emily

Huh. Never bothered to figure out what was going on with the timer since its original purpose to count down to a new chapter is long defunct. 

I'm curious as to why the timer would be different in the fan-modified saving versions of the game - that means that a fan working on it had to have been the person to change it, right? But why would they care to do that?

And its weird that the official version has the timer starting in 2005. That version of the game was polished off in 2002 and sat untouched from then until 2006 when Lego tossed it up on the site. Does the timer start date necessarily reflect when the timer was truly set? I guess it must not, seeing as the fan version (which came from the official version launched in 06) has a start in 2004.

Ooooh, nice! 

I have copies of most of the cards kicking around somewhere, but I didn't have the fun of getting them from actual packs - save for the single pack I got  back in 2002. 

I need to get some card sleeves like those you've got - much nicer than keeping the cards stacked and stowed away in a closet.

Even the Rahkshi and Makuta as villains in 2003 was a retcon. I'm not kidding - the 2003 style guide says Makuta "will eventually be shown to have good reasons for his seemingly nasty behavior... it is his methods that are at fault more than his motivation." Christian Faber corroborates this in this blog post where he ties it to the Makuta = virus analogy.

The first time we got real 'villains' would have been somewhere between 2004 and 2006, depending on when you want to place the redo of Makuta's character.

Early Bionicle seemed like it may have been aiming for a message about how enemies frequently have actual motivations for what they do, and that you should try to understand and work with them rather than blindly antagonizing them. Unfortunately that just seems to have been forgotten somewhere along the way.

Thanks again, everyone! 

awesome! can you make something similar for Gali?

Gali's next on the list! It'll be a bit of a while before I have the time to get it done, though.

Very well done, Pereki. I was expecting more what you'd done with Lewa and the Rama, but this blew me away. Great work!

 

Just out of curiosity, do you only do 2D animation, or can you do other types as well?

I'm learning a bit of 3D at the moment but I'm not super interested in it, personally. I do want to get into hand-drawn stuff, but of course that's 2D just like this animation is!

Thanks so much, everyone! 

The one criticism I have is that the new music featured doesn't have the compression of the old music, so it sticks out quite a bit. I would have preferred to hear the old SFX and music recreated, or at least have a compression effect on the new music. The style of the new music definitely fits perfectly, though.

Shadowblazer's music was great, albeit could have been better edited to fit the picture. The sound design as a whole left quite a bit to be desired.

Just to be clear, any sound design issues are totally on my end and not Shadowblaze's! I wanted to work to preserve the audio "space" of the Templar stuff and he isn't that familiar with MNOG so I did the editing work myself. But sound definitely isn't my specialty - something I'll need to work on for the future! If you're interested, Shadowblaze put up a video with everything he composed, including some really nice stuff that ended up unused.

I'd worship you forever if you could upload the Flash file like you did for the Lewa animation.

Sorry to say it isn't going to be possible this time. The final animation is split into chunks. I could combine them into a single file to export, but the reason I broke them up in the first place is because CS6 has a pretty glaring audio sync issue that gets worse as an animation runs - even if I went through and meticulously predicted where sounds would need to be placed to play correctly upon export, there's no way I could get sounds that play at the beginning of a scene to line up right. 

Yeah, those are hands, like everyone else has said. From what I can tell, they're actually leftovers from the original Voodoo Heads concept. You can't see this in the prototype models, but on the finalized model on the box from the Faber video, you can see that the axles included were originally 6 or 8 modules long, and they would've been used to rip off the heads off of your opponent. That's why the smaller models without functions all had them; they were tools. The larger models in the videos, such as the "Axe" character that was the first shown in the video, don't have those on their arms.

Hah, wow, that makes a lot of sense. Kind of crazy, actually.

At the time, the Y-joint wasn't established as able to be an abstract representation of a hand, so I guess they just came up with that big ol' two-fingered design and rolled with it. Its goofy, but I like it.

I did know a kid who insisted they were guns, though. Wouldn't be surprised if a lot of kids thought that.

oh wow yeah I can't believe I forgot about literal cartoon man Ultimate Dume and totally would have voted for him if I hadn't.

Early sets prioritized wide variation in design between waves, at the expense of diversity within them. So while all the Bohrok or the Rahkshi were basically the same, you still got the Bohrok and the Rahkshi - vastly different constructions with completely different appearances. 

Around 2006/7 they sort of traded off that ability for diversity within a wave. The Barraki and Mahri have some of the most diverse builds in comparison to each other in the history of the line, but they all fundamentally relied on elements and a design structure from the previous year. So you ended up with individual waves with more distinct individual characters, but on the whole the waves started to mix into a muddy samey-ness due to never evolving past the Inika/Piraka framework. 

Kavinika and Kinloka are both cute little models, but I went with the first one.

Yeah, the Toa Metru shoulder articulation was undoubtedly a step backward (the Toa Nuva included replacement elements that made their limbs fully poseable, so there wasn't really much of an excuse) BUT they were so conceptually out there and new that I find it hard to fault them for it. Yeah the Rahkshi may have had just a tiny advantage, but the Metru were the first Toa to be so articulated. They also carried the burden of ushering in an entirely new texture and style to the sets for the Metru Nui arc. I think they're pretty cool.

didn't vote because the correct answer is "kirikori nui." I know a trick question when I see one 

Hi folks!

