CyclonatorZ

It really is. The whole saga of Saffire is being described on the discord as akin to a whole season of Law and Order. There's family feuding, sabotage, backstabbing, and so on. And it all stemmed from the company losing the contract for a frickin' Bionicle game. And to think we always thought us Bionicle fans were the only ones who suffered from the game being canceled.

For all we know, Captain America in that shot could actually be someone else. Maybe Dr. Strange used his mystic arts to make Vision or Thor look like Captain America.

So, if you're not part of the Beaverhouse discord, you're probably not aware of some interesting developments in the strange story of The Legend of Mata Nui. It turns out the game was such a mess partially because Saffire Games was run by a tax-evading jerk. That jerk's name was Dave Rushton, but we've known him for a long time under another name: Deep Brick. Yes, you heard me right - going by a timeline of events that is too exact to be coincidental, the Beaverhouse team has come to the conclusion that the founder of Saffire was our mysterious source of TLOM leaks back in 2010. And get this - the reason Red Quark lost contact with him was because Dave went to jail for tax fraud. The Unseen64 website, which catalogues beta and unreleased games, is going to be doing an article on this whole mess soon. I would recommend keeping an eye out for it.

Reinventing all of the Slizers was a great idea, and one I'm surprised hasn't happened sooner. I've seen the odd MOC here and there, but never a concentrated effort to remake all 12. And I love that you've added a bit of fanfiction that is vague and yet so interesting.

I think there's a case to be made that video games and other forms of electronic media have potentially affected the sales of Bionicle, but not Lego as a whole. Recall that it was explained that G1 Bionicle fans largely did not transition into buying lego sets from other themes. I'd argue that's because Bionicle was targeting the action figure sector of the toy market more than the building toy sector. And Bionicle's sales peaked in the first couple years because, at the time, the other big robotic action figure line (Transformers) was reeling from the failure of it's latest line (Beast Machines). That kind of success seems no longer possible when action figures sales as a whole are declining. And my theory is that the action figure sector targeted a specific kind of kid that now is more likely to play video games than they are to play with real life toys. Perhaps the reason System themes like Ninjago and City still succeed is because they target a different type of kid, one who is far more creative and spends just as much time building their own creations as they do playing with the set right out of the box. I'm speaking in a general sense here obviously - I know plenty of Bionicle fans MOCed as well, but I question if the majority didn't treat Bionicle more as an action figure than as a construction toy, one they would assemble and play with but not disassemble a hundred times and combine with other sets. All of this is pure conjecture, but it would go a long way to explaining why Lego just cant get CCBS back on its feet, and why they may never.

My guess is that Voltron's design process is considerably more involved.

Somebody was google bombing the empty Bionicle link to appear when people searched for "Bionicle reboot," making it look like Brickset had recently gotten an exclusive scoop that Bionicle was coming back into 2019. But you're right, it is pretty ridiculous that this was enough to get people to believe it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb There's nothing to see here, folks. If you're still not convinced, try changing the word "Bionicle" in the Brickset hyperlink to anything that suits your fancy. You'll get the exact same results.

Because some Harry Potter fan art is so horrifying that adding the Old Ones would just be redundant. Seriously, why did Harry Potter x Voldermort ever have to be a thing?

You hit the nail on the *ahem* head, TMD.

The real reason, outside of canon: because the Toa Norik set was meant to be a Toa Dume set, just as Toa Iruini was meant to be Toa Nihdiki. I must be behind. When was this ever stated? And how does that make any sense when we know mask powers are determined by what combinations of Kanoka are used to make them?

The first half of 2011 was definitely the worst Hero Factory had to offer. Generic hero builds with all the individuality of their previous incarnations stripped away, and jumbled builds for the villains made for a pretty lame introduction to CCBS. It's a good thing they immediately got back on their feet with Savage Planet six months later. Really, that's the only wave I would consider outright bad. All the others were at least on par with the average Bionicle wave, and Breakout and Invasion From below rivaled the best years of the previous theme.

It still confounds me that this set is real. Like, seriously, a whole bunch of people had to sign off on selling this thing for 40 dollars. Even if its technically based on a scene from the movie, selling an incomplete vehicle is still really stupid. It's like if they made a hundred dollar set of Grievous's flagship from Episode 3, except it was only the front half that broke off and Anakin landed on Coruscant.

I saw a user on BZpower claim he found the demo on that old Lego Harry Potter PC game from 2002. Listen, I don't know why everyone has latched onto this Harry Potter thing, but I can guarantee you it isn't real.I’ve never played that Harry Potter game but I read about it on the Harry Potter wiki. The Wiki lists all the features in the game but it doesn’t list game demos. So yeah I agree this probably isn’t real. Yeah, with how many people were on BZPower at one point, there is no way this wouldn't have surfaced a long time ago. Most likely, if there was something on the disk related to Bionicle: TLOM, it was probably the same old Onua teaser video we've known about since 2001.

You think after 14 years they would have found a way to make the roof without all those giant gaps. We're up to 5 falcons now, and while it is the the least accurate overall, the original 1999 set is also the only one that is completely enclosed.

