Highway long jump
Posted January 8th 2008
The final section of highway is guarded by a mass of Wraiths and Choppers. After taking care of those, board a Warthog and get a checkpoint part way towards the Brute blockade. It's triggered where the fencing ends. Do a U-turn, drive back along the highway and launch yourself off the end to perform a massive jump. There's a slightly rising tip on the right and if you use that you'll fly across to the collapsed highway beautifully, though you may sometimes land with a nasty bounce or lose a few hub caps. It's good if you've got Marines with you as they'll whoop or make amusing comments. The best remarks I got were from a cheerful Aussie, but if you want a bit of variation from the usual roughnecks, there was a female Marine in the rally point alpha area who you could have brought along for the jump. Thanks to the checkpoint you got, you'll be able to repeat the jump conveniently, time after time.
Bigger air
If you want to catch even bigger air, deploy a grav lift at your launch point prior to heading for the checkpoint. You'll have enough time to return and drive through the lift, potentially landing about halfway up the sloping middle section. If you put it on the rising tip, you tend to land on all four tyres with an almighty crunch that may well put you in the spinal care unit, but never mind. The hog may even blow up on impact and it'll be curtains for all concerned, but I've found such 'wipeouts' very rare.
You could even deploy a couple of grav lifts. Move one nearby beforehand by doing continued swapping with another item, then come along with your second and deploy both in quick succession before whizzing off for the checkpoint. I was hoping that a double dose of vertical thrust would take me even higher but things didn't pan out that way. Check out the effects for yourself, effects you can vary according to how you arrange the lifts.
Trip mine boost
In addition to a grav lift, try adding a trip mine. I'll leave you to experiment with the exact arrangement, but you'll probably find that the mine blasts the front up and makes you do a spectacular back flip as you travel, often landing on your wheels near the base of the collapsed highway. On Easy you should survive ok, but passengers may not fare so well. Try to have healthy ones. The most fun I had with this was on Easy with the Cowbell skull on. Usually even my passengers survived, but there was one memorable time when we exploded on impact.
You could also experiment with using more than one trip mine, but whether it's survivable is another matter! Even if not, at least it'll be spectacular.
Grunty action
One other enhancement you may care to add. You could've left one or both of the Shades manned so your gunner gets a bit of action during the drive. Should be good for an extra bit of hollering. To get up to the highway to position the grav lift, take a route up the rocks on the side of the hill away from the high Shade so your gunner won't target it yet (there's a pretty easy route). As for the task of leaving Shades intact beforehand, you'll want to have prevented any Marines from driving around in their own hog, lest they destroy it. You can use my 'two gunner method' to keep Marines out of the action, as described in the set-up work for Infinitely spawning Warthogs.
Watching afterwards
Loading up the game from your checkpoint after saving it, do several jumps then exit by saving again, and go into Theater mode to watch the action. One really excellent thing you can do is to switch to a free-cam and have it skimming along the tarmac close behind the hog as it heads along and curves around for the jump. If you boost the camera by depressing the left trigger, it conveniently travels at practically the same speed as the hog, giving a truly dramatic view. Also try skimming along ahead of the hog; that's good too though it's not as easy and may take a bit of practice. You've also got the third-person camera of course, but the free-cam is a lot more flexible. It's great fun to play about with it to give yourself cinematic views of your jumps.
Chopper too
You can also do the jump in a Chopper but I don't think you'll find it as satisfying. Boost at just the right time to maximize take-off speed.