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The ultimate jump-CVG retrospective article
Posted By: ElzarTheBam	Date: 9/23/11 6:29 a.m.
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/319988/features/two-towers-how-two-halo-obsessives-landed-the-ultimate-jump/?cid=OTC-RSS&attr=CVG-General-RSS Two Towers: How two Halo obsessives landed the ultimate jump "No one believed it could be done..." Halo's tallest towers were never built to be climbed, and yet players climbed them, launching skywards with a mountain of grenades and a kick from a rocket-propelled Warthog. From the top of one you can make out the other tower, just beyond the sheer rock faces and the canyon separating them. It wasn't so long after the first players saw the top that one asked a question nobody could answer for almost seven years - with enough grenades and a little luck, could a player jump from one tower to the other? "Anyone who plays Halo for any length of time will see lots of things exploding, chain-reacting and flying across the screen," says original Halo tricker Randall Glass. "(And they're) usually Grunts." Glass was among the first Halo players on the Halo.Bungie.org fan forums to exploit chain reactions and Grunt-launching physics. "Someone had posted a shot of himself standing on top of Silent Cartographer, outside of the gameplay area," continues Glass. "I thought I'd one-up him, so after a couple of frustrating hours of experimentation using grenades and a rocket launcher, I managed to launch a Warthog on top of the same mountains and drive around. It felt like landing on the moon." Glass captured the setup and cut together a one-minute instructional video called 'When Pigs Fly' for the HBO forums. It was an instant hit, but his second video changed everything. 'Warthog Jump' was a series of 'Hog launches over Silent Cartographer's arch, set to Blur's Song 2 and samples from The Matrix and Star Wars. It went viral in the days before YouTube made online video distribution easy - HBO posters mirrored it and spread it to other forums, and a movement was born. It was such a hit Glass was taken on a tour of Bungie's studios. Halo trickers would use launches and other techniques to explore parts of the game Bungie never intended anyone to see. A player can carry four frag grenades and will drop them when he dies, so two players can harvest dozens of grenades from a level's enemies and build a stockpile. One grenade triggers nearby grenades, and the cumulative blast can be used to launch vehicles and players great distances. With enough grenades you could propel yourself to the top of Halo's tallest towers - but what would you do when you got there? Helljumpers In 2004 a poster on Halo.Bungie.org's forums built a website dedicated to Halo tricking. High Impact Halo became the home for players who had launched thousands of Warthogs over Silent Cartographer's arch, seen the bottom of The Maw, and crammed every vehicle into Blood Gulch's bases. On 10 September, HIH forum member Grenadesticker described his plan to launch from one tower to the other on Halo's second level. He never made it, but the idea was too good to let go and others kept at it. Unfortunately, it seemed impossible. "Yeah, everyone thought it was impossible," says Kevin Marnell - the young Texan known as Mr. Monopoli on the forums at High Impact Halo's successor, Jumprs.org. "But last November I came up with a new idea for the setup, and I was getting some close attempts. Suddenly everyone else started getting back into it." Originally a Halo 2 tricker, Marnell is too young to have been part of the original tricking community. Now 18 years old, he was aged only eight when Halo hit shelves in 2001. "I went with my brother to get Halo at launch. I didn't even like Halo, because he was three years older than me, and he would always beat me." After Halo 2's release in 2004, Marnell's older brother didn't get to win so often, as Marnell set about tearing the game apart. "I liked super bouncing, sword-flying, and the old-school tricks that made Halo 2 what it was," he says. "Tower to Tower was actually the first Halo 1 trick I ever attempted. I remember watching another poster, Lonestar, try it about a year before; even he decided it probably wasn't possible. But after seeing how close he got I figured it just had to get done." Mission Improbable If not impossible, going Tower to Tower was certainly improbable. Before launch you'll have to spend time on the setup - Marnell puts his first attempts at close to 20 hours. You'll need almost 130 grenades in total and the game only spawns enough on Legendary difficulty. All three of the level's Warthogs must be launched to the top of the towers with grenades - two on one, one on the other - and a further 30 grenades need to be gathered atop the launching tower, four at a time. Before launch, the two 'Hogs on the landing tower are flipped onto their noses with a grenade in