Let's Play Marathon, pt 9 - G4 Sunbathing

Anyone who plays video games will be able to recall a point where they got stuck. A spot they found themselves coming back to time after time and hurling themselves at an impossible fight, fiddling fruitlessly with an uncrackable puzzle, or wandering aimlessly looking for an invisible path. In this most formative game, G4 Sunbathing was my sand trap. One of the consequences of playing a game that’s(more or less) appropriate for a nine year old but not made for nine year olds is smacking into challenges intended for an adult mind. It’s sort of like how Marathon’s story has all these literary references and symbolic depth that I didn’t pick up on my first time through, with the crucial difference that not getting that stuff didn’t stop me from getting farther in the game.

G4 Sunbathing throws a new mechanic into play that creates a further dimension of tension and urgency. The whole game so far we’ve been watching that most fundamental of staples, our red health bar, deplete as we take hits and refill when we find shield recharge stations. Later we find stations that give us a second layer of shield that turns the bar yellow. All that time its downstairs neighbor the blue bar has been sitting there, impassive and indifferent to our triumphs and tragedies alike. Its only effect on the game has been morale if the player really likes blue.

When you teleport into G4 Sunbathing, if your brain hasn’t been trained to ignore the blue bar completely, you notice that it’s slowly trickling away. If you let it fully deplete you’ll discover that what’s trickling away is the sand grains in your mortal hourglass, cause that’s your oxygen supply. As Leela warned, the G4 Sunbathing Landing Station - and I love that that’s actually the in-game name of the place - is totally in vacuum. Both the inside - corridors and control rooms and so forth - and the outside, where the landing platforms are. Until you leave the level your air will steadily deplete, and you need to find oxygen stations to refill it. I never timed how long it takes to empty, but I’m confident it’s under ten minutes and would guess it’s closer to five.

Don’t be afraid to care.

The time pressure of the vacuum is a fiendish ally with the level’s layout. It’s a big, spread-out area full of broad hallways connected by narrow twisting corridors, multiple similar-looking routes to similar-looking places, and switches that work doors in opposite corners and across wide distances. The only way to move from inside to outside is through several now pointless but still present airlocks, adding time as you wait for the door behind you to close so you can open the one in front of you.

Exploring all of this mess and trying to remember if you’ve been where you are before is made intensely more complex by the fact that you can only go so far before you need to replenish your air, so you’re constantly checking the map and making sure you know how to get back to the nearest air station. All this before even talking about fighting the aliens in this ostensibly alien-fighting-centric game. Don’t worry, the Pfhor are here in force and they’re tasking gluts of firepower with your demise. Meet the Hunter:

Wabbit season.

Fast, tough, well armed, dogged. If you can catch a lone Hunter out like in the above scenario it’s not too much of a challenge, but a pack of them, or one or two supporting a squad of weaker troops, can be overwhelming. G4 Sunbathing has a lot of Pfhor running around in large teams. Rushing headlong at them will more often than not leave you as a burn spot on the floor.

So you see where child me was left floundering. Zinging around from place to place like an oxygen-starved pinball, too distracted by Pfhor attacks and my need to breathe to keep track of where I was going, where I’d been, and what controls I found might have turned on what. I have no clear idea of how long I was stuck on G4 Sunbathing, but it felt like months and may well have been.

It’s just like Rear Window except Jimmy Stewart is a space marine and Raymond Burr is like 1,000 aliens.

Revisiting G4 Sunbathing always brings back that feeling of being lost and uncertain, scrambling for resources and constantly second guessing myself. In spite of the fact that I can get through it in 20 minutes now, that imprint still reigns in my brains. Oof. Let’s realign this transmitter and get the hell outta here.

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