emily

A little late here, but thanks for pointing this listing out, I got a set of cards from it. Weird that the seller has so many of them - maybe they had wider distribution in Germany than the US.

This is so incredibly kind and generous! I went for a Lava Beast, never had the opportunity to get one before. Thank you.

There are some pictures around the net. Understandably, most people seem to assume they're bootlegs, but the menus actually use some glatorian assets that never saw the light of day before, let alone would have been easily accessible to bootleggers. Considering the publisher on the case is named as Universal, combined with the very limited distribution, I'd wager these are just extremely budget products that Universal patched together partly using a cache of assets leftover from The Legend Reborn.

MNOG and the webisodes Templar did are all made up of SWF files, which hold on to all the individual assets that go into a given scene. I use SWFRIP, to either extract the assets or ready a given file to be open in Flash directly, depending on the context. It takes a while to build a library of stuff by grabbing masks and such from the different files where they make an appearance, but definitely much faster than redrawing everything, haha.

Historically, Brickset has been ok with making up names to suit polybags when they aren't given specific titles - all the "good guy"s and "bad guy"s are only known as such because that's how Brickset decided to name them. I've never seen any official source for Villain Pack or Accessory Pack either, and it'd be my guess that they are fan inventions.

Here's my copy of that issue, but weirdly it doesn't have that ad in it. Yeah, any of the cards that either have a faint rainbow tint or are unusually dark in Screenguy's gallery are the foil ones. One included per booster pack iirc.

There's a fair chance that the rainbow cards were just extra stock of QFtM foil cards they had around once the line had retired, especially if it was in 02, when the games upper deck had out for bionicle consisted only of the cards you could get in the theme decks.

It's all good! Sorry if I came off as kind of rude, sometimes I take mnog a little too seriously.

It was, check out this quote from the page Surel-Nuva linked up above: It was fan-written, just officially endorsed. The real-time timeline for mnog is best demonstrated in a line that lost its place once Po-Wahi was unlocked. Before then, a guard blocked the Ga-Koro marina and said You can still find the text file in the game, text_v.4n_guard_eng.txt. It's a pretty clear allusion to how the update would be arriving in later spring. I hadn't thought about how the last two chapters fit together seamlessly, though. Fair point, but I don't think that that changes how things worked with the other updates. It was the end of the game, and Templar being trusted to even depict the Toa Kaita battle at all was a last-minute decision that would have called for such adjustments to the formula. With regards to the mnog timeline contradicting Greg's retcon in 2008, Greg himself has contradicted that timeline in different Q&As. But in any case my intent is not to get into a debate about what should or should not be considered "canon" - I just want to point out what the original, creative intent of the mnog was.

It had them playable in either order, but the same could be said of Onu-Koro and Po-Koro. The live game in 2001 was also like this, once the chapters had been released. And yet, the menu still places Ta-Koro chronologically before Ga-Koro. There was no intent to change this original order - its just that walkthough was written by a fan who either did not recall/chose to eschew the original order, and obviously the bionicle.com web team was not so pedantic as to remember minute details like that and ask that they be addressed. Also, there was no 'fixing' of 'non-canon' elements - the only thing that was altered was the word "Tohunga." As for the story flowing better that way, it doesn't really sound to me to be any better than the original intent, where the updates happened in real-time as they were released - so Ta-Koro happens a month after Takua wakes up on the beach, giving plenty of time for Tahu to have come through and gone.

If it does, than the dictionary I used was very wrong.

Gali's been feeling kind of down lately. I hope she'll be ok! animation I made. Let me know what you think, if you like!

Aw man, thanks so much for the scans! I've been hoping the English version would pop up since I translated the Russian version back in the ancient year of 2012. I hope you're able to track down the other issues, I've never had any luck finding them. Knowing there's an unseen Tahu comic makes me really wish I had! Was his about mask hunting too?

bzpers circa 2004 weigh in: yes

Sure thing! I'll do my best to remember, but don't be afraid to remind me if december rolls around and I don't post anything.

