On further reflection UT might be my 2nd favorite overall, for one reason - storyline. UT def best in Unreal series, but Marathon was what a great fps should be all about.
Bungie's Marathon series was the first FPS with the complete package, a decent storyline to go with the action. Came out Mac-only at first, Marathon 2 was also made for pc, and the finale was Marathon Infinity. Graphics for the time were very good.
HALO was conceived out of the Marathon story.
Have read of some speculation that Bungie might revisit Marathon.
To give one an idea of the depth of the storyline, visit
http://marathon.bungie.org/story/
After hours and hours of playing Marathon single person, I hated the pfhor and wanted every one of them to die horrible deaths. And then there was Durandal . . .
"For seventeen years the renegade Pfhor scoutship
jumped between the closely packed stars of the
galactic core: charting and discarding nearly
seven thousand systems before finally falling into a
slow orbit around the second planet of a dim star
ninety-seven light years from the gravitional
center of the milky way.
Probes were contructed and launched, with engines
and instruments whose sophistication would have astounded
both the Pfhor from whom technology had been
stolen and the human programmers of the AI whose
mad genius had directed their fabrication.
The outlines of continents were mapped, and along
them the radioactive ruins of ancient cities
were discovered, buried under the shifting
sand and rock of a global desert.
The tireless, nearly immortal cybernetic crew of the
ship were the genetically engineered descendants of
the dead world below- the first of their race in
a thousand years to return to their ancestral home.
They came to search through the devastation of the
ancient war in which they had been enslaved,
to find a weapon or some piece of knowledge
with which they could fight back against their oppressors.
All over the ship, dancing through the wreckage
of the Pfhor computer core,
DURANDAL WAS LAUGHING"
