Let's Play Marathon, pt 8 - Cool Fusion

We got an antenna to fix. Sending a radio warning to Earth that’ll take a decade to get there may not be much use in light of the Pfhor’s apparent FTL tech, but it’s more than nothing. However, the part of the ship with the antenna is in vacuum, and our rifle won’t work there. Leela doesn’t want us charging in with fist ‘n pistol, so we’ve got a quick stop to pick up our first legit ray gun.

Zap.

The Zeus-class fusion pistol is my favorite weapon in Marathon. Its shots are weird and kind of cute in a way that should be really nonthreatening, but when you let off a dozen-bolt salvo you feel the might of the Olympian’s wrath. It makes a little sparkly plunk sound that I find completely endearing. Then there’s the secondary fire mode; you can charge up a much heavier blast at the expense of a hefty battery/magazine drain. Something about this tubby little guy just shouts “this tumbled out of the R&D pipeline two weeks ago, so uh… good luck, try not to turn yourself into a hydrogen cloud!”

Hey bud, you gonna take me to that leader, or what? Ain’t got all day.

Cool Fusion offers a break from some of your recent travails, especially the prior level’s dismal tunnel crawling. Once you get the fusion pistol you embark on a running battle to open your path out of the area to where Leela can do her beam-me-up magic and get you to where the antenna is. Cool Fusion mostly features big, open environments with a lot of breathing space and verticality, and a chance to engage in some fights that feel less grimy and frantic.

A refreshing sense of vertigo.

I like that Marathon has a consistent in-world reason for why you have to complete the normal FPS task of puzzling your way through large areas, searching for hidden switches that unlock distant hatches and make platforms move around until you can hop along them like stepping stones. You’re in a place where the doors are controlled by a computer that’s going crazy and is flexing its newfound craze-powers at various points along the line from careless to diabolical. Of course you have to find or make unusual paths through this massive labyrinth if you’ve got a need to get to a really specific point.

Cool Fusion is punctuated by another event: The single biggest concerted effort by the Pfhor to scratch you out. Even in a game as old as this, from a time when enemy AI was very rudimentary, the layout and setup of encounters allowed the devs to show a progressively more active response to your presence. In the early game your encounters with the Pfhor seem to consist of chancing across patrols, but later there are encounters that look like deliberate attacks or planned ambushes. At the midpoint of this level we come across this room:

Nothin to see here, folks

What a fine looking, brightly lit, empty space. A perfectly forgettable room to get across and move along, not thinking twice about. Let’s just get down there and mosey along.

Oh.

OH.

You walk into the trap, the lights go out, and suddenly you’re in a death pit. I can only imagine what this encounter would feel like if you were actually there, in an enclosed, metal-walled room, cracking off dozens of heavy caliber shots drenching the room in ear-bursting reverb, muzzle flash blazing in the dark, Pfhor weapons sizzling and crackling and spitting ball lightning. It’s a well executed set piece, in part because it’s brief. In a minute or two you’ve either cleared the room in a frenzy or been cut down and sent back to your last save.

The ambush is a perfectly toned midpoint to the level, a quick and furious fight for your life in the middle of your searching, running and gunning. A little later on you have what looks like an encounter with a batch of Pfhor reinforcements that didn’t expect you to punch through the ambush so quickly.

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Cool Fusion is just a really fun level. A lot of movement, a decent amount of exploration, a variety of combat including one intense battle for survival. And a new toy that goes plunk plunk and spits shiny bolts, which is just what we’ll need to survive the next level in vacuum. Let’s get to it.

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