I've got some bad news today. Wes Jenkins, the Creative Director on the original LEGO Island game, is in dire financial straits and needs all the support he can get. My friend Sadie knows him personally and has written this piece.
 

You can find Wes's GoFundMe page here. I know extra money is hard to come by, but please consider making a contribution if it is possible. And even if it isn't, please spread the word - it seriously goes a long way.

Thank you so much! 

LUGNET launched in 1998, probably a while after these had aired. It was the first proper Lego fansite out there.

Before that it was newsgroups! rec.toys.lego was the nexus of the fan community, and thankfully it's all still there on Google. Little tricky to navigate/get to stuff from its heyday, but it's there. 

The bad news is that I can tell you I've looked in both places for more info on the show and haven't found anything substantial. 12345678's post in the topic you linked is the best lead we've had. 

With luck, something will show up eventually! I'd really love to see the series.

EDIT: And if you're interested in obscure old lego media, you may want to check out Rock Raiders United - a couple of us over there like to dig up old stuff, and if you pick around you may find some interesting discussions. Our magnum opus is unfurling the mystery of a bizarre Time Cruisers comic.

Not sure if this's been shared yet, but credit to stardustdragon123 [tumblr] for the find.

 

https://soundcloud.com/mikeraznick/heroic-theme

 

https://soundcloud.com/mikeraznick/bionicle-the-journey-to-one-makutas-theme

Nice! I'd really like the music from the webisodes, but this works too!

Radical. Thanks so much to the Bionicle team for being so responsive to the community and getting these pictures to us asap. And thanks to the designers for making it a reality, too! 

 

The two or three short cutscenes are okay, but they look rushed, text moves by too fast to read (surprising given they had that figured out for the news updates), and they have no sound whatsoever.

 

I'm still scratching my head about that. Was Templar really in such a time crunch that they couldn't create any sound, or proofread any of the text (Nokama proclaims that they are going to "Metra" Nui if I remember correctly)?

 

The last update went live in January 04, so something tells me they were probably occupied with other stuff. Maybe other LEGO games, maybe work for other clients. 

I've heard the game does have a few cutscenes and some important story near the very end, but that's a case of too little far too late.

There is some potentially interesting stuff going on at the end, but it's muddled a lot by Templar being required to obscure any details related to Mask of Light. Instead of just keeping the resolution to the story away from the film, though, they went for working around it without attempting to contextualize anything and it becomes just a mess. The two or three short cutscenes are okay, but they look rushed, text moves by too fast to read (surprising given they had that figured out for the news updates), and they have no sound whatsoever.

I watched Journey to One when it went live at midnight. When things started taking their turn in the last ~10 minutes or so, I was like "hm, didn't think they'd take the story this far" but didn't think anything more of it. I had figured that, even if Bionicle had been canned, they wouldn't have had enough time to adjust the end of the series accordingly. 

And then the Toa flew into freaking space and I kind of lost it. In a good way. I just couldn't believe what I was watching. Then I spent the wee hours of the morning in a sort of euphoric bewilderment. Bionicle's dead again!

I'd already come to terms with the prospect of the line ending, thanks to the last time and thanks to reading the signs well in advance this time 'round. I was a little miffed there won't be a proper Makuta set like the rumors went, but combiner Makuta is ok. 

I love Bionicle, but I've never really been able to muster much sadness for it's ending. It's gotta happen sometime, right?

As others have said, Mr. Luchter has lost a lot of older files, and most are just gone forever.

Lego probably has them on some server somewhere, but since no one's looking for them they won't be uncovered.

 

Luchter did put a unique arrangement of the MNOLGII Ga-Wahi music on his SoundCloud though. 128kbps.

 

https://soundcloud.com/controlcentral/bionicle-year-2-theme

 

It contains some audio not heard in the final version of the game. Music wasn't handled very well for that game... it just sort of came and went without warning.

Great atmosphere though.

whoasnap. That's lovely, thanks for sharing it! 

It is too bad music (among other things) wasn't handled the best in mnog2. I don't think Lutcher was even able to compose any truly new tracks past the first chapter, save for the Po-Wahi ones. 

In fact, the whole game seems kind of like they gave it their all on Ga-Wahi, then either got totally burnt out on it, or ran out of time, and just copypasted the same idea with less and less content in each iteration over to the other Wahis. It's a solid game, but I think they may have been a little too ambitious.

Whoa, seriously nice find. I'm especially liking this full view of Ta-Koro and this concept art of the Rahkshi underwater.

Good to know this stuff isn't just lost to the sands of time.

What CD is this?

The Interactive Demo CD. They were given out to the winners of the Manas tournaments at Toy R Us stores.

Here's a download of it from the BioMedia Project.

The only ones that exist in high quality are the ones on that CD. Justin lost most or all of the original files - it's why he couldn't do the remasters like he had originally intended