BCM42 - Massed Hunters, everybody jump

(4:58) Level 4 ('The Silent Cartographer') on Heroic. This shows some Warthog fun with six Hunters, assembled as described in my article Massed Hunters. After a full play in which I make them jump while Sergeant Stacker peppers them with the chain-gun, there's a comedy action montage of short clips featuring explosive mishaps and more.

Released October 17th 2011, gameplay recorded October 11th-14th October 2011 except for the first montage clip (April 21st).

Commentary

00:02 (Full play) The movie begins with a full play, starting from the checkpoint I saved near some spare weapons. With Warthog fun in mind, I already had some Marines aboard: the comical Sergeant Stacker on the chain-gun, and an Aussie in the passenger seat. I won't talk through the action in detail because it's basically just a lot of swerving about making the Hunters jump while Stacker wears them down, but around 0:34 I make all six jump at once, which is something I wanted to include in the movie. It's fairly easy to manage that, and it can look pretty amusing. If you want to add some interest to the driving in this area, one thing you can do is pass around the back of the tree like I do around 0:50.

01:43 (Clip montage) The rest of the movie comprises clips obtained using the same save. Again, I won't give a blow-by-blow account but I'll mention a few things.

The first clip is the odd one out in terms of date. It's from some play I did back in April, shortly before doing BCM34 and BCM35 - which likewise featured massed Hunters, though using saves on Normal. I thought the driving around business could make a nice little movie, so I finally got around to doing it. The hog somersault in that old play gave me the idea of including a whole montage featuring that sort of thing. Makes for nice spectacular footage.

I also included some bits of play where the Hunters do some jumping, and in particular there's a very nice 5-Hunter jump in clip 2 starting around 1:52. They form an unusually good line and the synchronization of the jumping is almost perfect. You'll also see some mass squashing where I get my own back for being blown up so much, hah!

In the final clip, the hog gets overturned when a Hunter shot hits the back of a falling colleague. At the end, Stacker takes a stray shot from the enraged Aussie as I'm killing the Hunter, and amusingly watches as the Aussie runs for home. If you're wondering, Stacker followed a moment later.

Closing remarks That was all on Heroic, but sometime maybe I'll try to set things up on Legendary to see how that plays. The Hunters would last longer against chain-gunning and their firing should be significantly more dangerous. It'll be harder to set things up on Legendary though.

In regard to the explosive mishaps in the montage, it's actually very easy to keep the hog from getting blasted because the Hunters have no sense of anticipation in regard to targeting. Basically they seem to fire at where you were a few moments ago. In most of the play for the montage I was allowing myself to be way less safety-conscious than usual, for the sake of movie entertainment.