Watching this thread with great interest, but I wanted to reply to this from a couple of pages back:
I think everyone's putting too much weight on "punching" the switches.
The only reason the Marathon Vidmaster challenge says to punch the switches is because that's how you activate them.
It's worth a shot trying to punch them, but I think "punching" them means activate them. Because that's how you activate them in Marathon.
Marathon had an "activate" key, too, and you could use it to activate switches. Certain weapons - the fist, grenades, fusion pistol, rocket launcher - could flip switches, too, but you were by no means required to punch switches to activate them.