exactly the right place - a matter of centimetres. It's this wall that keeps you from sliding off the platform if you're lucky enough to go in the right direction when the launch tower explodes. The launch itself was more a matter of luck before Marnell began work on the problem. Trickers pile grenades on top the launch tower and place a Warthog between themselves and the blast, using the force from the flying 'Hog to propel themselves across the gap. Riding an unpredictable explosion, players went vertical more often than horizontal - the physics were never consistent. Worse, Halo's Fall Timer is always out to kill you mid-flight. The launch has to be straight and fast and has to hit a vertical surface, or Halo considers it a suicidal plunge and even the most accurate launch ends with the player's death. "The fall timer is the biggest challenge," says Marnell. "Getting a horizontal launch was such a difficult task - that's why the Hog placement was so important. Lonestar actually walked me through my setup and I messed it up - hanging the 'Hog's rear wheels off the edge. He thought it was a bad angle but after launching for about ten minutes we knew it worked. Before that, it was like one in one hundred that you'd get a horizontal launch, but the new 'Hog placement allowed for much more consistent horizontal ones." In the end Marnell had the setup down to under ten hours - six at his best - and was leaving his Xbox on for days and weeks at a time, using his tower-top checkpoint to launch over and over again. Then in January 2011, Marnell learned that Tower To Tower had become a race. The Race Thomas 'Duelies' Laskey was 18 when he started escaping Halo 2's multiplayer maps. Like Marnell, Laskey wasn't a Halo 1 tricker, but Lonestar and Marnell's discovery of the new, more consistent launch had opened the door for someone to be the first to go Tower to Tower. "When Kevin started doing it he got really close quite a few times," says the 24-year-old Laskey, another regular on Jumprs.org. "I was actually gonna try it then, but I was in my final semester of college so I didn't have much time. I had to put it on hold until May." Marnell, meanwhile, was launching as often as he could. "I think I did the setup probably 15 times," he says. "I'd take a couple of weeks off and come back to it, but when High Impact Halo closed back in April I really wanted to get it done. For about a month straight I had my Xbox on. I just did it over and over but I couldn't get it. "The longest I left my console on was two weeks, and I thought that was maybe a little too long. I've had power outages countless times. One time the power went out within like ten minutes of finishing my setup. One time I threw a grenade at my pile, and the second my grenade exploded I got a checkpoint. Another time my dad thought he was doing me a favour by turning my Xbox off. I was... kinda disappointed", he laughs. He kept launching. "In April I think I hit the tower, like, ten times within an hour and every time I'd just die on impact," he says. "I hit the 'Hogs too, which we thought would let me survive. I got to the point where I just thought 'this can't be possible. If it were I would have landed it by now.'" Marnell took May off and returned to the challenge in June. In all, he captured over 200 hours of footage on his laptop, minus the lengthy setups. That's over 25 eight-hour working days - an entire month's work. That's 72,000 ten-second launches. But it was a race Marnell lost. Laskey attempted his setup only three times. "I actually ended up watching Lonestar's entire setup," he explains. "It really helped me figure out what I needed to do, and then Kevin inspired me to keep doing the trick. The first time I did the setup, it took me about twelve hours, then I left my Xbox on for almost a week." Maine resident Laskey spent the spring wrapping up his finals in Engineering and went back to launching in late May. "Kevin was doing the setup in about six hours at the end," he says, "but I just wanted to be more careful and not get anything wrong. I might spend over an hour on just one launch if it wasn't working well." Laskey has estimated that he launched himself around one thousand times, but that's a conservative estimate. From late May to early June his Xbox had been powered on for five long days, and on the morning of 4 June he was losing his confidence in the accuracy of his setups. "I was actually considering reviewing the whole thing. I just felt like I had the position of the grenade pile wrong and I couldn't get low launches. Most of them were ending on that cliff behind the tower, or it would be a weak launch and I'd hit the cliff in front of the tower." Then, on the evening of 4 June, after almost seven years, Thomas Laskey was the first Halo player to jump from Tower To Tower. Landings "I think I was really close to tripping the fall timer," says Laskey. "I was surprised I lived. I ended up