Fry

How do you fix up parts that are cracked? I've tried superglue but it doesn't really work at all. In other news, I've been whitening some of my yellowed and faded parts and they've been turning out great. 

I'd like to add the Rahkshi as sets I don't really like. Even as a kid I thought they were goofy looking and their little t-rex arms severely limits their poseability. Looking at my collection somehow I've ended up with all 6 in their canisters despite never making a particular effort to get them all.

I also think the original Makuta set from 2003 is kind of badly designed, as a kid the front two gunmetal Toa Nuva chest pieces were constantly popping out, and the legs had 0 articulation and barely seemed to hold up the weight of the upper body.

What are your least favorite sets?

Honestly I think the year 2004 was really bad set wise. The Toa Metru are sort of more poseable than the original batch of Toa, but I've always found them less fun to play with and to have less MOC potential. I also really hate the Metruan and hold that they are probably among the worst batch of mini-set lines in Bionicle history. They are just so cumbersome and awkward looking, especially from the side.

Even the titans which are usually the highlights of any year weren't that great, with Nivawk in particular being flimsy and more clumsily designed than Bionicle sets usually are in my opinion. Nidhiki looks cool, but in the hands he's very limited in what you can do with him and just not a whole lot of fun to build or play with. Krekka and the Vahki are alright though. Overall the sets from 2004 look cool on like, promotional posters, but they're not that fun to play with. (I could also go into how I think 2004 had a particularly underwritten story, but that sounds like a topic for another thread).

Thoughts? What are some of YOUR least favorite sets?

I wish this was the Bionicle we got.

What's up with Bionicle always having B-stories? Immediate examples that jump to mind are the Bohark Kal half of 2003, and especially the Morbuzakh in 2004... I'm not even sure I understand that one. In the movie Legends of Metru-Nui the Matoran are transformed into Toa Metru, but apparently sometime between that and them finding the great Kanoka disks they fought a bunch of sentient vines? And like befriended a bunch of other Matoran, one of whom was that a**hole Ahkmou? 

I feel Bionicle in general despite its reputation as a story-centered toy line really didn't have a very focused story. Telling massive swaths of a given year's story in, and forgive me here, what basically amounted to throw-away media (comics, books, online animations) and NOT movies and video games. Especially the latter, I feel the Bionicle world was just begging for some high quality video games to flesh it out and I don't think it every got it outside the MNOG. I hope what I said about "throw-away media" isn't too inflammatory, but what I mean by that is that probably 80-90% of Bionicle's target audience never consumed them, and by extension never had those pieces of the story. When I was a kid, I didn't know anything outside what was shown in: the first three movies, a handful of flash animations, and MNOG/Bionicle: The Game.

And then there are the B-stories, like the Morbuzakh, the Vahkii, the Bohrok Kal, The Makoki stones in 2005 (and something about the mask of light???), there's probably more examples but my interest as a kid petered out and I gave most of my attention to the earlier Bionicle years. I literally cannot even begin to imagine why any of those things exist. Why not just spend the entire year on the main story? Or if you want to explore a little subset of the Bionicle universe and dive into more detail, make a game out of it! Take a lesson from MNOG!

Wow three paragraphs now? What are YOUR thoughts on this?

Lately I've been thinking a lot about Bionicle, especially the early years. Things like the MNOG, early sets, interactive CDs, the movies...

But anytime I go back to those things, for me anyways, they usually wind up feeling devoid of any real substance. Still the profound nostalgia remains, and I mean profound. It's no exaggeration to say the entirety of my pre-16 life was unequivocally dominated by Bionicle. I still appreciate certain aspects of them, but now 20 years after the fact they just feel hollow for a number of reasons.

For starters, it just feels like Bionicle's time has past. Nothing punctuates this feeling quite like the fact that none of the links in any Bionicle media work anymore. Another thing is that a lot of the Bionicle "experience" IS hollow, in my opinion that is. Playing with sets isn't fun for me anymore. The story after the year 2002 isn't very good, although just for the record I still to this day think the original 2001 story, its atmosphere, and its background are really fascinating, I did give that article someone here wrote on the original pre-maori scandal story a read and that was very interesting.

