didn’t stand in line, in fact I bought it online and it showed up two days later which was sweet. I bought a “party” bundle that has been dubbed the “panty bundle” via a friend who misread one of my emails a little bit.

It’s a pretty good bundle as it came with Elebits, Rayman Raving Rabbids and a 1 gigabyte SD card. After purchasing it was shortly out-of-stock again, so I caught it at a good tiem. For the record this is the first time I’ve bought a console at launch.

Other than The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess the two bundled games are great launch titles. Rayman is mini-games with a lot of twisted humor and fun. Elebits is just fun, totally taking great physics and letting you apply your control via the Wii remote. Elebits has awful voice acting though – seriously bad. It’s strange that such a fun game would even let that happen.

As you may have noticed the Wii is over-hyped. Truth is most folks can’t put it down when they first try it out. It’s addictive, and like everything this should taper off once you’ve played everything to death. That’s when the burn-out sets in because you’ve played it all to death and yet you want more. Once more really slick games come out I’m sure folks will happily pick it again.

It’s a launch console so the game options are limited, but better than usual as well. Folks who got their Wii back in November are tired and want new games now. This is the usual problem with a new console.

The Wii does offer more options with the Virtual Console games you can download as well as the GameCube games being compatible. This is the first time Nintendo has opened up compatibility with their own previous systems unless you count the DS having Gameboy Advance support.

So like most folks I couldn’t put it down, even after having played much of this with friends elsewhere, this was my Wii and I was going to explore everything it had to offer.

Upon a simple setup of the Wii my fiancee joined me and we played Tennis, Bowling and then a lot of Rayman Raving Rabbids because gosh darn it, she had to experience the retarded bunnies! She isn’t a gamer by any current standard and doesn’t have the old-school NES or SNES background either. But nevertheless she was obviously curious about the controls and gameplay, even enough to seem pretty addicted. Nintendo has opened up the rather shallow gaming world with the Wii, just like they’ve been saying. The success of the thing is proof of that so far.

It’s fun. The one ingredient a lot of games have missing is fun. The Wii is pushing a lot of small mini-game titles right now, probably because of the control scheme. The games tend to overlap but some are better than others. The fishing in Zelda TP is far better than Wii Play for example.

Some things are so obvious and new with the control that they can create frustration – a friend of mine and I spent an hour figuring out the simple steps to catch a fish in Zelda TP. Yeah, we read all the stuff but the language didn’t translate so well when using the remote. Eventually we figured it out and swore never to fish again – minigames be damned!

Like the DS, it’s a great little piece of hardware that is also experimental and new enough to hopefully push some innovation from the game development community.

Ｍeanwhile Ｎintendo continues to sell them like cake – perhaps if Ｉ was willing to get up early and stand in line Ｉ’d have one, but Ｉ’m far to busy and need my rest to do that. Ａnd so Ｉcontinue to plow through recent ＤＳ games while keeping an eye out.

Ａpparently Ｎintendo is breaking records with this release, supposedly because typical non-gamers are getting a Ｗii. Ｈousewives, retirees, etc. are into it so like the ＤＳ we have a new audience that doesn’t want only first person shooter and first person shooter. Ｔhat’s pretty cool.

Ｉ hope the third-party game developers rise to the task as the Ｗii launch titles are wearing thin according to online forums and such. Ｏf course they are, but really if you had a ＰＳ3 would it be any different？ Ｉt’s coming, and figure that Ｗii sales will peak more if they slow down when Ｍario Ｇalaxy and Ｍetroid Ｐrime 3 are released.

So here’s Wil writing about the long gone days of the arcade. He’s only a year older than me so this a subject I can relate to pretty well. Check it out:

Pac Man Fever