News

Cancelled City of Legends Game Demo – Now on PS2!

Hexadecimal Mantis has been doing amazing work behind the scenes researching the development of Bionicle: The Game and its cancelled sequel, City of Legends – and now his research has procured a PS2 build of the latter’s movement demo! Unlike the Xbox build, this one features working sound, among a few other miscellaneous bells and whistles. You can download the PS2 build directly from this link, or on the retail games page. Hex has learned a LOT beyond this as well – take a look at his full post for all the info.

Video Games!

Do you like video games? Do you like Bionicle? Have we got some news for you.

It finally happened! The BioMedia Project now hosts the full assortment of Bionicle video games. The new stuff is over at Retail Games – stuff like Bionicle: The Game, Bionicle Heroes, and Maze of Shadows. The Legend of Mata Nui has found its home there as well!

The long-time mainstays of the archive you’ve come to expect, like MNOG, MNOGII, VNOG, and, fret not, Mistika: Trail of Glory, are all now to be found on the Web Games page.

Both pages are reached from the Games page, naturally! Enjoy the update, and look forward to even more Bionicle media to come! Here’s the full changelog:

– divided games page into Console and Web games sections
– added all the Bionicle console games
– added flash content warning
– moved Bionicle Heroes demo and City of Legends movement demo to Console Games from Promo CDs
– moved fan games to Fan section

Set Review 40341 LEGO xtra Sea Accessories

LEGO has been kind enough to send us over a few of their 40341 LEGO xtra Sea Accessories sets for review, available now on LEGO Shop at Home, and today we are going to review it.

This will be the first of what will be many more set reviews to come in the new year, so stay tuned for more to come.

The Set

In the LEGO xtra line, there isn’t much to build, so it’s all about the pieces that come in the “Sea” themed accessory set. All of the standard pieces are pictured on the cartoon-style packaging, but let’s take a closer look.

In this set there is a mix of animals, pirates, and modern beach accessories. The selection of parts is also rather nice, and includes a number of pieces and color variants which are new to me. There are also a number of spare parts that come in the set, but more on that later.

When all assembled, this is what it looks like.

When all is built you get:

  • 1 Shark
  • 1 Clam
  • 1 Starfish
  • 1 Parrot
  • 1 Fish
  • 1 Surf Board
  • 1 Pair Swimmer Fins
  • 1 Buoy
  • 1 Barrel
  • 1 Oar
  • 1 Fishing Spear
  • 1 Treasure Chest
  • 1 Treasure Map
  • 1 Binoculars
  • 2 Jewels

 

Pieces

Probably the biggest highlight of this set is the shark.

It’s the new-style of shark with the painted eyes, which has been fairly popular. If you are looking to build up on sharks for you watery scenes, this set is probably a good way to get some.

Another neat piece is the parrot, which until now has only appeared in this coloring in one very large set.

It’s the 2-color plastic parrot design with blue and yellow, which combine to produce a swirl pattern. That swirl pattern is fairly randomized, kinda like BIONICLE Kraata, so you can actually get multiple different-looking parrots if  you buy multiple copies of this set. Taking a peek at the other poly bags, we can see how much  they can vary.

If you are buying this set in a store, you may want to take a peek at the contents through the transparent ploybag.

The white clam and star fish are also pretty nice.Don’t ask me why the packaging suggests putting the star fish inside the clam though…

One questionable choice of parts selection though was the choice to only include one oar.

You only get one oar in this set, so if you want a pair of oars, you will need to pickup two copies of this set. The set is pretty cheap though, so getting more than one isn’t a bad plan.

 

Extra pieces (xtra pieces)

These pieces aren’t officially part of the part count, but they will normally appear in the set under.


Keen eyed readers might notice you can actually build an extra fishing spear with this pieces.

With most don’t have the extra pieces to actually build anything, so that’s a pretty cool bonus. The extra star fish and jewel are also pretty cool, and the extra flipper means if you get two copies of this set you would get three sets of flippers.

The Sound of Updates

We’ve got a few small updates to the music archive for you today. We’re calling it version 2.2.1 – that’s a whole .1 up from the last version! What all does it entail?

  • Legend of Mata Nui soundtrack updated by Litestone with new track names and the addition of Bionicle Age and Obey the Force, the tracks they have used for update trailers.
  • Sound Effects download package updated with sounds from the demo for City of Legends, the unreleased Bionicle: The Game sequel. These are courtesy of Hexadecimal Mantis!

Happy listening.

New 2001 Comics from Adventures! Magazine

LEGO Adventures! Magazine ran between 1999 and 2002. For years, scans have been on the ‘net of three Bionicle comics from the magazine’s Russian localization, centering on Lewa and Gali. Darth Jaller was able to provide English scans of The Legend of Lewa parts one and two a while ago, and now PANGOLIN2 has scanned Gali’s Tale, as well as – surprise! – two additional comics focusing on Tahu we never even had in Russian.

Check them all out on our miscellaneous comics page. Huge thanks to PANGOLIN2 and Darth Jaller!

PANGOLIN2 also provided English scans of some more Bionicle content in Adventures! Magazine. Stay tuned, this will be added to the archive in the future.

G2 Story Bible, Style Guide, and More

Recently these items were publicized online. BMP was made aware of them several months ago and can confirm their authenticity. The bible was only available in Russian, but thanks to the efforts of Dryu_nya we are also able to provide an English translation. The Style Guide is incomplete, but contains several original PSD files in addition to PNGs. On top of all this, a few misc items were discovered, alongside PSDs and high quality JPEGs of the 1HY sets’ boxart.

Download from the links below. The materials will be integrated into the archive as time allows.

2015 Story Bible
2015 Style Guide
2015 Product Images + Misc

Minor MNOG Update

Our versions of MNOG are built off of the official 2006 download release from LEGO. Turns out there was a minor hiccup as a result: the 2006 version was missing a couple of the dialogue files for the Chronicler’s Company on the road to the Kini Nui. Thankfully, these files are present in the version of MNOG put up by Templar Games in 2013 on their site.

So we’ve re-added the missing files! Though of course the official 2006 release remains unmodified for posterity’s sake. You can download it on the Games page, along with the other versions.

Video Updates Now for Download!

Late last year we rolled out a big update to the Videos section. There was just one problem – you couldn’t download it. Well, good news, that’s a problem no more – Videos 0.7.1 is now up for download! In addition to all the changes you can see here and here that weren’t already a part of the download archive, we’ve added even more Bionicle videos – to both the downloads and to streaming. check it out:

0.7.1 Changes

  • General reorganization/update to fit with Streaming updates
  • Character Videos
    • Added stage for Vahki animations from Templar
  • Commercials
  • Games
    • Added Legend of Mata Nui Behind the Scenes
  • Short Movies
    • Updated Mata Nui Rising to 480p version from Binkmeister’s YouTube
  • Web Animation
    • Merged and updated Wall of History news pdfs with header images from bionicle.com
  • Miscellaneous
    • Moved the Tahu Nuva vs. Kohrak animation here, as it turns out its relation to Bionicle: the Game is unclear
    • Moved the “Lewa demo” (aka Infected Lewa) animation here as well as its provenence is unknown

In addition, a few small cleanup changes have been made to just the streaming archive:

  • Updated links for MNOG and Wall of History animations to avoid auto-download in some browsers

Stream it or download it – whatever you prefer, enjoy the updates!