I don't know what I'm trying to say. Is this the twentysomething's equivalent of a mid-life crisis? What are YOUR thoughts on Bionicle nostalgia? It's not very common to find someone who knows a lot about Bionicle so I'd be curious to hear your perspective.

I had no idea the masks of power were even a thing until like 2014 when I got back into Bionicle. So I was always mystified in MNOG whenever a Toa would change their mask and thought they were animation mistakes.

For the longest time I thought Kaita was pronounced "Kai - EE - tah" instead of "Kai - tah" and make that mistake every now and then thanks to 15+ years of habit reinforcement.

I was always under the impression that many years passed in-story between when the Toa landed on Mata-Nui and the end of the Bionicle story on the reunited Bara Magna, but in reality it was only like one year??

Can someone give me a quick rundown on this? 

I believe some slight changes in Flash over the years has rendered certain parts of MNOG unplayable, and the only real solution I can think of is installing an older version of flash and downloading the offline edition of MNOG.

You're all absolutely welcome <3

I've always wondered, how do they make these cheap repros? I mean, as far as I can gather from a simple picture the pieces look pretty similar to the original.

Front page of bio2001.eu5.org updated to include link to complete offline version.

No. Don't bother thinking about it for at least another ten years.

If I remember correctly the plastic dyeing only works with the original Ritz dye formula. Last I checked you could still order it on their website, but that was some years ago.

Speaking of later years, would you ever consider recreating the other versions of the site 2002 onwards?

I don't think so, this was a passion project and I only really care about the 2001 site. Then again, that's not a guarantee. Who knows, maybe one day.

There's already a petition for that but its for BIONICLE: Heroes

Lego video games exist to advertise their product lines. That's why they're almost always quickly slapped together trash. When the line no longer exists, the game might as well not exist anymore as far as Lego is concerned.

Thats such a lost opportunity.

Even if Lego wanted to fix it, I'm not sure how much success they would have re-tailoring the game to run on consoles without the source code. Not to mention the basic underlying fact that the game just plain isn't designed all that well as far as gameplay goes.

I wonder if we could potentially get official support from LEGO for our dedication to save. If they show interest in it...it could be released to the public on modern systems.

Perhaps Travellers Tales who are used to creating LEGO games could be trusted to take over and finish properly coding it.

 

And if it gets approved optimized and released on PS4, XBOX ONE, Nintendo Switch and PC then it might spark real interest in the bionicle series again. 

Sorry, but there is absolutely no way that would ever happen in a billion years

 

I assume you'd need at least some content from the missing levels to do that properly.

 

As I understand it, a lot of the "missing" content is actually present in the game files.

 

As I understand it there are some remnant assets, but hardly anything along the lines of completed levels.

Playable Kaita? Weren't they and the Manas confined to a cutscene?

 

The one that starts at Kini Nui and ends with the six Toa disappearing and the masks left on the floor.

Both Kaita were playable in the alpha. I use "playable" loosely, their section of the Makuta level is easily the most broken part of the game

how do you remember all of this info? also villages? 

How do you mean? Most if not all of the text has been backed up in one way or another, I'm not remembering anything per se  . Even some of The Buzz remains, although I plan on adding some new articles... 

What about the villages?

Kanohi partially finished

Turaga and Tohunga pages completed, please test them if you can! I also added a homepage just for convenience's sake: http://bio2001.eu5.org/

Here's some links to the Turaga, Tohunga, and Kanohi pages on the Wayback Machine if it's any help recovering those pages!

Thank you for the convenient list!!! And don't worry, all the 2001 site text survives: http://www.neoseeker.com/forums/1599/t19076-bionicle-dictionary/

"Bionicle Age" MP3 stream/download? 

when was that established?