your jumpy and a whole humpy

Oh man where do I start with this guy

What is going on with that launcher

Are those butt cheeks

I’d like to thank Stuart Sayger for designing the ugliest bonkles characters of all time

so I’ve received an interesting tidbit from an iPhone-owning friend who has the HF Brain Attack game on her device: apparently they now do microtransactions to buy armour for use in-game

something about this seems overwhelmingly stupid.  I’m not sure whether it’s the fact that it’s a cheap shitty toy tie-in game and trying to squeeze microtransactions out of it is optimistic at best, or that they’re missing the obvious opportunity to better tie in the game’s functionality with the actual toys - like, registering a hero core code unlocks a set of armour as well as netting you points, thus giving you even more incentive to buy the toys the game’s supposed to be supporting as advertisement

incidentally we’re probably not going to bother reviewing the game because seriously who cares; if you want to see it torn to shreds, try The Three Virtues’ take on it.  on the other hand I really should get to work doing a review of the TV episode (and the second book *sigh*) now I have the time

I found it

The lost Bionicle costume

so this combiner model from 2010 is meant to be this guy

frankly I’m surprised it slipped my mind to not post him here earlier because holy shit that’s a bad combiner (it also doesn’t make much sense as a Hero because come on, if Evo is anything to go by they’re racist fucks who’d lynch anyone who stands out from the Hero norm as much as he does :P)

I’m currently on a bit of a Star Wars kick (it’ll abate again soon enough), so I was pretty eager to see the leaks for the winter 2013 sets.  I’m pretty pleased with what I saw (this set in particular is absolutely stunning), but then I noticed this set.

The SW planet sets are I suppose an odd if interesting idea, but I admit they’ve never really sat well with me, insofar that there’s not really much one can do with a plastic sphere representing a planet (though the minifigs and mini vehicles are consistently nice).  This “planet” set is supposed to represent the asteroid field from The Empire Strikes Back, but quite frankly, the job they did was impossibly awful and in defiance of common sense.  It’s literally a black ball with a few specks of brown painted on.  I know there isn’t much you can do with an asteroid field in that capacity, but that’s the entire problem - with this in mind, who the hell thought pursuing that part of the film at all was a good idea?  Geez, this is actually sadder than even the worst sets Bionicle and Hero Factory have to offer.

(the mini TIE bomber is pretty nice though)

So while poking around the BioMedia Project (by the way you really should be giving this place a look if you still care about bonkles), I chanced upon an archived game called “Sands of Time”, from a Disney XD mini-site (why does Disney XD have this? I don’t think any branch of Disney had anything to do with 2009.  oh well moving on).  I was in a Bara Magna mood for whatever reason, so I thought I might as well.  I wouldn’t describe what followed as a fun experience.

Its gameplay is pretty awful, and I don’t think I’ve seen a worse flash game peddled by an “official” media outlet - all you do is jump around with some VERY wonky physics and attempt to stomp on top of other Glatorian.  Yeah, I know this sort of thing is par for the course for little Flash games like that (MNOLG has seriously spoiled me in that regard), but that’s not even why I’m here writing about it.  No, the only reason I thought it’d be worth writing about here is because of two particularly hilarious problems:

• BS01 describes it as a remake of an earlier bonkles Flash game, Sea Survival.  That’s not entirely accurate - by the look of things, it is just a reskin of Sea Survival, only changing the graphics while leaving the game itself unmodified; the term “remake” implies, y’know, effort.  I guess that’s not exactly insidious, but boy does it show - when jumping, sometimes Strakk LITERALLY TURNS INTO TAKADOX.  They’re not even in the same art style - the Takadox graphics from Sea Survival are unique to it (?) and are actually moving somewhat naturally, whereas the rest of the Glatorian graphics… well, I’m getting to that.
• Oh yes, the visuals.  For the models/sprites/whatever of the four Glatorian involved, they just used stock images of the sets with no alteration at all.  They’re just standing there in their stock poses - or rather, jumping while not budging from their pose at all (which is made even funnier by how some of them are actually firing their Thornax in said poses).  Not to mention, the cropping is really bad on the pictures - there are a lot of aliasing artifacts on their borders, and it looks awful.  The rest of the visuals are also crude and unexciting, but that’s far less important.
• And to ice this cake of bitter failure?  They didn’t even use the ACTUAL set images - the pictures used are earlier prototype ones, wherein everyone is using zamor launchers to fire their Thornax.  I guess I shouldn’t complain about that TOO much since the prototype Gresh is infinitely superior to the shitty final version, but it’s the principle of it all.  This, as I recall, was a fairly widespread issue in 2009.

