The ship is about to blow, but never mind that. The fight is on!

(6:37) Level 10 ('The Maw') on Easy. In my third instalment the fleeing special ops squad gets into some action with the Flood (to rousing musical accompaniment), and I tag along to watch and to have a bit of action myself!

Released April 21st 2020, gameplay recorded April 13th-20th 2020.

00:02 In this introductory clip I accompany two Grunts as they run to catch up the Elites. The other Grunt wandered off course into a wall, something which happens all too often (see the first few clips in BCM420). Indeed, none of my ten battle clips feature all three Grunts in action, and in a few cases there's only one. Anyway, this is a nice play to start with, having a few amusing aspects. A Grunt scores a close-range hit on a Flood around 0:54 and it's surprising that his buddy doesn't get killed by the blast. Right after that, something quite freaky happens. An Elite throws a plasma at a Flood, but then a Grunt fires a fuel rod shot which blasts the grenade back, killing both Elites! Nice.

01:12 In this play one of the Grunts gets whacked by an Elite. His dropped fuel rod cannon fails to explode, but that's because it went out of my sight and vanished. One of the Elites gets killed (was that actually by friendly fire?) and he vanishes too, his death cry getting cut off. Eventually the remaining covies run off (the Grunt crying "Run away!") and I have to decimate the Flood myself.

01:38 You get a closer view of an Elite throwing a plasma grenade here. I take the opportunity to tag him from behind, and I finish by rocketing his colleague.

02:08 As the covies back off down the passage, a Grunt gets killed by the Elites' plasma fire, then I give them a rocket.

02:38 Here's a spot of Banshee play for variety. I already had the Banshee at the start of the save I was using (the same save as used for the previous two movies). When I splatter an Elite, he drops a pile of plasmas and I detonate them, sending a Flood flying down the passage. Eventually the Grunts gang up on me though. Banshee goes boom, and one Grunt dies in the blast.

03:17 After I rocket the Elites early on, there's just a solitary Grunt left to deal with the Flood. He scores a nice hit before being lashed. When I rocket the final Flood guy at close range, my body instantly vanishes. The game strains in this area.

03:49 Again I take care of both Elites. But the main feature of this play is the comedy at the end, where there's one Grunt left and I wait for a Flood to approach and lash him. In my early development of the movie, this episode was going to make for the ending, after I rocketed the dead Elite into the void and followed him, my body instantly vanishing when I died. But later when I got into some Warthog play, I realised that a Warthog ending would be much better.

04:32 A Grunt is cut down by friendly fire from the Elites, and then one Elite manages to tag his colleague. Bunch of idiots! Pretty amusing though.

04:49 More blundering, as one of the Elites misses a swipe at me and kills a Grunt instead, leading to a grunty wipeout.

05:12 Finally, I arrive with a Warthog, which I'd briefly flown back to in my snatched Banshee. I did quite a few takes for this, and you might notice the well timed explosion at the start, coinciding with a cymbal crash. That was deliberate. I timed it by being at a particular starting point and hitting the gas at a certain point in the music, which I found would made the explosion go off at about the right time. Another requirement I had was to end with a good spinning jump. I messed that up quite a few times, but here it goes well. As for the combat phase, I was trying to initially avoid splattering the covies because early on, the game has a tendency to remove bodies instantly, which can be very obvious. That detracted from some of the plays I did. Here I actually plough through the Flood early on and splatter three, and if you inspect the footage you'll see their bodies instantly vanish. But played at normal speed it's not all that noticeable, so that was okay.

06:07 Originally I was going to end the movie after that second Warthog jump, but for fun and to complete the narrative, I decided to follow with a quick dose of escape footage, which is actually from a different play and selected for the relatively good action. The cutscene portion is edited down to about 12 seconds. I also did a cutscene edit at the end of BCM162 incidentally, though that edit was a bit different.

Closing remarks This movie went through a lot of development. Originally I was going to have whole battles, fought to the end, but gradually I cut things down to mostly shorter clips comprising the best parts, which made for more action and a faster pace. I also put in a lot of editing work to get segments following on from one another fairly well musically, so I hope you enjoyed that aspect. I must say, it's really rousing music, adding a lot to the proceedings. As you may've noticed, a lot of the clips began with a cymbal crash. A nice way to transition.

I think that concludes my work with these guys for now. I reckon there's potential for another movie involving stacking sometime, and in particular I'd like to pursue the goal of getting a column of four or even five covies, if that's possible. Maybe I'll return for a try at that later. But that's definitely going to try my patience, and I've had enough tricky work for now. That said, one of these covies is scheduled to make a small guest appearance in my next movie, as you'll see.

© 2004-2020 by Rockslider