Bet you've never seen a plasma grenade like THIS before!

(5:54) Level 4 ('The Silent Cartographer') on Legendary. Back in January I was playing SC's landing battle a lot on Legendary (see BCM542 and BCM543). After one such struggle I happened to backtrack, and came across a dropped plasma grenade in a truly freaky position. Having saved that situation, I've now put together this movie about it.

Released March 22nd 2025, gameplay recorded March 19th-20th 2025.

00:02 ('Discovery') I should explain from the outset that after discovering the freaky plasma, I saved the Pelican checkpoint, and the movie is built up from plays of that save. As such, this opening clip isn't really when I discovered the plasma. Think of it as just a playful semi-recreation, to make things more fun. Basically I've designed the movie to be like an unfolding story (with comedy elements), using various bits of playing around. The featured Marine is actually the only one who made it through the fight.

This clip includes an excellent side-view of the plasma perched on the shield, and it appears to be resting on a figurative knife-edge. You'd be hard pressed even to balance that thing up there by hand! I take the shield down twice with plasma balls, but as you can see, the shield keeps recharging (or whatever). Takes just over eight seconds.

01:24 (Using a plasma on the shield, plus an AR) In these next three clips I take down the shield with a plasma blast. The first one is too close and displaces the freaky plasma. The next one is fine (I'd found a good aim at the distance of the Marine's knee), but when I move in for a close look at the plasma, I unintentionally pick it up of course. Doh! In the third clip I take care to top up my plasmas first before moving in. When the shield recharges I try an AR on it, but really I knew it wouldn't work. I was just getting some comedy out of it.

02:14 (Ramming, and close-ups) Oddly enough, if you ram the shield, it seems to stay down, at least while you remain in the area and don't set off a blast nearby. So I used ramming from here on, letting me get close-up views of the freaky plasma without the shield recharging.

03:21 (Hog-cam views) Eventually I had the idea of getting a hog-cam view, and you see some me playing about with that here, culminating in a particularly good close-up.

In regard to the 4:08 clip where the plasma bobbles along, that whole bobbling business arose when the hog happened to get semi-wedged between purple containers, causing it to jiggle, which affected the camera. After some experimenting, I decided that it would look amusing to have the plasma bobbling across the screen. So that's how I exploited the phenomenon.

04:51 (Side-seat view) Later still, I tried getting a side-seat view, and realised I could have some fun with that too. Such as here, featuring an amusing ending in which the gunner slowly walks away.

Closing remarks When I discovered this weird situation on January 12th (which I saved via the Pelican checkpoint that came soon after), I was initially thinking that it would provide me a good clip for a 'freakiness and fun' movie. And indeed, I recorded a few candidate clips with that in mind. But they were almost a minute long, which would've been very long for those movies, and I started thinking that there might be enough potential to instead do a short dedicated movie, particularly as I was interested in showing more close-ups of the plasma, dwelling on the aesthetics for a while. In the event, I've come up with enough playing around to take things up near six minutes, which is quite a bit more than expected.

In the battle which produced this plasma, I'd taken a cliffside route without passing through the second group of covies, somewhat like in the 3:25 play in BCM543. I didn't see how the plasma got up onto the shield, but I'm pretty sure I threw at least one frag towards that group, and my best guess is that such a frag was responsible.

One other thing I thought of to do with the plasma was to send it skyward with a rocket blast, which I think would've resulted in it exploding a good way up. However, every time I brought back the launcher (tried two or three times), the game had cleared the whole beach of battle residue. The grenade was gone.

© 2004-2025 by Rockslider