Hi all
I noticed that if you goad the Barneys etc to the left of the screen, then get to the right of the screen as the "Up" appears for the traffic lights, if the Barneys etc get hit by it off-screen, regardless of health they seem to die.
This can be really useful for getting into the Estel fight early. If you time it right, you can even get rid of the first group (Barney + 2 Dicks on Easy) in the first cycle then the second Barney on the next cycle and really cut out time fighting them.
Hopefully I have explained it well, you can see what I mean at 28:30 onwards on this run.
You can see I first throw the items away to the end of the screen (gets them into Estel fight btw), then I move forward, I throw two Dicks away, they had so little health left that the traffic light hit kills them anyway, but notice the first Barney has not been touched. The light instant kills him because it hits him off screen.
I then kill Dick, throw Barney to the left and walk away. iirc, the damage from a throw plus a traffic hit shouldn't be enough to kill Barney, but as he is off-screen, the traffic light pushes him to instant death and I am ready for Estel (with two tasers and a pipe).
I have not seen this piece of information discussed anywhere at all, so I'm not sure if anyone else is aware of this. I also haven't practised it on Mania so please let me know if it works or does not.
My friend @deadofthesean also recommended me this video when I mentioned this today. In it, it describes the level as being the background moving around the area as opposed to the area itself.
I don't think this video particularly explains this trick, not sure if it will help us discover more exploits, but it was an interesting watch nonetheless so I'll add into this discussion.
Is this what you mean on Stage 1? Causing the two sewer Donovans to not spawn at all. Or something else?
