Honor Guard Councilor



"Honor Guard Councillor" is a fan-derived term describing a certain Elite seen in the level Gravemind. It appears to wear the armor of an Honor Guard Ultra with the helmet of either a Councillor or an Ultra Elite. The Elite's appearance can be attributed to a glitch in the game's programming due to a programmer typing in the wrong thing.

Appearance
It appears at the end of the level Gravemind, at the fore of the bridge between the Mausoleum of the Arbiter and the Far Tower. The Honor Guard Councillor is flanked by two SpecOps Elites wielding Plasma Rifles or Carbines, but is armed with an Energy Sword himself. This only occured after SPARTAN-117 destroyed the Ultra Elites, Hunters, and Brutes fighting in the Mausoleum and moved to intercept the High Prophet of Truth.

Combat
The Honor Guard Councillor is extraordinarily powerful, and requires at least two Fuel Rod Cannon direct hits to kill or multiple Energy Sword slashes to down. It was programmed to have the power and skills of a Zealot, and does. It always wields an Energy Sword.

Explanation
The Honor Guard Councillor only appears by mistake in Halo 2, its appearance was never intentional. The armor the Elite wears is the result of a bug in the programming of the game.

Every charachter was programmed into Halo 2 with variations to increase the realistic feel of the game. These variations would be randomly placed in each level, each time it was played. These variations determined that the Elites would act and sound differently, instead of saying the same things, as they did on Halo: Combat Evolved.

In particular, there are two voice sets for regular Elites. They are "_dog" (for "dogmatic") and "_scl" (for "scully"). _dog Elites have the voice clips of Norm Woodel while _scl Elites have the voice clips of David Scully. The "Object Properties" tag takes care of what variations of things have; it assigns armor, voices, faces, default health, and such. So in most maps, the elites have 2 copies of one rank, one assigned to each voice.

Therefore, In the case of The Great Journey for example these are all the elite variations:


 * Minor_dog
 * Minor_scl
 * Major_dog
 * Major_scl
 * Stealth_dog
 * Stealh_scl
 * Stealth_Major_dog
 * Stealth_Major_scl
 * Ultra_dog
 * Ultra_scl
 * etc etc

However, both sets of variations are not always used. For example, in Metropolis, the voices of all the Grunts are the same because the designers did not put the Brian Posehn grunt variation int he Metropolis Map file, so that all the grunts only have the voice clips of Joseph Staten variant. They chose only to use one of the two avaliable variations in the game.

On most levels, all the programmer has to do is program the Game to produce one Minor Elite for instance, and the game itself will randomly chose between the Minor_dog and Minor_scl variations, unless otherwise specified. But, only one set of variations exists on the Gravemind map file. Gravemind is another level like this. It was programmed so that only the _scl type of Elites were in the file. Therefore, every time the programmers wanted an Elite to appear, they would have to add the _scl suffix.

Unfortunately, the programmers accidentally programmed the game to spawn a "zealot_dog" Elite to appear at this point on the level. They had intended for the Elite to be a Zealot, but attatched the wrong variation suffix to it. Since this variation was not in the level, the Game can not find it.

This results in the glitch players see: The Game knows to spawn an Elite with the power and weapons of a Zealot, but it does not know what the armor is supposed to look like. Since white is the default armor color, the game automatically chooses it. Since it does not know what helmet to give the Elite, it randomly choses between the three Elite helmets, the Councilor helmet, Honor Guard, and the Regular (which is why it sometimes has a regular head as well). Finally, since the game does not understand the Elite appearance, it automatically enables the "honor guard" armor for some reason. This armor is a feature avaliable on all Elites but is supposed to be disabled on those that are not supposed to wear Honor Guard armor. The game may even spawn the Elite with the wrong face, Half-Jaw's.