Marathon - ★★★★★

I've never seriously played an MMORPG. I played maybe an hour of World of Warcraft during its heyday at a friend's urging, but found it immediately boring. Nor am I much for shooters, especially in a competitive context; I played a bit of Halo and Halo 2 multiplayer when they were the biggest thing in video games, and enjoyed myself, but I never got good and I certainly didn't feel the drive to hone my skills on the grindstone of Xbox Live. But I've been playing Marathon. I'm still playing Marathon. I would have written this very review months earlier, except that I was too busy playing Marathon. It's a surprise that I like this so much. Even my girlfriend who loves trying to push me out of my video game comfort zone almost as much as she loves Marathon (both the 90s and 2020s incarnations) didn't bother encouraging me to play it. But I had a gap in my gaming schedule and an itch to play something with a sense of both action and progression, so I gave it a shot and was blown away by…