Suddenly out of the blue, an old dream realized!

(5:53) Level 2 ('Halo') on Easy. Back in 2018 I did a sequence of movies on the spawning of the valley Banshees and their subsequent behaviour. BCM305 featured a set-up in which they were prone to doing some amusing jinking after spawning, and it crossed my mind that one of them might end up getting hit by a blue beam. With visions of spectacular destruction, I spent a few hours failing to get lucky. But now, eight years on, I've tried again. Check out the results!

Released September 26th 2026, gameplay recorded September 24th 2026.

00:02 (Reminder) Just to mention in advance, the four plays here are in chronological order. This first one, obtained early on in what was a session lasting around 70 minutes, is just a short reminder of the spawning business. Here, the Banshees quickly go into mutual circling, as very commonly happens.

00:30 (Jinking, but failure) This time we get the desired jinking, which moves the Banshees along nicely. They then get into some random playing as desired, but never get near enough to the distant blue beam, and after a while (a little over 2 minutes from the time of spawning), they stabilize into circling, ending any hope of success.

02:02 (Same again) Once gain, an acceptable start but things don't work out. The Banshees are occasionally at least aligned with the beam (i.e. by my line of sight), but they're too near to me by quite a way. They stabilized into circling, shortly after the footage ends.

02:50 (3-hit success) About 50 minutes into the session, I finally got this play, featuring not one but three beam-hits. In the first hit (4:15) the Banshee is climbing and gets shunted at the rear or side, giving it a brief spurt of speed. That was almost 4 minutes into the play.

Right after that, the Banshees appear to stabilize into circling, but I see that they're actually circling the beam path, so there's still hope for another hit if they drift a little. Finally it comes (4:58). That was about 70 seconds after the first hit. A Banshee seems to fly directly into the beam, and gets bounced back. Again no destruction. Seems like the Banshees may have immunity from the beams. A pity!

The hit also disrupts the circling, and they get back into random playing again. Around 5 minutes later, hit 3 occurs (5:24), in which a Banshee bounces back and also gets a lift. I zoom in just in time to see it.

Afterwards though, the Banshees appear to stabilize into circling. I continue for another several minutes (and I'm now close enough to hear the beam firing) but it becomes clear that we're not going to get another hit.

Closing remarks It was really just by chance that I happened to revisit this topic. I was pondering what movie to do next, and was looking at a list of some of my saves when I happened to notice an old level 2 save being kept around for trying to get a blue beam hit on a Banshee. Decided to fire it up and give it a go. Happily, I didn't have to do a huge amount of playing before I got my first hit. If you include the few hours of play I did back in 2018, that makes about 3 hours in all, before I got a hit.

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