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balljoint dog

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Everything posted by balljoint dog

  1. TuragaNuva's Biological Chronicle and JSLBrowning's Wall of History both collect all the disparate story material in one place for easy reading. Enjoy!
  2. They're rating Tamaru's landing like judges at the Olympics, presumably on a 10-point scale. (All three of them are harsh critics.)
  3. Oof. Of all the Bionicle GBA games, that's the one I know the least about! It's possible, I suppose, but I'd like to finish the 2001 game before moving on to another one.
  4. Back in the saddle again: I've also amended the "cheat codes" article to reflect a new discovery: the six codes used to unlock minigames are actually a combination of each Toa's mask and canister codes! For example, Lewa's mask code is 3-LT, and his can code is 154, so the cheat code that unlocks Kewa Bird Riding is 3LT154. This feature is mentioned offhand in early press releases, but not in the game manual or either walkthrough. Weird!
  5. My next post goes deep into the connections between Lego BIONICLE (GBA) and everyone's favorite online game featuring Mata Nui. That's right: here's The Battle for Mata Nui!
  6. I'm glad to hear it! Tbh, I'm blown away by how many people are into this incredibly niche blog – thank you all. They weren't intended to be invisible platforms, the speedrunners are exploiting a glitch in how the game handles collision. Like most of the game's glitches, this was discovered by a runner named Memory, who (it's safe to say) knows more about this game's mechanics than anyone. If you want more details, I highly recommend her tool assisted speedruns of the game and their commentary (one, two).
  7. Hope y'all are ready for some goofy overanalysis, because our next installment is here:
  8. In a way, it adds to the fun – it's like how Lego sets used to have "inspiration models" where they just gave you a picture and you had to figure out how to build it. No two people will build the Brakas in the same way, and I think that's beautiful. Eh, who am I kidding? It's frustrating. As Peri's post shows, it's kind of a tricky build. I didn't know the gray piece used for the abdomen even existed before now. Got another post for you today! Short, marginally interesting, and with little-known trivia, it's probably the truest I've been to this blog's mission statement. Also, if you're into speedruns, Derek M.K. will be running this game at not one, but two marathons tomorrow! His first run starts at 11:30 AM EDT at https://www.twitch.tv/calithon. His second is at 10 PM EDT at https://www.twitch.tv/esamarathon. It's a fun run to watch and it showcases a bunch of interesting glitches. Check it out!
  9. Another update, wrapping up the demo footage: And here's my take on the Brakas! (Don't worry, it's a bonus. This won't become Balljoint Dog's MOC Blog, I promise.)
  10. Dang, that spider is dead on! Nice catch! Tbh, the Brakas torso may as well be a Rorschach test, but it looks like we have the same proportions, which is something. Oh yeah, same. Sometimes I regret missing out on the golden age of BZP sprite comics... but frankly, it's probably for the best, lol.
  11. I'm sure many people have tried! The first that come to mind are @Peri's from, gosh, almost seven years ago now: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=533174 One that I'm pretty sure nobody has built is the spider, since it's a blurry block of liftarms that somehow tapers. That said, if anyone feels up to the challenge, I'd love to see your take on it!
  12. Eh, it's fun but repetitive. If you quit because you weren't feeling it, there's not much point in picking it up again, imo. Thanks for the feedback, anyway! This time: more Brakas, and the first ROM hack for Lego BIONICLE (GBA) (2001)!
  13. It was probably even weirder for, say, Vhisola to be told how she felt about Nokama in a past lifetime. The memory wipe situation is truly fertile ground for angsty fanfic.
  14. There are three big stumbling blocks I see here. The first is that Lego would never make a movie without having a corresponding toyline, and they've given up on constraction. Second, it would be hard for Lego to convince any studio to make an all-CGI blockbuster film out of an IP which failed pretty definitively the last time it was rebooted. Third, the Great Spirit Robot was foundational to the first eight years of Bionicle, and that twist has already been revealed. I think that to keep the feeling of Bionicle, you'd need a different big secret that underlies all of the mysterious goings-on. IMO, that's a tall order, but there's a reason I'm not a writer. But, for the sake of argument, let's set those aside. Again, the foundation of Bionicle, to me, is its atmosphere of mystery. When it comes to Hollywood writers who are good at setting that kind of atmosphere, the big three that come to mind are J. J. Abrams and the Nolan brothers. That's not to say that I like much of their work, or that I necessarily trust them to pay off on mysteries in a satisfying way. All the same, I think they could do a decent job with the first installment in a series, so long as the reins were quickly handed off to someone else. (Preferably someone who actually carried those mysteries forwards instead of actively shunning them.) I don't have a dream cast in mind, because good actors are frequently not good voice actors, and I don't watch enough cartoons to know any big name VAs. When it comes to the soundtrack, I think any kind of pop music would be distracting and take away from the atmosphere. I also wouldn't want something that sounded John Williams-y, so (with all respect) Nathan Furst would be out. Idk, maybe Hans Zimmer would be a good fit? But to be honest, any future reinterpretation of Bionicle would probably disappoint me, because it wouldn't be enough like the idealized Perfect Bionicle that lives in my mind. More than any kind of reboot, I would like to see new creative projects done by people who were into Bionicle as kids, taking inspiration from the story but doing something radically different. Just my two cents.
