Flares and meteors
Posted May 31st 2007
Flares
Throw a plasma grenade onto the ground, and without altering your aim throw another. It lands in exactly the same place as the first, gets blown into the air a moment later and goes off in mid-air, potentially with a shower of dirt. Pretty! Apparently such a mid-air blast is called a 'flare' and is sometimes used in multiplayer as a way of signalling where you are. Me, I just do it for fun so I can go "Oooohh…" and have a little break before I get back to the covie-roasting carnage again. Big softie huh?
Meteors
With the aid of a pile of loose grenades, you can do something more spectacular still. Throw a first plasma grenade at the pile. Pause a moment then throw a second so it arrives just as a massive chain reaction is going off. The grenade gets blasted away and sails through the sky still fizzing, looking a bit like a meteor (hence my term for it). A zoomed pistol view can be handy for keeping track of a meteor as it shoots off. You can get your meteor to head off a certain way by slightly altering your throw compared to that of the first grenade. The meteor's direction will largely depend on where the incoming grenade is when it gets blasted by the chain reaction.
I guess most players will occasionally have seen meteors created by chance in hectic outdoor fighting where a few loose grenades happened to build up. But ideally you want to set things up on purpose. A great scenario for this is level 2's Arc of death, which is where I first had fun with it; see the section on 'Bonus fun with a grenade concentration'. You can get enemies to drop lots of plasma grenades in front of a particular rock there. I've got one save on Legendary with seventeen grenades ready to be set off, giving quite a bang (that also sends multiple bodies flying). Of course, you could also use a frag pile built up in time-honoured fashion for Warthog launching or suchlike, if you happen to have such a save handy.