>>13399749I always felt the sequels were more cartoony because of the rounder textures and brighter colors. The muted, darker, almost harshly angular features of the first Marathon felt like a used retro-future to me, almost like Aliens or something, which was probably Bungie's intention. I also thought a lot of the weapons in the later games had goofy features, whereas the ones in M1 were more utilitarian and believable.
That said, PiD was cutting edge when it was made, for a first-person adventure RPG on any platform. Maybe it's a combination of nostalgia and perspective; the human engineering on PiD's player interface was pioneering, giving an intuitive hybrid of existing RPG interfaces that worked to the advantage of the Classic Mac OS. One experienced in the OS could do things in PiD like on-the-fly mag change pauses that allowed for almost continuous fire with even the pistol, and other such hijinks. Note that some of the PiD game experience was restrained by early computer constraints, like the inability of OSes to interpret more than two pressed keys of input at any one time. I always felt PiD was less action and more survival horror though; limited ammo, creepy monsters, very dark, puzzles, rich backstory, and a very interesting plot.
That said, I didn't like Infinity "pressing" custom physics models into the map itself. Can't run custom models of your own with the campaign due to that.
