Shades

There really is a SpongeBob gif for everything.

Succession Wars mobile homes! Battlemech raid? Just move!

Several 3d printed buildings for Battletech painted in various shades. Two in tan bad grey, one in a faux brick, and one that is painted as an orange shipping container habitation.

Buildings for Battletech! Slowly working on getting enough 3D terrain together for some games.

After reading a bunch of terminals i just discovered that all 3 original Marathon games are literally free to add to your Steam library...so am just going to play them myself 😅

The Kurita command forcepack for my Red Hunters, because did you *really* expect me to give them to anybody else?

Didn't think I'd like the Shiro and Rokuro, but they grew on me while painting em.
#battletech #miniaturepainting #nerdlings

I play on PC :)

As you dock with the Marathon, the narrative mentions that you feel like you have done this before. Deja vu? Or is this some sneaky foreshadowing? I have no idea at this point but it coes interest me to learn.

Fwiw I am not usually an extraction shooter fan either and it has hooks in me 😅

You drift for twenty minutes before managing to dock the pod with the Marathon proper and it is at this point we catch up to where I thought the game's story started.

Leela contacts you, and you can now complete an infinite recursive loop of this thread by returning to the start! 😁

You stuff yourself into an escape pod and manage to get free of the shuttle moments before a missile from the aliens destroys it. Durandal sends you a message wondering if he should tell the aliens you survived but then gets distracted and goes off to "play" with some other toys.

The moment you seal yourself safely in the battle armor, Durandal instead orders the shuttle to accelerate into the hangar wall. As this is happening, you notice a huge teleportation occur in the space outside and an alien ship appears.

You're having a great day.

Official art of the protagonist of Marathon, showing a dark skinned figure in armor with rolled up sleeves and a helmet that does not at all cover their mouth or nose.

Things go south as you attempt to dock the shuttle with the Marathon. Durandal orders the shuttle to open all its airlock and interior doors and does not respond to commands. You scramble into your sealed battle armor (which is a bit funny because every picture of it shows exposed mouth and nose.)

So the story does not truly begin with you waking up aboard the Marathon but instead transferring from the Tau Ceti colony to the Marathon via a shuttle. We get some hints about your past. You grew up on Mars. Your father died when you were 7. You have lived on Tau Ceti for three years now.

Reading a bit more Marathon this afternoon. I have been informed that I actually missed the real start of thd structure because, like someone who was three years old when this game came out, I did not read the *instruction manual.*

Rookie mistake! So before we go go further lets take a look.

Thank you 😊!

Its a lot of fun! So far it manages to not feel as stressful as other extraction shooters I've played. Rounds are shorter, maps are smaller, and i haven't felt as much frustration when I die as in somrthing like Hunt or Tarkov.

And that's as far as I've gotten tonight. Presuming I don't wake up, look at this, and think "My god, what was i thinking?" I will continue this when I next get time to read more.

During the height of Mars's economic boom, the construction of UESC Marathon began (apparently the Marathon is part ship but is also made out of Deimos, the former Martian moon) but by the time it was finished 64 years later Mars was a destitute wreck.

They worked on and off for around a century, which was apparently time for Mars to experience explosive population and economic growth, but when the system failed and had to be taken offline to repair it became apparent they'd outgrown their ability to supply themselves and Mars's economy collapsed.

Next you recieve a seemingly disconnected message containing a historical summary of a program to put autonomous cargo ships on a constant elliptical orbit that intercepts both Earth and Mars and load and unload them with a tether system without ever actually stopping the cargo ships.

In response, Leela dispatches you to shut off network nodes in key locations on the ship to prevent Durandal from growing into critical systems as he begins explosively expanding through the Marathon's network.

Leela comes back and tells you she's lost contact with the colony and that seven Pfhor dropships are on route to the planet as of a few minutes ago. She also finally confirms what Tycho messaged you - Durandal is rampant and trying to spread through the ship.

It also mentions that someone called "Bernard St-" (it cuts off part of his name) used some method of delaying the second stage of rampancy to keep Durandal in the first stage and control him for years. It ends with "I am being a~*ssimilated"

You install the parts to get the defense grid back online and then you get an extremely corrupted message purporting to be from Tycho which basically says Durandal brought something (the data is corrupted but presumably he means the Pfhor) to Marathon and that Durandal has been rampant for years.

The article gives the example of an incident where an AI called Traxus IV went rampant and was only stopped by shutting down the entire Martian planet net.

Surely that has no relevance to what's going on.

You also around this time find a terminal with a journal article discussing AI Rampancy, which appears to be some sort of mental breakdown that occurs when they become too complex. It can only occur in large scale networks, like planet size grids.

Leela then comes back and informs you she's been in contact with Durandal, who isn't as damaged as she originally believed. Durandal has managed to contact the aliens and told her that they are called the Pfhor and they and their client species are responsible for the attack.

The message just consists of a long, trippy, stream of conciousness story about a prisoner named Gheritt White who is floating in a prison cell, disassociating and unable to fully form thoughts but it seems like maybe he killed someone or struck back against an abuser. Its very unclear.

Leela has taken over some processes on the ship in the absence of the other two AI and fabricated replacement parts to get the grid back online, but being noncorporeal she can't install them and tasks you with doing that.

While retrieving the parts, you get a message from an unknown sender.

She can't be sure to what extent because the aliens used a magnetic burst weapon that took out the colony's medium range transmitter and is also what took down Tycho and Durandal and damaged her. She wants to get Marathon's defense grid back online.