Peri

thanks all for sharing your experiences, i didnt get to visit a legoland until 2011 so hearing about the bionicle stuff i missed out on is very neat!! vakama and hahli narrating the 03 fireworks show is an interesting pairing, and its cool they were running mnog on the clubhouse computers in california. still hoping someday someone who witnessed the tribal jam in 01 will come forward to describe it... ive only been able to find this lone photo:

pics and scans from the tribal quest as it was in california. they had an excess of tgnms there, too, lol

That 1800 is just the Lego shop at home number... I'd wager they offered the slizer-branded spare disc packs by mail order.

According to Greg, the original bible said Mata Nui was "in a place that might be earth," so there is some precedent if this teaser were meant to be taken literally. I'm not convinced though Antarctica here is meant to be more than symbolic, if only because itd feel somewhat redundant for Faber to be trying to get two "near future on Earth" environmentalist narratives off the ground at once. but on the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me too much if that were the case. I guess we'll see, hopefully.

Yay, glad to see this is up! Excited to read more of these through proper translation instead of just google... the blog looks really spiffy too. nice header!

As Cheesy said, we've got their version of mnog saved on bmp. All our versions of the game should have that text re-implemented as well (save for the official 2006 download, which is unmodified from how lego presented it). I strongly recommend you try a download version of the game as the streaming ones are only going to get more and more broken until/if we find a workaround for the deteriorating support for Flash.

I'd happily check the inventory number on mine - if i had access to it atm. Hopefully Planetperson has his more close at hand.

Yeah, the US release of the Toa Metru never came with CDs at all - they were Europe only. Your findings with the minicomics seem correct - I only ever got the Matoran version of the comic. In fact, I had no idea there was an alternate Toa Metru one lol. Ive long assumed my Metru Nui minicomics came packaged with my Toa Metru, but considering the ebay listings you found, combined with the fact mine are all the Matoran version, it seems a safe bet they came from my Matoran sets. If you're able to scan the Toa edition at some point, that would be great - BS01 and bmp only have the Matoran one (i believe from some scans i made many years ago).

Hi BZP! been a bit. Here's my take on an animation Templar intended to include in mnog, but didn't have the time to finish. Its about Onua!

The Mask of Destiny news archives are preserved on the biomedia project servers; theyre not currently accessible but that will not be the case forever. Sorry i can't give you more right now!

I have no memory of making such a change, but it's certainly likely that it was my fault, considering that the book type-ups came from me. Perhaps I was somehow bothered by the sword being in two pieces? I really have no idea at this point... Might've been edited since that's potentially one of Hapka's Nuva/original Toa confusion slipups that made it to print - the key art of the Nuva has Tahu with his magma swords combined into one big sword.

even if scans aren't possible, i think people would appreciate photos!

been working on a story update for biomedia and part of that is adding the books - i think ive sourced most of these from them same places you have, but i also seem to have found dark hunters somewhere. enjoy!

If it was ever said by anyone that Lego took the words from some proto-Polynesian language, whoever said it was misinformed. It was Alastair Swinnerton who initiated the word-appropriating, and while he does say that Maori wasn't his 'first choice' (that was Rapa Nui, which as far as I can tell is no more proto than Maori), he says he used a Maori dictionary. That said, even the initial four words Swinnerton took to name the Toa (Tahu, Gali, Fonua, Lewa) come from a selection of languages - it seems that either the dictionary he had was woefully inaccurate, or from very early on the Bionicle team was comfortable taking from whatever culture they liked without much specificity beyond "Polynesia." Either way, all the languages used are modern and, quite the opposite from being early and archaic, many are in danger of dying out thanks to colonial practices violently suppressing Polynesian languages. Gamilaraay, the language Gali's name is taken from, is already deemed dead, with no fluent speakers left alive today.

Ok so, poking around bricklink it looks like these two (ish ?) posters were probably included in some run of some Bionicle product or another (based on the smaller size and the Universal and Gameboy logos on some of them). I got a poster like the Tahu + Muaka one with my copy of Quest for the Toa, though mine had a different back.