This level, or actually series of levels, is sick. Reallly sick. I got past it for now by cheating, but I'm going to make another run of it tonight on Deathwish to see if I can legitimately beat it and read Ian's terminal at the end. There are a couple of points that Mark missed, a significant omission and one important note about the name of the level, which I'll discuss first. G3 Sunbathing . . . at 300 MHz is a reference to Ians shiny new beige G3 Mac that he was using back then. I'm looking right now at the identical unit, sitting in the back corner of my desk where I can use it for emergency backup as I did last week when my PB was in for repairs. My 21" Sony monitor is now connected to my PB, which sits on the keyboard tray just below the monitor, giving me a top-bottom 2 monitor setup that is pretty slick. The reason I'm mentioning all of this is that I consider the beige G3 unusable for playing Marathon now. Oh, booted in OS 9 it plays all of the original Marathon games and the 3rd party scenarios just fine. Booted in OS X, these games can still be played in the classic environment, but hardware acceleration is disabled. There is a class action suit out there against Apple for never providing the promised OS X drivers - I have 3 computers that were affected and might actually get a decent credit from the suit. In any case, Marathon suffers on the Beige G3, and AO is pretty much unplayable, even with OpenGL disabled. But this brings up another point - if your graphics engine is old as is the one in my PB, disabling OpenGL may make the difference between finishing this level and suffocating trying.
The other two points deal with map design. As Mark mentioned, Ian has left some interesting text in the map of the first level of the series, which is visible in Forge or the OS X viewer Klia. The map of the 3rd level of the series is the same as that of the first level, but upside down! They certainly don't look the same and Ian has significanlty manipulated the floor hieghts, but this is an interesting and cleaver cheat on Ian's part. Finally, there is a secret O2 canister in the end room. The fake O2 recharger is a decoy - the real O2 canister is in or on the leftmost crate - I'll figure out wich when I replay this tonight, but it's definitely in the map. I agree with Mark - the final room should not have been in vacuum. It took the Rubicon folks to show us how it's done - a transporter in that airlock should have taken us to a fifth level in which oxygen is present. And Mark really missed one - a chip is required to access that airlock. The chip is in the center of the levl, right where the turtles are.
