I write this post in response to Cameron Lee Ceschini‘s “Off The Map” discussion.
Thank you, Cameron for bringing up a discussion that I have always taken interest in. One game that I have always loved traveling out of the map boundaries is Halo 2. Any Halo fan will remember the beloved days of sword cancelling and rocket jumping. I believe Professor Pursel mentioned rocket jumping on another game he used to play in class. Anyways, I would connect with friends in a custom game and spend hours exploring the outer-depths of Headlong. There were really three glitches one could take advantage of back in the day:
Headlong – Halo 2
- Sword Cancelling – The process of lunging at an enemy with the sword and quickly canceling the lunge. In effect, you are lunged forward with no damage or kill done to the enemy.
- Wall Climbing/Butterflying – This is a more advanced strategy that takes advantage of multiple sword cancels in a row. Essentially, the player with the sword will crouch in front of a wall, ideally a corner, while an enemy player jumps on top of him. Then, the sword-equipped player looks above at the enemy on top of him. The enemy player then continuously jumps while standing on the bottom person while he sword cancels the player on top. If you can imagine multiple sword cancels and jumps happening in succession, the two players can end up scaling gigantic buildings and walls, and essentially getting to new areas in the map where they aren’t supposed to be.
- Rocket Jumping – Essentially shooting the ground below you just after you jump, making your jump trajectory much greater.
I remember in Headlong, if you get to the outer parts of the map by butterflying out, there was so much extra content and buildings that you could actually reach, and then look down at the “real” map from a totally different perspective.
Check out Halo Nation on Wikia if you want to read more about sword flying in Halo 2. Have any of you guys tried any of this in Halo 2 before? Let me know your experiences in the comments!
While I agree custom gaming has come down a notch since the old days, I wanted to mention another interesting facet of Halo 2’s strange ways of getting around.
I’m fairly certain both of you know about it, but there is a special item in Halo 2 called the Scarab Gun. [http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Scarab_Gun] This is actually in playable space, but so hard to reach it warrants mention in the same conversation. If I remember correctly, the finagling required to actually get this thing involved getting a flying vehicle through a loading screen in a tiny space. This sort of insanely well hidden stuff continues to baffle me. Many of these areas are in the playable space, but in incredibly odd places and provide alternative perspectives on game events.
Mostly, I just wanted to thank you for responding to my post! I thought it might be interesting to consider that this stuff can be found on the map, but in really odd places in the same game you mentioned.
So much nostalgia! I remember getting glitching lobbies of 10+ people to all get out of maps and go exploring. A few of my personal favorites were Burial Mounds, Turf, and Backwash.
You also can’t forget about superbouncing! I probably knew at least two or three superbounces/jumps on each map. I’d never use them in a matchmaking game, but messing around in custom games was great. The glitches in Halo 2 were so much fun that it created an entire sub-community. How could you not love getting on top of the tower on Ascension or the wheel on Zanzibar?
On a kind of tangential topic, I’d just like to point out how much custom games seem to have died over the years. Most games are based on experience levels and unlockables instead of skill ranks, so there aren’t really “ranked” gametypes anymore. Because of this, too many people see custom games as a waste of time because they could be getting experience in actual games. Halo 2’s only ranking system was based on skill, so if you didn’t want to risk losing a level, you’d play unranked gametypes (which were worth nothing) or crazy custom games with your friends (which were also worth nothing).
So many good custom gametypes came out of that (Tower of Power, Cat and Mouse, Troy, Hide and Seek, glitching games, Fat Kid, etc). All those games don’t exist anymore because people see custom games as wasting time because winning/losing doesn’t matter anymore as long as you get your XP. There’s no risk for playing matchmaking games, and there’s no reward for playing custom games, and because of that, the amount of creative ways people find to play games (like games entirely devoted to glitching) is really low now.
I wish Halo 2 was still online!