I swear, this trooper is in his own grunty Twilight Zone or something.

(6:55) Level 5 ('Assault on the Control Room') on Heroic. In the sleeping Grunts room after you part ways with any Marines, there's often a special fellow I call the cubby-hole Grunt on account of his location. I've been meaning to make a movie on him for ages, and now that I've got into things, it looks like I'll be needing more than one! But this one will cover the basics at least. I'm using the set-up created for BCM502, as all possible weapons are conveniently present. By design, the music quickly fades out, unlike in standard play of course. Incidentally, I'll write an article on this guy shortly; so you can watch out for that at my site.

Released September 13th 2026, gameplay recorded September 10th-12th 2026.

00:02 (Introduction) This opening clip focuses on how the Grunt seemingly can't be blasted out of his cubby-hole, whether alive or dead.

01:17 (Air swimming via plasma rifle) Now we come to the main topic of the movie, and the most notable aspect of the cubby-hole Grunt. When you kill him, he can enter into this strange animation state. Looks like he's swimming in the air, but really it's his death-flight animation, except static (or anchored).

02:31 (Pistol) Another example obtained in combat, this time using a pistol.

02:57 (Frag) A grenade blast can work too, as seen here.

03:23 (Melee, with quieter set-up) If you want to explore this business, the thing to do is make a set-up like this where you've stealthily killed unwanted covies, then got a delayed checkpoint not far from him. My set-up here, which namely used a delayed tunnel checkpoint, is a modification of the previous one. I also moved some weapons, as you can see.

It was pretty easy to initiate air swimming with melee like this. The odds of success may've been around 1 in 3, the way I was doing it. I do some tagging, twice managing to get an arm so the plasma goes round and round.

04:09 (Melee again) I do some tagging again, and all the blasts seem to be contained.

04:46 (Melee again) This time some of the blasts are not contained, and the final one is nasty!

05:32 (Pistol headshot) With a pistol headshot like this, my odds of success may've been around 1 in 3. I think it's random, according to which death animation is randomly selected at the time of his death.

05:50 (Pistol headshot again, and needling) Some good resilience to needle bangs here.

06:36 (Tag) A short clip to end the movie, and this time I get the air swimming using a tag.

Closing remarks My coverage of this Grunt has been a long time coming. Back in 2024 while working on some battling for BCM495, the cubby-hole Grunt happened to go into his air swimming a few times, and I kept the relevant clips, thinking they might get used at some point. I actually tried to get some coverage going later that year, but for some reason I was having trouble getting him swimming again, and I ended up putting the project aside. Well, I've finally got things going properly now. I settled on using Heroic for the movie though, so it looks like I won't be using those old Legendary clips after all.

Don't go away; there's more to cover regarding this Grunt!

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