Why settle for a nice safe seat when you can risk your life in a ludicrously dangerous balancing act instead?

(6:34) Level 5 ('Assault on the Control Room') on Heroic. Here's my second instalment on the Warthog descent business in the cavern (see previous movie for the first). Almost as a throwaway, Spasmodic ended his 2015 video with an amusing clip in which he was bouncing on the hog as it slid to the bottom of the cavern. The video didn't show how he got into that situation, but I suspect it was pretty much like you'll see here. A slightly tricky business which took me a while to get the hang of!

Released September 18th 2025, gameplay recorded September 16th-18th 2025.

00:02 (Intro) Here's a short introductory clip somewhat similar to what I saw at the end of Spasmodic's video. So how is it done, we ask ourselves.

00:22 (Method, plus failures) Here's what I settled on as the best way - or the best I could come up with at least. This set-up (with a short run-up) was honed so that all I need to do is press the 'forward' button on the D-pad for a suitable amount of time (albeit within a very small window), to end up ejected onto the lower pipe and with the hog going into a slide. From there I can try to drop onto the hog and get stable. Doing that is quite hard (for me anyway), but thanks to the honing, I was able to get drop opportunities at a fairly good rate as desired.

I've provided three failure examples here. Quite often I was bouncing off right away (that was always on the cards for the third failure, as my drop was so late), or losing my footing within a few seconds.

01:02 (Full descent) So, here's a full descent then (not my first, which I'd done earlier that day). After dropping, I felt stable so I didn't move after that. I just looked around enjoying the sights, sometimes using my sniper rifle's light-amplified view. And fortunately I didn't kill myself at the end when attempting an early dismount for fun.

02:36 (Tail spot) We've focused on the wheel so far, but here's an introduction to another spot where you can potentially get stable; the corner of the tail. Seems like I don't quite achieve the perfect spot here though!

02:56 (Bailing option) Instead of getting ejected from the hog, there's the possibly of using bailing instead. Well, I gave that quite a bit of work and you see two examples here, but both were quite difficult, and especially the second. Certainly harder than using my normal method. The first one is quite neatly controlled, but the second one is so messy, I was surprised it nevertheless worked. I was trying to bail onto the lower pipe, but actually ended up going straight down with the hog, and landing on it even before it had properly settled into a slide!

03:42 (Transfer test) I'd wondered if Spasmodic got onto his hog by transferring from the driver's seat during a slide. That would be nice! Well, I tested that and found it to be a no-go on my PAL Xbox. Can't get enough traction. Maybe it can be done on NTSC/PC though, thanks to MC's greater traction?

04:11 (Adding jumps) At some point I had the idea of jumping on the spot, and found that it could work, though there was a danger of falling off as illustrated in my first clip here. In the second clip however, I was totally stable, and able to do jumps all the way down. With my jump dismount at the end, I get nicely cushioned by the windscreen. Wasn't aiming for that, but it may've saved me spraining an ankle.

05:31 (Jumping on the tail) In the first of these last three clips, I show how you can move across from the wheel to potentially get stable on the tail. I hone the exact position by observing my landings. If a landing includes a slight sideways motion, that means I'm not quite on the sweet spot, so I try to shift a bit. The remaining clips are actually from other descents, but again with me on that spot.

Closing remarks Okay, that's instalment two done, but actually there may be another. And just to add, when dropping down onto the hog, it might help to do a crouch landing if you've got a relatively long fall. It might reduce the chance of you bouncing off immediately. I'm not sure how much use it is though, which is why I didn't cover it here.

PS: For more descent fun involving bouncing on top of UNSC hardware, see BCM190.

© 2004-2025 by Rockslider