The alpha is certainly a janky glitchfest, judging by the stream. And I believe the prevailing theory among fans has been that it was canceled because of the studio's incompetence, Lego's official explanation non-withstanding. However, the soundtrack that was just released is an entirely different story. It's absolutely fantastic, and easily in the top tier of all lego game soundtracks ever.

I wish this was true. If this had happened around 2008, we would already be on page 6. But there's no one here anymore, and the Bionicle fanbase has largely moved on.

So, is the news team going to make an article about this soon? Or have they chosen not to due to the questionable legality surrounding the release?

Toa quest 2? I never got to play that one sadly. The only other Toa Quest I was aware of was a completely different version of Toa quest 3 that focused on 2004. It has four levels: Lhikan, Onewa, Matau, and Whenua, and features some pretty impressive platforming gameplay and graphics. There's an Archies escape sequence at the end of Whenua's level that is probably the most epic thing I ever saw in a Bionicle fangame. And for the record, the version of Toa Quest 3 you have never worked very well even when it released. I remember the executable with the Tahu and Kopaka levels crashed on the Muaka boss fight, and the one with Lewa had a nasty habit of becoming corrupted and spawning you in an endless death cycle after launching it a few times. The executable with the Gali and Pohatu levels was the only one that I was ever able to fully playthrough - and I did it multiple times, cause it was great fun. Pohatu's level being a Sonic the Hedgehog clone was a stroke of genius. It was a shame it never got patched. I believe the creator actually lost the game files in a hard drive crash, and decided to just cut his losses and release the executables he had already compiled. Both versions of Toa Quest 3 were still more impressive than the majority of games created over the course of BZP's history. Nothing like them, The Insurgent, Dark709's Comics: The Game, or Bionicle Paracosmos: the Map of Mata Nui is probably ever going to be created again.

By any chance does your stash include Super Smash Matoran? It doesn't appear so, sorry. Unless it happens to be in one of the zip-files that is just named "demo." If it is, there's no way of confirming it, because as I explained its impossible to actually open the executables.

I totally forgot you got the job at Lego. This is awesome! I'm curious: how many people does the company have employed as full-time set designers?

I have a whole bunch of them. I even made a topic at one point with the intention of eventually sharing them with everyone. Sadly, there's no real way of doing that, because the vast majority were created in 32-bit gamemaker, which means it's impossible to run them on modern versions of windows (I believe anything after WIndows XP is 64-bit). The only hope was a crude conversion program gamemaker themselves offered, but unfortunately it doesn't work well at all. I wish someone with the expertise could write a more competent version of the conversion program, but I think any interest in doing such a thing has probably faded ever since gamemaker was bought by yoyo games and became a freemium application.

Well, I wouldn't exactly call it my "dream Bionicle wave," but I had an idea way back for how the tenth and final year of G1 could have been much better. Basically, it would expand the "nostalgia" premise to cover a full two waves of sets, rather than just six small figures. It would cram as many iconic characters from Bionicle into the wave as possible. This is how I envisioned it: Winter Wave Visorak (Vohtarak) Maku Nui-Rama Bohrok Va (Kohrak Va) Onepu Ahkmou Tahu Piraka (Nektann) Gresh Takanuva Skrall Rahkshi Wairuhua (Irrnakk style set with Gali, Lewa, and Kopaka and instructions to build a combined model) Summer Wave Makuta (Miserix) Kiina Barraki (Ehlek) Bohrok (Kohrak) Onua Pohatu Mata Nui, Spirit of Light Terridax, Spirit of Darkness So, a total of 21 sets, with the caveat of far less money spent on new molds still holding. Only three titans instead of the obscene number we were getting in the previous few waves. And overall a much wider celebration of Bionicle's first run, with at least one set representing every single year, and a full set of original Toa remade with modern molds.

There was a fanfic I had an idea for way back that ditched this whole storyline for one that I thought made more sense, and removed the need to introduce multiple new species that were just equivalents of Matoran and Toa. My idea was that Mata Nui was a prototype weapon the Great Beings were developing to protect the inhabitants of Spherus Magna from the greatest evil in the universe: the Baterra. However, the Baterra arrived too early, and so a Great Being named Makoki loaded his consciousness onto the Great Spirit Robot and told everyone on Spherus Magna to hop aboard. They fled into space, and all of this was lost to history over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. The modern day inhabitants of the robot believed it to be the entire universe, and Makoki to be their "Great Spirit Mata Nui" Also, Terridax was a Great Being too (who went by the name Mangai) but he betrayed the others (including his brother Makoki) and secretly stowed aboard the Great Spirit Robot and corrupted one of the members of the Makuta race. He alone was Makuta Nui, "The Great Makuta."

That question was already answered, in the worst possible way. To quote Greg, they were "a glitch." I remember. But why were they prophetic visions and not random nonsense? Indeed. Its why the explanation given makes no sense, and was in all likelihood one of the many retcons Greg pulled out of nowhere.