Marine fitness training just got a punishing new regime. Administered by yours truly!

(7:31) Level 5 ('Assault on the Control Room') on Heroic. Back in 2024 when I was working on BCM520, in which I had a very oddly suspended Warthog, I showed how Marines would dive clear of it, sometimes making dive after dive. That 'auto-diving' was already amusing, but I knew things could be taken further, and in fact I started to do so, stopping only when I realised that the topic deserved a whole movie. Well, here we are at last. After a short recap using footage from BCM520, I show some of my play from that time, featuring two Ghosts. Then the rest is new footage, where I go further still.

Released July 21st 2026, gameplay recorded October 15th-16th 2024 and July 18th 2026.

00:02 (Recap from BCM520) These clips use footage from BCM520 to give a quick recap, setting the scene. Good job I save all the raw footage used in my movies, just in case I want to reuse it. I'm not sure I've actually ever done so, before now.

00:40 (Using two Ghosts) These six clips (from six plays) are from the time I was working on BCM520, and feature the use of two Ghosts to hem the Marines in somewhat, an arrangement I'd checkpointed. I was hoping to get the Marines auto-diving for longer, and as you'll see, I had some good results, ultimately getting each of the Marines (individually) auto-diving indefinitely by crowding him.

The clips were from a session lasting about 24 minutes, by which time I realised there was going to be scope for a whole movie, so I left the whole topic for later. They're in chronological order except that the last two have had their places swapped.

03:29 (Using more Ghosts) Now to the new stuff! I still had my save featuring the suspended hog and the two Marines, but I had to fetch Ghosts afresh. This time I brought six along, hoping to get the Marines completely hemmed in and auto-diving indefinitely. The four tries seen here are in chronological order, so hopefully you'll get some sense of my progression.

My final play, the really big one which lasted over seven minutes, starts at 4:56. This was after tweaking some Ghost positions to make things tighter, to hopefully reduce the Marine escape frequency. In this play I block the gap myself, but Marines nevertheless escape sometimes and I have to work to get them back in. Ultimately though, I close in, crowding them and getting a 'double capture' where they're auto-diving on their respective spots. Pretty sure that could've gone on as long as I wanted. It's best illustrated in my 6:33 clip, in which I kept still so I'd get an idling pistol animation, highlighting how effortless things now were. In all, I had them locked in there for about four minutes, before backing off to allow an escape..

Closing remarks That seemed a good result on which to end the movie, given that it had already grown quite long, but I'm actually not finished yet. Sequel coming!

Something I noticed. The Marine with the AR had two grunt sounds for diving, and alternated between them, but the Aussie with the plasma rifle only had one sound. So he was a bit repetitive!

By the way, you may've noticed that the Marines weren't always protesting when I shot them. It's some sort of vocal glitching, a phenomenon I've encountered in many situations which have involved non-standard play to set up. I might have been able to get it fixed (I've done fixing in the past by just waiting around), but I elected not to spend time on that. They were grunting when diving, and that was the main thing.

Note: in all of this gameplay, the first ground battle still hadn't been triggered yet (just as in BCM520).

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