Big Man With A Gun (another level name which just seems right to me somehow), as a Marathon level, is a bit of a strange experience for me. Years after playing it, I happened upon a copy of Quake for Macintosh in a software bargain bin, and finally managed to play through the level that inspired it. The oddly tweaked creatures in this Marathon level seem nowhere near as deadly as the Quake bestiary... but then, that's perfectly fine with me. They seem to help to make the level more a purely strange experience than an imitation of Quake, though, a feeling somehow helped a little by the pinkish walls I kept running across. (One point where this level seems more difficult than its inspiration, though, is that in Quake, you can save before rounding every corner. The save terminals in Big Man With A Gun aren't really located so that you can use them as "home bases," pushing on from them in a succession of increasingly longer steps forward.)
The three terminals in this level inject a disturbing level of thoughtfulness into the pure adrenaline rush it was originally supposed to be in a different engine. The first has a touch of Lovecraft (and one dash of dark humour at the end), the second seems (unfortunately) more grounded in reality as we know it (and has a picture requiring just a little more study to be gruesome), and the third is the most purely Lovecraftian, with its tale of degenerate cultists and things not to be looked at closely.
After surviving Big Man With A Gun, I Do Not Want This is more normal, more reassuring. As has been said, you have to look in just the right places to get through it, but it does help to explain the story with allusions to things on levels monstrously above the familiar aliens of Marathon. Again, Leonardo seems to refer to the player as the character who went through Tempus Irae. After figuring out just what to do with the manuscript (which has taken me a while in the past), we're on the move again...
