Take one frozen Elite, add a thousand or so needles, unfreeze and enjoy!

(5:50) Level 5 ('Assault on the Control Room') on Heroic. Relating to the Floor show section of my Elite fireworks article, this shows what happens when you put about a thousand needles into a frozen Elite. You can enjoy watching about a hundred needle bangs after he's unfrozen! Here I got 99 bangs on my first play, due to a few needles going astray; I wasn't bothering to be super careful as that takes longer (my needling took 5 minutes). The second play gives 100 bangs, though again a few needles missed. During the bang phases, you'll note that certain effects return around halfway through - such as pink clouds, and blast effects for the rocket launcher or Scorpion. They were initially absent as the game was somewhat overloaded. Part of the reason I keep blasting him is to get away from blood build-up, which can soon cause framerate slowdown. And by the way, 50 clips is almost the most I could've got into this Elite. He would've taken 51, but beyond that he'd suddenly vanish. Go read my article for way more on this stuff if you're interested.

Released January 8th 2015, gameplay recorded January 4th 2015.

00:02 (Play 1 - On foot with rocket launcher) At the start here I didn't need to kill and unfreeze the red, but I did it so all the focus would be on the blue. As it turns out, the grenades dropped by the red play a part later on!

00:15 The needling begins! I needle all around him, in a rather random way. It's partly to do with balancing out explosive effect - see the article.

00:46 Eventually the game gets overloaded, and during clip 23 you can see that some graphic effects stop, notably the pink explosion clouds and the blood, and the needler's muzzle flash. Even the snowing stops, but it resumes when you look away from the needles.

01:16 My needling takes five minutes, and finally I'm ready to unfreeze him. Initially he does some excellent thrashing about on the spot, repeatedly getting pushed up by needle explosions. But soon we're starting to get framerate slowdown due to blood build-up, so I rocket him to a new location; my first blast of many. At other times I switch to the pistol to have a better view of things. Some launcher effects are initially absent because of the overloading, but they return later.

02:08 This rocket also sets off the blue's dropped plasmas, and consequently he gets an extra-large boost.

02:25 The pink explosion clouds return, making for more spectacle. however, slowdown is kicking in again now, due to all the blood. Time to move him along! Rocket effects have returned now too.

02:49 Whoops! The red's dropped plasmas get detonated by a needle bang and I'm caught in the blast. Forgot about those. With shield bleeping, I stay clear of the needle bangs to safely recharge.

03:04 So far I've done quite well getting close views of the needle-wracked Elite without getting caught in a needle bang, but finally my luck runs out and I need to back off a while to recharge. Still got one rocket left, but then the bangs are over.

03:20 (Play 2 - In the Scorpion) This time I do my blasting with the Scorpion, and the Elite gets around quite a bit! You'll notice that the Scorpion blast effects are initially absent, but return about halfway through (near 4:34), along with the pink needle clouds.

05:21 (Speed-up finale) Just a jokey final segment here. I tried playing some footage at double speed and it made me chuckle, so I thought I'd add a bit at the end. It seemed to fit well enough with the comical nature of the movie.

Closing remarks After doing BCM23 and BCM24 I didn't think it was going to take me almost a hundred movies to get back to the topic of Elite fireworks, but it has! There's loads to show for that topic, and this is a movie I've had in mind for a long time. Really should've done it sooner; it wasn't a hard one at all, especially as I was able to re-use the save I used for BCM24.

As I mentioned in the description, a few of my needles missed the Elite. Because I was taking care with my aim, the misses were probably all due to firing during a needle bang. I'd forgotten about how needles can occasionally miss if you do that, and it was only later that I realized there were a few misses on both plays. The reason I got alerted to the fact that there were misses on the first play was because I only got 99 bangs, whereas I got 100 on the Scorpion play; so something was definitely amiss. I then did some calculation (there's a formula in my article), according to which 1000 needles should give 100 bangs. And then I looked at the footage and spotted a few black impact marks, as confirmation of misses (you can spot them for yourself; and two spots can be seen vanishing just before I unfreeze the Elite for the Scorpion play).

I didn't want to redo the plays though, as I liked these, and in any case, getting an exact number of needles into an Elite takes significantly more care than just pointing and shooting (see the article). That's more effort than I think most people would be interested in.

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