Spectacular death by mysterious alien tech, again and again. Just because.

(5:26) Level 2 ('Halo') on Legendary. Last year I did three movies about hog-launching yourself up to the top of the first tower, and there were a few clips where I inadvertently got zapped by the blue beam in mid-air. But getting zapped is a worthwhile topic in itself, so now here's a movie on doing it deliberately. The set-up work is just the same except you'll want different timing, so that if you promptly launch yourself, you'll have a good few seconds to sail up high and then the beam will fire. Here I was using the 'alternative checkpointing' approach shown in BCM325, which saves you having to rush the hog positioning.

Released July 28th 2019, gameplay recorded mainly July 24th-27th 2019.

00:02 (Setting up) Because this set-up work is largely the same as that shown in BCM325, I've abbreviated it here. It's mainly just to remind you of the key points. One minor difference is that for the checkpoint delaying when positioning the hog, I elected to use frags instead of plasmas - and in fact I used all four, so had to visit the tower later to get a frag for launching. But the only important difference is the checkpoint timing at the end, where I use 4 auto-jumps after the beam fires.

01:57 (Launches with various set-ups) Sixteen launches follow. The first four and one later one (the double Elite zap) use the set-up just seen, while the rest are from four other similar set-ups (I'd been hoping to get a particularly good one, but there wasn't any standout). I'll comment on some of the clips below.

02:21 An unusually high zap. An Elite gets zapped too, after sliding up the lower half of the tower. He leavess an excellent purple streak of blood, and you can subsequently see his body flying across the hills.

02:34 Hey look, the lifeboat area, including the waterfall! I've taken a frame from this footage and used it for one of the pictures in my article.

03:00 It can be fun to face in the direction you're about to get sent flying, as I did here just before the beam fired. That way the camera is initially behind you.

03:13 Launching 'forwards' like this felt relatively awkward, but it makes for an interesting variation, and I managed to get a few nice clips this way. There's one other, later on.

03:25 In this clip you can hear the waterfall near the end.

03:38 Sometimes when I could see I wasn't going to get zapped, I threw a plasma grenade to try and get it zapped (there was some plasma zapping in BCM325, you may recall). Here's a nice example. When I turn to try and see where the plasma went, I fail to spot it. And now that I inspect the footage, I still can't spot it. It was travelling fast and I suspect it went over the hill.

03:52 There's a scenery glitch near the end of this clip. You can see some rocks and trees vanish. And actually, there are already some rocks missing, and only their shadows are present).

04:18 I didn't get zapped here but two Elite bodies did. Thought it was worth including in the movie, for a bit of variation.

04:32 Another 'forwards' launch, and an excellent clip for showing the 2D nature of the trees on the hills. They were seen from higher up in the 2:21 clip.

04:45 Highest zap in the movie. Just a bit higher than the 2:21 clip.

05:58 This is one of the few times I got zapped in the channel, causing me to get sent up vertically. Would've been nice to go a lot higher. Maybe I'll get a better clip some day.

05:11 To end, an amusingly violent looking zap with a great death cry. I was actually surprised when I got zapped, as I thought I was falling short.

Closing remarks Almost all this footage is from from the last few days. The only exception is the 3:25 clip, from a set-up created late last year after I'd done the last of my tower ascent movies. I recorded a few zapping clips at that time, but then decided to leave a dedicated movie for later, in order to get a bit of separation from the tower ascent stuff.

The five set-ups I used (that old one plus four new ones) were all created from a common base save, formed from a delayed dropship 5 checkpoint with just one Grunt left and 31 plasmas present. The set-ups all ended up with 24 or 26 plasmas (not that I was aiming for a specific number).

In regard to the launch clips, I separated them just by short dissolves (rather than my usual page curl transition when showing replays from a certain checkpoint), in order that my picturesque death flights could be seen as fully as possible. The flights are only short of course (death cam sequences last up to about 4 seconds on PAL Xbox). Using page curls would've made them feel even shorter.

© 2004-2020 by Rockslider