: Logically, any time Ian sends you ammo, he should be able to send you oxygen
: at the same time, right? Unless he has a limited supply of canisters. Even
: then, given that the marine survived, it's likely he had more than the one
: mistakenly sent to the top of the level.
Now that does make sense, and the sides of the level are easier to get to than the interior of the airlock. Another place where Ian was able to send us an item is the 1x health canister that appears halfway though the second level; it would make sense if an oxygen canister accompanied it. This would also remove the need to make more extreme changes to the geometry to allow backtracking and optional areas as Steve is advocating.
However, I still think that the trick recharger needs to be changed. I feel it's one of the more important unwritten rules of Marathon that an interactive element communicates immediately to the player what its function will be (a switch alters the level, a recharger restores health, an oxygen charger restores oxygen, etc- and this information can be determined from the moment it comes into view), and is recognizable because of all the times a player has encountered them before and their description in the manual. This is only the second recharger in all the maps we've volunteered so far that does something other than what its texture indicates (the other is on Nuke and Pave, and not only does it do something *much better* than its texture indicates, which is arguably not the case here, but the area it's in is set up to make it look extra suspicious). I don't think comic relief is appropriate at this place in RED, either. If everyone is unified against me, I'll back down (the fact that we're alleviating the oxygen crisis by other means makes it a much smaller issue than it was before), but I just wanted one more last word :P
