#marathon red

[gapian]

and the award for the nichest fanart i have ever done goes to... my marathon RED ian fanart..

[general-radix]

RED and Abuse don’t have much in common besides “gnarly-looking monsters”...

* Paco, before and after his last encounter with Joshua. It feels like every time I draw Paco’s armour, I have to re-figure it out...

* Nick Vrenna, the protagonist of Abuse, without his helmet (for face-idea reasons, and also to show that he’s not an incarnation of the Eternal Hero). Inmortalitas-wise, he was an activist who was falsely imprisoned.

[general-radix]

This one ended up rather red.

* First doodle’s based on “where giants have fallen” by Hamish Sinclair and Matthew Smith (not that one, presumably), where--in between the PiD weirdness--Durandal and the SO face off against a rampant Leela who uses red text.

* Something tells me that Paco’s the sort of guy who’d just wear his jumpsuit under everything.

* “Joe” wasn’t actually a nickname anyone called Pfh’Joueur, but I prefer that over typing out his name every time. Tal’sen is modeled after my Telosians, but I’m not sure if his creators were meant to be Jjaro or the Greys or what.

* Been doodling Phoenix again here and there, now that I’ve picked that scenario back up.

[general-radix]

A random human-based height chart I slapped together last night; mostly from the Trilogy, Rubicon, and RED (the BaB is from the ‘BaBs Deluxe’ shape patch).

Left to right: the Security Officer, Ian, SciBoB, BoB, AR BoB, Cleanroom BoB, MaserBoB, Paco, BaB, RED marine, VacBoB.

Something odd about the SO: he appears taller than the non-vac BoBs in-game, but his assembled sprite is the shortest one here. Presumably there’s some sort of display trick going on. (Paco, on the other hand, really is shorter than the marines)

[unusedcactus]

i need to actually play marathon RED why are there house (?) textures in here

[general-radix]

By the end of Marathon RED, Paco has become an immortal wanderer, having returned to his old body (I guess there was a soul transfer involved with his Reaver form, not body horror) and apparently taken Joshua’s cloak. Appropriate, since it’s implied that he’s now in Joshua’s and Michael’s league.

Worked his appearance in the ending around my speculative Reaver design, which is incompatible with whatever happened canonically. I swiftly ran into a snag--Paco’s armoured again, but his torso-blades wouldn’t fit in there. The solution was to move them to his back, to better mirror his armour-tubing (when I first drew Paco, I’d mistaken those bits as being part of his shoulder pads).

[general-radix]

Something about Marathon RED that I keep forgetting to mention: back in ‘08, when I didn’t play FPSes nor had much info on the fan scenarios, I thought that “RED” referred to some sort of bio-virus/fungus that was choking the life out of everything and was the biological basis of all the nasties you had to fight; this was derived from the first chapter screen in which Paco is struggling against a giant fleshy mass. I also didn’t realize that Paco wasn’t the Security Officer from the canon Trilogy.

[general-radix]

Trying to think of a way to share my Marathon RED-related thoughts without going too deep into Spoiler Country.

As Mark Levin (author of RED’s Volunteers series) pointed out, RED leans more towards the mystical/supernatural side of things, rather than Marathon’s (and most fan scenarios’) more hard-sci-fi atmosphere. On the one hand, this lends RED a distinct identity/feeling of its own, and gives it the chance to explore parts of canon Marathon that were more left to speculation. On the other hand, I’m undecided on how well it actually FITS with Marathon (though it does work as an alternate timeline, I guess).

At the very least, Joshua and Micheal (Organic and Metalloid leaders, respectively) are suitably menacing. Their names DO seem a tad pedestrian for what they’re revealed to be, but perhaps they were directly taken from the Bible or something (let’s just say that these wouldn’t be the only allusions).