When the harlequin Grunt turns red, he can be quite a resilient chappie!

(5:41) Level 5 ('Assault on the Control Room') on Legendary. At the end of BCM192 - which you should watch first - you saw the harlequin Grunt go red. In this state there's often resilience against standard blasts (non-tag blasts going off when he's settled). You can do blast after blast and there's still no separation. In the case of such resilience I'm using the term 'super-merged', and I suspect the bodies are extra closely aligned. You don't automatically get this with a red appearance, but you do get it often. These things are the subject of this second installment.

Released August 4th 2016, gameplay recorded July 31st - August 3rd 2016.

00:02 (Blast resistance demo) This clip starts from a delayed tunnel checkpoint I got after clearing the Shade away and preparing to use a rocket launcher. After a few failures, rocketing the harlequin Grunt against a nearby rock makes him go nearly all red. I think the two Grunts got affected slightly differently by the impact, causing a shift in the alignment. A further blast happens to make him all red (that doesn't always happen; often he'd instead return to being jazzy or mixed), which is what I want.

00:54 Something I soon noticed about this state is that he often exhibits resilience against standard blasting. That seems to be the case here, with blast after blast failing to produce any separation (I also did another several blasts afterwards, which for brevity aren't shown). I'm guessing that the bodies either got exactly aligned or at least aligned extra closely.

01:48 (Blasted to the tower with a Banshee) After that previous blasting, I played through to the twin bridges area to steal the Banshee there and bring it back. In this segment you see me using it to blast the super-merged Grunts all the way to the tower, an easy task which takes about 60 blasts and 5 minutes. As well as being for fun, it's a further demo of how merged the Grunts are. However, a tag causes separation as easily as ever.

02:40 An amusing bonus of the blasting is the trail of Grunt blood left up the rising tunnel. I think each patch is a double helping because both Grunts gave blood. So it's a good strong trail!

03:01 (Using a Scorpion instead) Prior to that trip to the tower, I saved a checkpoint so I could make repeat trips. In this segment you see me blasting him along with the Scorpion instead, which took about 30 blasts and 3.5 minutes. Faster then, but it's a bit clumsy sometimes. That's amply illustrated by a clip from near the end where my shot lands long and blows the Grunt back the wrong way; and then my next shot seems like some kind of wild misfire! But I eventually get the Grunt out and demonstrate an alternative separation method; a mid-air blast.

03:58 (All red but resilience fails) All-red doesn't guarantee being super-merged. In this example I've just obtained an all-red state the same way as used at the start of the movie, with two blasts. On the next blast we end up with about half orange however, and a few blasts later the Grunts have separated.

04:24 (Mixed colouring may clear) Alternatively, a mixed appearance may return to all-red, after which things seems stable, based on my experience so far. Here's an example where the Grunt has gone jazzy (he was all red two blasts ago). After my next blast his appearance still involves orange but it's patchy rather than jazzy. On the next blast he's back to red, and that continued on subsequent blasts not shown.

04:50 (Orange patches) It seems to me like orange patches can appear even if an all-red Grunt is super-merged. But they seem very transient, disappearing after a blast. Here's an example featuring a relatively large patch. You may've also noticed some small patches seen at about 1:12 in the movie's opening clip.

05:15 (All orange) Initially it seemed like the Grunt could never go all orange, which naturally piqued my interest. However, when I eventually started using a needler, I finally saw it. All-red can become all-orange via a needle bang, and it's rather striking to see. Here's an example to end the movie in a teasing fashion. The orange state may be the subject of a whole other movie - we'll see.

Closing remarks Ok, second movie done, but I'm still a long way off finishing with this guy. In particular, it was only when I'd pretty much completed the movie that I discovered I could get all-orange, which made for yet another topic which needs covering. I've done some exploration of that state now, but need to do more. Keep watching!

Unfortunately, a problem with YouTube continues. Lately it's not producing 480p in a reasonable amount of time. I did eventually get 480p for BCM191, but with 192 I'm currently still not seeing 480p after almost five days. There's only crummy 360p; and that's what I see for 193 too. YouTube is only a secondary outlet for my movies, but still, I think a lot of my audience is there, so the trouble is bugging me.

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