hitting a corner of the tower and it bounced me up. There's a slight incline. It slowed me down enough to make it. It didn't really hit me all at once; I landed on it and I didn't really think about it, then a few seconds later I realised I was on the other tower and I was alive. I was speechless, basically; I just checked my capture card to make sure it was recording. "I actually took some time before I reported it. I spent all day Sunday editing the video and I uploaded it Monday morning. It was a surprise to everyone except Kevin - I told him over Skype." For a moment, Marnell didn't believe him. "And then I didn't know whether to be mad or happy. I was excited that it had been landed but then I was disappointed that it wasn't me who got it first. I wasn't gonna give up, so I launched for, like, eight hours a day for the next day and a half." Marnell jumped from Tower to Tower on Monday, landing perfectly on the wall he had built from Warthogs on the opposite platform. "I looked over at my laptop to make sure it was recording, then I just stood up and walked away. In the clip, the launch takes like ten seconds and then there's another 30 seconds of my character just standing there. I didn't know what to do so I just walked to my refrigerator and got a drink - orange juice - and walked back to my Xbox to make sure I was still on the tower. "I wasn't really that disappointed," he says, when asked about coming second. "With the whole community of trickers it's not really about 'hey, I did this first!' We generally just try to accomplish things together, but at the same time I was thinking 'man, that should have been me!'" Both men agree about who had the better landing - "I don't want to sound cocky, but I think I did," says Marnell. "Yeah, he did," agrees Laskey. "But I don't know - what's the 'better landing' anyway? I guess not taking any damage, and he did that. I guess the next challenge for me is to do it in the new Halo game..." Anniversary In November, Halo Anniversary will introduce a new generation of players to the first Halo. Identical to the original in every way, the same glitches and tricks exploited by Marnell and Laskey in Combat Evolved will be possible in Halo Anniversary, even with the new HD models turned on. "I think it'll get a whole group of people interested in Halo 1," says Marnell. "Right now there's a bunch of people who never experienced Halo 1 and 2 and they think Halo 3 and Reach are the best. And honestly, I don't think they're very good games production-wise or glitch-wise. Halo was this open world but now there's bouncy elastic barriers which keep you in and force you to go in one direction the whole game." Laskey agrees. "I don't think Halo 1 had any obvious barriers or killzones at all, or not any that mattered anyway. I understand Bungie didn't want anyone to use glitches to their advantage in multiplayer, but in campaign they put a lot of barriers in and it's really hard to get around that stuff." It seems wrong to complain when Halo was never built for this, of course, but the tricking scene is so vital, so necessary to the new game's authenticity that Microsoft's team at 343 and Saber are building the new game with all the old tricks and glitches in mind. "Every jump we've tried so far has worked," says 343's Frankie O'Connor, speaking to Halo.Bungie.org. "One of the big tests is the Tower to Tower jump - we hadn't thought that was possible, so we didn't try it out; but now that we've seen it, we're going to give it a shot. We understand that a significant chunk of our audience for this product will be using it for these kinds of tricks, and we made sure that they'd be able to do most, if not all, the things they could do on the original." Halo defined the Xbox but it was the players who defined Halo. Ten years after it first hit shelves, the game's final, most difficult challenge was invented and accomplished by players who created a new way to play. "It's truly amazing to me how this game that was just designed for shooting enemies and driving vehicles can also be used for so much else," says Laskey. "I love seeing what I can do with that - doing things the game designers didn't intend." For Marnell, it's even simpler. "I like that you actually have to try," he explains. "Some games you just play on autopilot and nothing really matters. Glitching involves actually making the decision to do something. People think glitches are random but it's very rare we do something randomly. We set out to do something, we know what we're gonna do, and we get it done."

Message Index

The ultimate jump-CVG retrospective article	ElzarTheBam	9/23/11 6:29 a.m.
Re: The ultimate jump-CVG retrospective article	Louis Wu	9/23/11 7:22 a.m.
Re: The ultimate jump-CVG retrospective article	ElzarTheBam	9/23/11 7:53 a.m.
Re: The ultimate jump-CVG retrospective article	Louis Wu	9/23/11 8:21 a.m.
Ah, ok, noted, thank you. *NM*	ElzarTheBam	9/23/11 8:23 a.m.