Spectacular fun with a Warthog on the cliffside hilltop…

(7:30) Level 2 ('Halo') on Easy. Here's a great new activity I've been sitting on for about a year. I realised that when a Pelican departs from the cliffside survivor area, you can use it to spectacularly catapult a Warthog. It's loads of fun, and easy to set up too!

Released August 8th 2019, gameplay recorded July 31st - August 8th 2019.

00:02 (Setting up) Having just cleared the hillside survivor area (where I picked up Stacker and another guy) and eliminated the valley Banshees, here's the core set-up work outlined in about a minute and a half. You can find more details in my article.

Just as I'm tagging and dodging the final Elite, my idiot sniper bounces a round off my armour, leaving me short of three health bars. Hardly ideal but it didn't matter much. One other shortcoming is that when I go up the hill, I've only got two plasmas. Would've been better to have four, but at this point in my exploration of the topic, I hadn't realised that I'd sometimes feel the need for extra plasma throws.

01:40 (Assorted catapults) Here are 13 catapults, with a good deal of variety and occasional hog shooting for fun. There's some impressive height and distance. I'll comment on a few of the clips.

02:48 In regard to this 'monster' catapult to the bottom of the valley, notice that there's a bonus blast from a loose frag. It visibly propels the hog towards the approaching Pelican.

03:14 Another example of loose frags going off. The blasts cause the hog to go on an unusual trajectory, almost settling on the end of the adjacent plateau.

04:14 Splattered by the hog. Bit of a hazard when the hog doesn't head upwards!

04:39 (Stacker specials) Somewhere along the line, I realised that Stacker could survive my 2-grenade boost if my plasma tagged the hog, rather than settling on the ground. I got some nice comedy that way, as represented in these three clips. In the final one, he actually survives the aerial excursion and ends up on the nearby small plateau, still aboard!

05:37 (Tag trick finale) To finish, here's a 7-clip sequence in which I'm tagging the hog as it gets catapulted. In this first clip I score a nice few sniper hits as I watch the hog spin away.

05:51 Practically straight up! Scored a lot of pistol hits too.

06:05 A nice landing of the adjacent plateau.

06:18 This time I do my grenade work from quite a distance. Quite hard (you obviously have a lot less accuracy in placement), but it looks good, and adds a bit of variety. My tag grenade catches the rear of the hog just in time.

06:31 This clip sneaked into the movie rather late, adding some extra variety (I cut another clip to make way for it). An unusual aspect of the catapulting is that the hog seems to bounce directly off the nose.

06:47 This penultimate example is another 'Stacker special' (I tagged that same rear wheel again), and you can hear his fourth protest call before the plasma goes boom.

07:01 The final example is sort of a double trick. The main aspect being, the hog gets a second bounce off the Pelican! Took quite a lot of work to get that. I later got quite a few more examples after honing my grenading to get the hog on the right sort of trajectory, but this clip remained the one with the most satisfying second bounce.

Closing remarks I'd created some other set-ups earlier, but this one seemed best, which is why I used it for the movie, despite the minor shortcomings noted. My hog position was pretty good (though slightly to the right of the Pelican's path), and my checkpoint timing seemed ideal, giving me a few seconds to adjust position before doing the 2-grenade boost. I get a fairly good variety of protest calls from the guys on the Pelican, although the POA crewmen are heard rather often and only ever use two calls. Another aspect is that the blue beam is due to fire about nine seconds after the Pelican starts accelerating, which I thought might give the possibility of getting the hog zapped. That's part of why I focusd on this particular set-up. I never did get the hog close enough for a zap though.

I used Easy mainly for the sake of being able to cut through the covies with maximum ease. But I also had a handy base save I could start from, in which I was emerging from the underground tunnel. I had Johnson and another guy, but I ditched them forthwith, in favour of getting Stacker and another guy from the hillside survivor area.

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