balljoint dog

TuragaNuva's Biological Chronicle and JSLBrowning's Wall of History both collect all the disparate story material in one place for easy reading. Enjoy!

20 hours ago, Daler99 said:

What the heck?   What does this even mean?  Nice find, Derek.  

They're rating Tamaru's landing like judges at the Olympics, presumably on a 10-point scale. (All three of them are harsh critics.)

28 minutes ago, chuckschwa said:

That's crazy no one noticed this earlier! Neat to find out those codes were good for more than just the promo cd and old website! 

EDIT: @balljoint dog any chance of us seeing some trivia from Bionicle the Game GBA?

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.

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!

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!

On 4/13/2020 at 10:53 PM, Iruini Nuva said:

This is utterly fascinating. I always had a soft spot for this game. Managed to beat it twice on borrowed GBAs (never actually owned one). Really appreciate the deep look into its inner workings--will be reading through every one of these.

I'm glad to hear it! Tbh, I'm blown away by how many people are into this incredibly niche blog – thank you all.

3 hours ago, Daler99 said:

Awesome new articles!  The history of this game is certainly confusing.

 

Have you ever seen the "speed runs" of this game?  I looked them up a few weeks ago, and I'm surprised by how many invisible platforms there are in almost all the villages.

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).

Hope y'all are ready for some goofy overanalysis, because our next installment is here:

On 4/2/2020 at 2:53 AM, Jaekoff said:

Nice stuff, I especially like seeing everyone's takes on the little Rahi. It's incredibly frustrating having tiny pixel art instead of proper instructions, though.

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.

18 hours ago, Cheesy Mac n Cheese said:

I actually tried this once a really long time ago, but it didn't come out looking quite right. Come to think of it, it might actually still be intact in one of my big bins of dismembered Toa, Rahi and other miscellaneous MU inhabitants.

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!

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.)

1 hour ago, Peri said:

oh im pretty sure i figured out the spider! we lucked out because the fikou nui is built very similarly:

[snip]

Here's my take on the brakas ive been working on based on your rips... im not totally satisfied with it, but its the closest ive been able to get to what the proportions seem to be. your take with the toa foot looks about right too.

[snip]

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.

2 hours ago, Daler99 said:

Wow!  Thanks for finding me the link!  That was before I was a member here, but I was lurking, so this is probably what I remembered.

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.

14 minutes ago, Daler99 said:

Great post!  I love your build of the Brakas monkey - I was wondering what one would look like IRL.

For some reason, I have the memory that someone made actual models of all the Rahi in this game, but I can't find it.  If it didn't happen before, it'd be pretty cool to see at some point.

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!

On 3/22/2020 at 12:35 PM, TheZOMBIEJ said:

interesting stuff! good job, mate!  

also, i need to finish the game at some point in the future! ha ha!  

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)!

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.

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.

8 hours ago, chuckschwa said:

Neat! I was actually thinking about Mata Toa Stones the other day and what they would look like since I had only ever seen this image

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!

15 hours ago, Peri said:

it kinda looks like the bird's got a diving animation going on in those unused sprites... makes sense for its mode of attack, but i could definitely see it being hard to get the sense of depth to read right for an animation like that in-game, given the perspective everything is at.

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:

9 hours ago, Jaekoff said:

Is there really no pattern to the sprite data? I can't imagine having to manually stitch sprites together from that... 

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...

18 hours ago, Peri said:

excited about this! its very nice to have a full spritesheet for the brakas like this... and the toa stone inventory sprites are quite neat too. looking forward to whatever's next!

1 hour ago, Daler99 said:

As someone who just played through this game for the first time last night, this is a really cool blog.  I can’t wait to see what else you’ve discovered!

I'm glad you're liking it so far!

10 hours ago, Jaekoff said:

[snipped]

These gifs own, thanks for sharing them!

This time, we're taking a closer look at the Toa Stones!

8 hours ago, Jaekoff said:

Can you rip the sprites from the game? I've always wanted to make a Bionicle fan game but all my projects die on the vine because I have no art assets. I've been thinking of just using stop motion at this point.

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!

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

12 hours ago, Mister N said:

It seems to me that this torso looks like a Slizer only because of its unusual angle.
It looks like this is actually the same torso that we saw on other Toa prototypes. In this video you can see especially how deep this hole is.

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.

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.

Cool, great find!! A while back I was wondering if it would be possible to dig up the Brakas sprites from the game, since we have such limited information about its appearance. Alas, I have no expertise whatsoever in hacking games. Thank you!

 

Do you think there's a way to extract the sprite information directly from memory or from the game binary? I watched a YouTube video once explaining the layout of GameBoy memory and I thought I heard sprites get put in a special place.

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.

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!