  15. Glad to hear it! I think Litestone (the team that's rebuilding The Legend of Mata Nui) has plans to remodel the Toa stones, so keep an eye out! Yeah, I think you're right. Also, the bird's hard enough to hit in-game as it is, and I have to imagine the dive attack would only make that worse. This time, we're taking a look at the demo footage from the Power Pack, in which Takua dabs and is killed by a bird:
  16. I mean, each sprite's pieces are grouped together, it's just that, a lot of the time, those pieces aren't in any sort of order. It's more like 100 tiny jigsaws one after the other than it's like 100 tiny jigsaws whose pieces are all mixed into one large pile, if that makes sense. Two updates this time! The first one has more unused sprites, and the second one is setup for things to come...
  17. I'm glad you're liking it so far! These gifs own, thanks for sharing them! This time, we're taking a closer look at the Toa Stones!
  18. Ripping the sprites from this game is a tedious process, and I'm not planning on ripping anything I don't find interesting or notable, I'm sorry to say. If you want background assets, you could probably cobble something together from the Quest for the Toa maps on BS01. As far as sprites go, you could try Chimoru R or Rayg or something? You'd have to do some custom spriting if you didn't want to make a sidescroller, but it would give you a base to work from, at least. Anyway, speaking of interesting and notable sprites: here's the Brakas!
  19. Hey y'all! I recently realized that I've poked and prodded at Lego BIONICLE (GBA) (aka Quest for the Toa, aka Tales of the Tohunga) a lot, and as such I probably know a thing or two about it that most Bionicle fans don't. Nothing earth-shaking or with deep canonical implications, but things I find interesting nonetheless. Many of these "minor discoveries" don't really merit their own forum thread, so I've created a blog where I'll start posting about them. I hope that it'll be interesting whether you've played the game or not, in the same way Supper Mario Broth is interesting. Give it a look and let me know what you think! Post 0: Introduction and FAQ
  20. Thanks for sharing this! I don't think I've seen these prototypes before. It's true that the torso in this video looks a lot like the sprites, but the sprites don't seem to have the same narrow waist or the hole in the pelvis. Of course, they're so small that there's a lot of guesswork involved. It's also interesting to me that the builds in the video look more like the final sets than these sprites do... except for Gali, where the opposite is true.
  21. Battle for Mata Nui was a Macromedia Shockwave game released during 2002. In this real-time isometric strategy game, you control the Matoran, Toa, and Turaga of Le-, Ta-, and Ga-Koro as they try to fend off the Bohrok swarms. As a kid, the sprites in BfMN looked odd to me, but the only thing I noticed was that Tahu has Vakama's firestaff instead of his normal fire sword. However, when I ripped the assets from the game recently, I gave the sprites a closer look, and noticed all sorts of interesting things: (special thanks to r543 for noticing the slizer-like torsos.) From the number of Slizer elements, especially considering that the Boneheads of Voodoo Island used Slizer heads as feet, I think these sprites are based off of undocumented prototype 3D models. How those pre-2001 models ended up being used as reference for a 2002 game is a mystery, though. My best guess is that when Lego commissioned this game, they sent the game devs a bunch of miscellaneous assets without vetting them too carefully. This would also explain why some elements are reused from the 2001 Bionicle GBA game. Once I finish ripping the Bohrok sprites and the background tiles, I plan on submitting all the assets to Spriters' Resource. Until then, here's what I have done: https://imgur.com/a/fJIwXuq EDIT 4/28/20: I finally ripped all the sprites, and with more accurate colors, too! Check it out, y'all.
  22. Haha, thanks! I don't have much experience myself, truth be told. The game uses uncompressed graphics, so it's easy enough to open the binary and look at the sprites… but they're broken up into a bunch of pieces, and the whole thing looks like a mess to me. The way to go would be to use an emulator with an OAM viewer, which lets you view each sprite on screen in isolation and tells you its position in x-y coordinates. It'd still mean piecing together the full sprite, though, and with 10 animations with about 10 sprites each, I'm not feeling particularly inclined to do so.
  23. I've been messing around with Tales of the Tohunga recently, and I figured out a cheat that lets you change an object's sprite to any other sprite in the game. Turns out, that includes the Brakas sprites! (Unfortunately, they default to Takua's color palette, and I don't know how to change that.) The Brakas has ten unique animations, which you can see in this youtube video right here. Things get a bit glitchy when the original sprite is smaller than the sprite you're replacing it with, so in the movie the Brakas sprite is substituting for a Bula tree on the starting beach in the game. Idk how kindly BZP takes to talk of emulation, so for more details, check out my Biomedia thread here!
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