So basically it’s easily the shittiest game of any description I’ve ever encountered (okay I concede that Big Rigs is worse but w/e), but honestly, that takes a backseat to the fact that the graphics and according Takadox issue are absolutely hilarious in their pure ineptitude.  I guess I shouldn’t expect all that much from generic browser games promoting products like this, but I’m not really - even the 2007 version of this game, though being identical in gameplay, at least had the decency to do its own graphics that made sense as game graphics (or, if they actually WERE borrowed from somewhere else, then at least they fit the game).

y’know we could quit doing this properly and turn into a blog only about bad Stuart Sayger bonkles comics art, and we’d still have enough material to last decades

poor Vakama :(

problems with Stuart Sayger’s run on the bonkles comics, #491

seriously it’s not as if he didn’t have access to reference material for the Ignika’s appearance

(n.b. I’m sure his other work is good and his style lends itself well to other things… it just doesn’t lend itself well to bonkles at all; perhaps the less intricate patterns of Hero Factory would fare better under his direction, but…)

So I was giving this BZP topic a flick-through and a reply had a link to a picture of this set, which immediately took my curiosity.  Most people versed in bonkles, especially those who paid attention to BZP’s news between 2006 and 2008, would be aware of the numerous “Good Guy”, “Bad Guy” and similar sets with low piece counts which surfaced as free giveaways or promotions mainly in Europe during this time; perhaps the most infamous one of these was this one, which garnered lots of attention because of its passing resemblance to Turaga Lhikan.  By my understanding, this practice in general is/was pretty common among LEGO themes, normally comprising miniature vehicles or similar with few pieces for the purposes of promotions, but when translated to the BIONICLE building style, it had interesting results, to say the least.

Anyway, this is likely one of those, and it is by a long shot the weirdest I’ve seen (and yet it’s still probably got the closest to a coherent design of any of these).  Seriously, it is a goddamn flying Zamor launcher, and the rest of its anatomy isn’t any less strange; for example, the foot which comprises its underside, which admittedly is hard to see from here.  Admittedly it’s pretty par for the course as far as these things have always been concerned, but come on.  Flying.  Gun.  With.  Wings.

Come to think of it, it’s a shame that as far as I (or Brickset) know, the practice petered off after 2008.  While these could never exactly be considered good, at the very least they’re kind of fascinating to regard in a way, and I’m legitimately curious as to what sort of… things… could have come out of equivalent promotions for Hero Factory.

Okay, we now return you to your scheduled doldrums.  The main reason I’m even posting this is because even back in the day when BIONICLE was a thing to which I paid attention actively, there was something I found fascinating about these rare promotional sets with borderline absurd builds.

(and yes, despite the quality of the image, this one is legitimate; its instructions are hosted on LEGO’s website, and the quality of the JPEG pictures contained in those has historically been somewhat poor compared to the actual vector instruction illustrations)

Don’t you miss the days when LEGO’s constraction combiners weren’t absolutely dreadful?  Sure, the Toa Kaita weren’t exactly paragons of design sense themselves, but as you can see from this, they could’ve been SO much worse.  Admittedly, they’re working with that godawful Hulk set so I guess I should give them some slack; you won’t find gold in horse shit, after all.

Sometimes I really worry about the constraction design team.  Suddenly I wonder if the HF team were also responsible for the Super Heroes constraction figures.  Either that, or the HF team passed along notes about how to suck at set design.