The story booklet that comes with the theme decks. It's the one with the image of the island of Mata Nui on it, to the far left in this pic:

I've got it in a couple different copies of "The Legend of Mata Nui" booklet. The totem part is mentioned offhand in the description of the Kanohi, and the ice skating was either in Nokama or Nuju's bio. I'd offer some pictures, but I'm afraid I won't have access to my lego stuff again until december.

Oh yeah, I remember those bios! They were also in the story booklet that came with the quest for the masks theme decks, alongside some other early material that mentioned stuff like nuju and nokama ice skating together on lake naho in the winter, and the toa having totems for their masks instead of the suva shrines. It's weird that all that info was considered official enough to publish at one point, only to be quietly set aside and retconned not too much later. Things like that and Greg mentioning recently that the original story bible had the toa do some kind of dance whenever they found a mask really make me wish we knew more about the earlier stages of Bionicle's development.

This YouTube channel will give you about everything we know - it has a walkthrough of the first level provided years ago by a fellow who went by DeepBrick. Gives a good idea of what the game would have been like. Good luck with your game!

I think that particular piece was composed by Justin Lutcher, rather than being drawn from a stock library. In any case, it and a few other earlier tracks from the game were available uncompressed on the interactive demo cd/Bionicle Gold - I'd link it, but considering you're behind the complete promo cd archive I'm sure you've already got it. VezonWireless also uncovered some additional music from stock libraries - check out this video and its description.

Oooh, this is really interesting - I can't believe I never caught it before. I don't know if you already knew this too, but in that same file (Text_IV.2A_2_deu.txt), Jala mentions Papu and Rangi. He even says they named Ta-Koro as the "place of fire." The corresponding English text file is, as you might expect, Text_IV.2A_2_eng.txt. The 'IV.2A' identifies the location the text file is assigned to (aka the gatehouse room where you talk to Jala), but the following digit, a '2' for these files, is the version of the dialogue. So Text_IV.2A_3_eng.txt, as an example, is Jala's dialogue for the beginning of the Ko-Koro chapter, the first time his dialogue changes after you encounter him with the 2 dialogue. The important thing here is that there is no Text_IV.2A_1_eng.txt. None of the other dialogue documents start at the number 2 like this one does. My suspicion is that the original versions were removed, but somehow the German revision was not actually corrected to remove the sensitive terms - in much the same way someone seems to have forgotten to edit Papu and Rangi out of one of Nokama's dialogue files. This theory is actually supported by the occurrence of the word "Haka" - that isn't a translation of the Takara, its the original name for the Takara. You can also find it in the early scripts Templar posted on their Tumblr. It got changed because, wouldn't you know it, the Haka is actually a Maori war dance. Like Papu and Rangi, who are of course also lifted wholesale from Maori culture, it had to be struck from the record asap. Now, why would they remove the bit about Lhii, then? Maybe just to cut down on the amount of jargon they were dumping on players, or something like that. Considering it stuck around in the lexicon, I'm assuming it wasn't a Maori term. EDIT: disregard the business with the missing file, turns out its actually there as just Text_IV.2A_eng.txt, lol. I still think there's pretty strong evidence here that the English files were altered, like the Nokama ones.

That'd make sense, but it doesn't look like it, unless it was added at a point later than the one capture wayback has of that page. A friend suggested to me that it might originate from the encyclopedia - and it turns out that the part about Lhii's death, at least, is in there. Still nothing about a pakari.

Cool, that at least resolves the question of how far back Lhii was introduced, but there's still a question of where the other details on BS01 came from. Specifically, they say Lhii was an all yellow villager with a pakari who died lavasurfing. Maybe those were just embellishments that were eked out of Greg over the years. I love how that bio also implies the Toa were on Mata Nui in the distant past. I wonder what they could've been thinking with that.

it doesn't even shoot anything

Here's an extended version of the netflix trailer plus a whole new one! I am excited for the lego anime