By Bill Maguire
More reviews will follow in a future MUGShot...
This shareware game is a solitaire card game involving two decks. It calls primarily for card counting skills. The interface is smooth. You double-click the cards and they do what you would expect, which you can undo. You can take back the last move.
The object, as usual, is to pile all the cards onto the piles of Aces. You start with 10 columns, showing four cards on each. You can see all the cards. The rest of the deck (2 decks) is face down. You get to go through the deck once. When you get an Ace, you start another pile. You can move cards onto any empty column, onto the immediately higher card of the same suit on a column, or onto an immediately lower card on the Ace piles. Blank columns are precious. Moving large numbers of cards using small numbers of blanks is the puzzle to be solved, similar to the "Towers of Hanoi" game.
It's pretty addictive. I have played well in excess of 50,000 rounds. I usually reset after 5,000 rounds, because it is too hard to budge the average after that. It helps that I play over breakfast and lunch. It is well designed to be a one-handed game, suitable for smokers or eaters. It is demanding enough to be challenging, but simple enough to handle straight out of bed or to relax. You just play slower. After 15,000 rounds, I paid the $10.00 shareware fee to Eric Snyder. I use version 2.0.
It runs on any Mac and, so far as I know, on any system back to system 3 (when I began using the mac). For a time on system 7 and up, it seemed to have memory problems. If you ran it, quit it, then ran it again, either it or the system might crash. That seems solved by System 7.5.5.
When I began playing Marathon, I liked to say that my life was disturbed by recurring dreams of being trapped on a fossil-fuel age planet, oddly obsessed with the native currency and the opinion of the natives. My real life, of course, was battling aliens to save the helpless humans of the colony ship Marathon.
Marathon Infinity is the third chapter in this game, which actually has a plot.
You can get demos of each chapter, suitable for dozens of hours of play for nothing over the internet. The full games come on CDs, early chapters of which are practically, and in some cases actually, given away by the stores.
You may recall our PC brethren slavering over Doom when it came out. We had already seen Wolfenstein 3D by the same company. This breakthrough was in the 3D first person perspective. You would experience the game through the eyes of your character. It was gory. It was smooth. The environment looked real. I recall the first time I had been playing Wolfenstein, took a break, and returned to be startled by the fact that it was using only a small square in the middle of my screen. Hell, I thought I was living in that world, and here it was really only about 3 x 5 inches. These games are processor-intensive, and try to help out weaker machines with options to shrink the screen, reduce resolution, reduce colours, reduce or eliminate sounds or types of sounds, etc.
Even with options turned down, Marathon on a 68030 machine is more like stop-motion animation than real life. Infinity's demo takes 17 MB, expanding to 54 MB. However, you don't need a top end machine. I haven't tried it on a 68040, but even a PPC 601 handles it well.
After trying Marathon, Doom seems pretty lame. Marathon has stereo sound, panning as you move, smoother animation, more character capabilities, and physics! You can even adjust the physics, including buoyancy, gravity, and so forth.
Technically, the breakthrough was in the physics and the texture-mapping. By containing laws and algorithms, large worlds could be contained in comparatively small files. Now big companies are latching onto this first person 3D perspective and offering standards like VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language) to let you use it to explore simulated and virtual sites.
In Marathon I, you are in the Colony Ship Marathon, which has been invaded by aliens. You have a pistol and your fists. You explore the area, trying out switches and computer consoles. Eventually, you begin communicating with the computer, which helps you until it is attacked by another computer, Durandal, which has gone rogue, achieving sentience and a real nasty sense of humour. Durandal puts you through the wringer too. As I recall, you ultimately invade the alien ship for information, weapons, and ultimately, sabotage. You ultimately learn depressing things about your character and re-evaluate who are the good guys.
In Marathon II, "Durandal", you are retrieved from stasis by Durandal many years after Marathon I. Durandal is now in control of one of the alien ships. The aliens, the Pfhfor (spelling?) are preparing for a big galactic invasion, in which earth will suffer. Durandal hopes to get information to stop them from one of the planets they have conquered, belonging to the Ssphpht (spelling?) race. It sends you down there to track down their military secrets, now millenia old.
I have just begun Marathon III, "Infinity". I haven't gotten far enough to know anything about the plot, except that you start in a ship, with a pistol and your fists.
You have got to love the way the different characters behave according to their personalities. You learn to anticipate, surprise, ambush, use the most effective weapons, and even, in some cases, make allies of your enemies. The poor, dumb, ordinary humans mostly get in your way in Marathon I, and some players, shudder, get in the habit of gunning them down. Sacrifice a few to save the rest I guess. Starting in Marathon II, the ordinary humans ("Bobs") are occasionally armed. Not only will they shoot back, but sometimes you can use them as allies (or as dangerous bait). Of course, sometimes, you just have to gun down the bumbling fools. Other times, a punch will get them moving.
I haven't seen any Marathon Anonymous groups, so I presume nobody else wants to cure their addiction either.
Haven't tried it. Got it free from a variety of sources. I know it includes many different solitaire games.