Or – when you’re playing the game under its highest difficulty setting – those middle steps repeat about 20 or 30 times. Your captors are mighty hard to kill, and unfortunately, your rescuers are mighty lousy shots.
Aaaa-aaa-aaaaa-aaaah!
I played Marathon too (I still have my Marthon: Infinity disk and manual!) and I’ve just about worn out a controller playing Halo and H2.
Theif: Deadly Shadows, if you get captured or killed by town guards, you wake up in prison with nothing on you. You have to break out of jail and steal your stuff back (or load a save file and don’t screw up next time.) I haven’t played earlier versions, so I don’t know if this was present in those or not.
M&M VI is really good, M&M VII slightly less so but still not bad. Both start out as routine fantasy but end up with a fantasy-meets-Science Fiction flavour - not that unusual for the series, I mean, the first few M&Ms (which I never played) had this big secret that the world was an artificial one which a demented android was trying to steer into the sun.
In M&M VI (no spoilers for a nine-year-old game) the world has been invaded by Kreegan, alien enemies of the Ancients who founded Enroth and many other colony worlds, and the players eventually find out that they have to storm the Hive that has been established on their world and blow it up (the Hive that is - there is scope for blowing the world up, but not if you follow instructions).
In M&M VII the players eventually meet visitors from another colony world who have kept their technology, and get into one side or the other of a faction fight that entails getting back into the spaceship they arrived in. (The faction fight means that the ship is security-locked against both sides, and only a band of seriously tough natives can get past the defensive systems.) The final outcome varies according to which side of the fight they favour.
Once you get really good at using capture corvettes, it’s possible to play the entire game while building almost nothing but scouts and capture corvettes, and simply capturing everything larger than a fighter that the enemy builds. I once crashed the game on one of the later levels when my fleet became too large to fit on the game map when in formation.