Marathon 2 Demo

Marathon 2 is the sequel to classic Macintosh FPS Marathon. It was made released for the Macintosh in November of 1995 and PC in September of 1996 by Bungie software, most famous for the Halo games from 2001 on.

The story so far from the readme file from the demo:

"In a remote and now half-forgotten time, the human colony ship
Marathon set out from Sol for Tau Ceti, 94 light years distant.
The year 2794 found this fledgling colony in its seventh year,
still suffering many hardships but striving for success.

That year, humanity made First Contact with the Pfhor, a ruthless
race of slavers. The Pfhor attack came swiftly and without warning.

The Marathon was disabled in orbit and the colony overrun. Having
been sent up to the Marathon in the first hours of the attack, you
were the sole colonist left to face the onslaught. But you weren¹t
entirely alone...

Damaged, one of the Marathon¹s onboard synthetic intellects,
Durandal, struggled to organize a defense of the stricken vessel.
Another, Tycho, was destroyed. The S¹pht compilers ( cybernetic
slaves of the Pfhor ) invaded the Marathon and rebuilt him,
but in the process Tycho went insane.

Durandal struck a deal with the S¹pht. In return for their
freedom, the compilers agreed to rebel against their masters
and give control of the Pfhor ship to Durandal.

After teleporting a boarding party to the giant Pfhor scoutship,
Durandal transferred himself into its massive computer array and
assumed complete control. Fearing imminent Pfhor retaliation,
Durandal left Tau Ceti, taking the Rebel S¹pht with him.

Three Terran months later, the Pfhor armada arrived at Tau Ceti
and razed the planet to bedrock.

Seventeen years after the dust settled on Tau Ceti, Durandal
found the lost homeworld of the S¹pht..."

Gameplay:

Pretty good, you face a variety of Pfhor baddies, with about five weapons (Your fist, a .44 pistol, a assault rifle with a built in grenade launcher, a double barreled shotgun, and a fusion pistol.) You go around completing tasks as Durandal assigns them via consoles. The demo has three levels, from the first half of the full version.

Aging:

It hasn't aged to badly, it's still a pretty fun but tough FPS. Limited resolution doesn't really bother me.

Sound:

The demo has a lack of active music going, but the weapons and ambient noise makes up for it. Some rocking tunes asides from the kick ass intro tune could have helped.

Overall:

Marathon 2, is a good FPS that is still pretty fun and challenging to play. It is now an open source game as Bungie released the source code for all three games in the trilogy in 2005. I found the demo on CNET again like my last demo.

Why haven't I talked much about anything, well it's pretty good, and I like to keep it sweet. I promise my next review will be more than half assed.

Well see you next time at Anicent Demos and Shareware.

Footage from Marathon 2 Shareware:

Fire Fight Shareware Review

Fire Fight is a isometric shoot'em up from EA/Epic MegaGames, where you go around completing objectives against rebels by well blowing up stuff, or collect specific items, or people, to well blow more stuff up. Sometimes you have to rescue people, and that doesn't involve blowing up stuff, just other fighters that get in your way.

Your Jaxon a pilot working for the Phantom Council (sounds vague and ominous). You fly something called a "99". You have six weapons, a vulcan cannon, swarm missiles (homing micro-missiles), a plasma cannon, missiles (regular homing missiles), a cannon, and grenades. Your supporting cast includes a bald dude as your commanding officer, and a redhead female for mission control, and a blonde flattop haircut SpecOps dude I'm guessing named Stone in mission 3. (There isn't much info on the story in the documentation, and I won't go to GameFAQs for a demo, not unless it's that important.)


Gameplay:
Controls are excellent, enemy variety is about four to five different craft types in the demo, they kind of look like Kilrathi fighters from the Wing Commander games but that okay. It's fun to play and blow up stuff in a fighter, outnumber as usual. The action is addicting, and well blowing up stuff is fun.

Aging:
When the shareware version is 320 x 240 on a flatscreen monitor it doesn't look as good when compared to a VGA/SVGA monitor in 1996, but the gameplay makes up for it easily, as you'll be blasting things to much to care much about such trivial things. Gameplay holds up good after thirteen years.

Sound:
The music for the shareware is MIDI format. It's nothing special to write home about but the generic action music does it job for setting the action based mood. The voice acting isn't to bad, but it doesn't really strike me as good.

Overall:
This game is pretty good and probably be worth picking up, from amazon, ebay, craig's list, or a used software store on a long shot. The gameplay makes up for any medoricty overall, and besides everyone loves a shooter if the gameplay is fun and fast.

You can still find it on the internet pretty easily at like CNet and places like that.

Well see you next time with another review at the Anicent Demos and Shareware.

Fire Fight Demo Footage:

Review criteria

The review criteria is going to be a little different then most places, it's going to be on four criteria:

-Gameplay
-How well it aged or Aging
-Sound
-Overall

I don't consider graphics a huge factor since these are really old game demos. Sound on the other hand can be quite catchy despite the years that go by. I consider gameplay the most important factor when playing a game. Sure a game can look slick and pretty, but if it's boring or play shit forget it man.

Since the criteria has been laid down, the reviews will begin shortly.

Well since that said, I hope I have fun doing this side project of mine, because well it's a harmless hobby.

Welcome to misspelled domain titles and nostalgia

Hello I am Evil Imperial, retrogamer and poor speller.

Your wonder why I'm doing this blogging about old game demos and shareware games, and why did you misspell your title on the word ancient.

The shareware era of the early to mid-ninites is where many gamers got started playing PC games, and well that's when I started. To me it's a nostalgic era of gaming where many people game to age playing games.

Also I'm also a lazy spellchecker, that's why ancient is misspelled for the domain, and well's it to late to fix that, beside it gives the blog a little character or so I think.

I'm going to be reviewing mostly old shareware games and demos from the pre-2000 era with some exceptions from later years that are at least a few years old. Sit back, relax boot up your x86 series processor or run DOSBox or a similar emulator.

Welcome back to the era of the 3.5" Diskette, sub-14.4k modems, and BBSes (Sadly I never used them, but well it was popular back then).

Welcome to Anicent Demos and Shareware.

Enjoy the trip down memory lane, and remember to wear you safety helmet and seatbelt as well things tend not to age nicely.