Marathon: Durandal Too Fast for its Own Good?

Filed in archive Games on July 31, 2007

IGN has reviewed the upcoming Live Arcade port of Marathon: Durandal and while they give the game a "decent" score of 7.4 they do have one unusual issue with the game - motion sickness:

Marathon now runs at 60 frames per second, where the original Mac version ran at 30. To be honest, this is a little unnecessary. One of the great benefits of 60fps is that you can see more subtleties in animations. Well, Marathon is an old game. It's animations (by today's standards) are crap. The 60fps allows Marathon to run at a lightning speed. You'll be amazed just how quickly you can zip around a level. But that speed also comes at a cost. And that cost is a very rare sensation in videogames - motion sickness. Because of the tight confines of the levels and the ease in which you can get lost, quite often you may find yourself running about, turning quickly, and watching as the world begins to spin. Though I had a blast playing Marathon, I can't deny that more than once I felt like throwing up. And I'm not the only one. All four IGN editors who played Marathon for more than 15 minutes began to feel ill. In fact, just thinking about the game is starting to bring back my lunch.

While I've never experienced motion sickness from a game I must admit that Durandal seems a little dizzying. Watch this video of the game in action and try not to hurl: