A different kind of tennis. No rackets, but a lot of rockets!

(6:16) Level 5 ('Assault on the Control Room') on Heroic. Continuing with the entry chamber, and more specifically the ceiling room, I bring you the noble sport of plasma tennis! You just need a plasma grenade and some skill with a rocket launcher. In this introduction I'm using a save in which I got a handy delayed checkpoint in the room itself. More sport coming later! Update: I now have an article on plasma tennis.

Released April 14th 2017, gameplay recorded April 10th-13th 2017.

00:02 (Bouncy walls and floor) As you can see in this first clip, plasmas bounce well against the transparent walls and on the glass floor. Since you can also boost them around with rockets, that leads to some interesting sport!

00:45 (Basic idea: keep it going) The basic idea is to keep a grenade fizzing away. In this example though, the grenade ends up going off before I've used all ten rockets. I couldn't reload in time and it got too settled after hitting the metallic inner floor (which is also what happened in the first clip). Actually it also hit that floor around 1:14, but I anticipated that and rocketed it almost immediately.

01:33 (Got too settled again) In this third example the grenade again gets too settled because I couldn't reload in time - though in this case the inner area wasn't the problem. When you fire your second tube, you need to make sure the plasma's going to stay up long enough for you to reload.

01:56 (10-rocket success) Now here's an example of successfully using all ten rockets. For variety I include a couple of zoomed shots; and at one point I've got enough time to take a quick look at the grenade with a sniper scope.

03:03 (Not moving) For extra challenge you can try to do things without moving. In this case I use the starting spot of my save. A couple of times the grenade bounces closer than I'd like, and I get caught by my own rocket blast. Ouch. At about 3:39 when I rocket the grenade, I lose track of it for a while but eventually spot it high up. Phew!

04:08 (Long fuse) An obvious idea is to see how long you can keep the fuse going. Getting good height is key, to eat up time. In this example obtained after a bit of practice, I manage 100 seconds, my best so far. That may well be the fizziest plasma grenade ever seen - unless perhaps someone thought of plasma tennis before me.

05:55 (Next trick) Here's a quick extra which I added late, for a punchier ending after that long play. I spent a bit of time fooling around with tennis-based suiciding, and this is a nice example.

Closing remarks Originally I was thinking I'd just have one movie on this theme, but as I thought of more and more activities it became clear that a single movie wouldn't do, and I started to break things up. For this opening movie I've focused on a general introduction plus a good round of 'long fuse', but in the next instalment you'll see further activities. Actually there's probably going to be a third movie too, and quite possibly more; we'll see. Incidentally, you can also do plasma tennis on an ice patch (though it's more difficult), and I may do a movie on that sometime too.

The save I used was created during the making of BCM225. It's what I used for getting that movie's penultimate clip.

A thought comes to mind. I'm not familiar with Forge in any of the Halo games in which it exists, but could it be used to create a playing space with nice bouncy surfaces for plasma grenades? If so, there could be a lot of potential for recreation - and maybe you could get something closer to actual tennis! Like, blasting a plasma back and forth across a central barrier.

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