Folks, I've been busy. You see, it turns out that there are tools that will do an OK job of decompiling a ROM automatically. Armed with Ghidra and basic programming knowledge, I've found out enough about this game's code to be dangerous.
For example, I can now edit the ROM to change what objects are spawned in each level. This has a few significant advantages over my previous approach, which was to change the values in RAM that determine which sprite an object use. For one, you can spawn the actual object, as opposed to having a fully functional palm tree that uses the object's sprites. Additionally, the object is more likely to use its correct color palette if you spawn it in this way.
This patch is for the North American release of the game, which you can find at the BioMediaProject site. You can apply it using any UPS patching tool. Let me know if you make it past the tutorial – one of the jumps is trickier than before! (Hint: try talking to the Matoran Brakases.)
Also, looking closer at the Brakas sprites, I don't think it uses a Slizer torso, as most fan builds do. Here's my proposed build for it:
While the Mata foot torso is odd, it has precedent. This game's version of the Maha (Mahi?) definitely uses one:
Edit a/o July 27: I've fallen out of love with the mata foot torso, but still contend that the Brakas doesn't use a Slizer body.
For a one minute video, there's a lot to unpack here. This post will cover the first 31 seconds. If you're playing along at home, it might be helpful to go frame by frame, which you can do on Youtube by pausing the video and pressing the period and comma keys.
00:01: This footage, released in early March, obviously came before the Maori controversy in June, so it uses the game's original name.
00:06: Sadly, this splash screen doesn't appear in the final game. It was replaced by a similar image in which Takua isn't dabbing. Neither the dab nor the serifed "PRESS START" are in the game's memory.
00:08: The demo menu screen. The BIONICLE logo is slightly smaller and the arch it's displayed on is slightly larger than in the final game, perhaps to make room for a subtitle. Tahu's mask looks like it's based off one of the prototype models with a code on the forehead. The bottom of the frame is also slightly larger, with a strange piece in the center. The "Tohunga Games" option was, understandably, changed to "Mini Games" in the released version. There's also a "Credits" option. Once upon a time, the Cutting Room Floor page for this game mentioned that there are two unused options on the title screen that both go to the credits. Unfortunately, the Youtube video showing this has been deleted.
A quick comparison between the demo footage and the final game.
If you're unfamiliar with the final map, it's available here.
00:12: Here's the starting beach, which looks fairly similar to how it appears in the final game. The big differences are that Jala isn't here and there are two palm trees. Madu fruit is bound to the left shoulder button, and it appears that Matau's Kau Kau staff is bound to the right. The number of Madu fruit seems to be glitched. A similar thing happens in the final game when you use cheats to have more than 199 of any object:
On first glance, the Madu trees look odd, but that's just because their sprite doesn't have a shadow, unlike the final version.
00:14: Takua shakes a tree twice. In the final game, this animation ends with a Madu fruit falling on his head, stunning him. In the demo, this doesn't happen.
00:18: An abrupt cut to further up the beach. There's a palm frond poking in from the bottom left corner. I assume that, between the last segment and this one, the player cut down the rightmost Madu tree using the Kau Kau staff. However, this particular palm frond is not a part of the final felled Madu sprite, implying that sprite was changed between the demo and the final build.
The player goes on to smash the boulder using Onewa's hammer, using the same animation as in the final game. They pick up the rock ammunition, heft the smaller boulder over their head, and walk further up the beach. The one change to this section of the beach is that the tutorial signs from the final game are absent.
00:25: Takua throws the boulder he's carrying, and a shadow flashes in the upper right corner. It's unclear if this is a Rahi or if the throwing animation was glitched somehow. I lean towards the latter.
00:27: Another smash cut to a higher part of the level. The shape of the coastline is different, but the rocks and treeline are the same as in the final version of the game, which means we can be pretty certain about where this was. (See the map, above.)
The Hoi turtles and Takua are unremarkable, but look: it's our old friend, the Unnamed Bird Rahi! Three of them, in fact!
The demo footage is approximately 1.7x larger than the final game.
The sprites I've added are scaled 2x.
There are a few notable things about the bird as it appears in this demo. First, the shadows for the normal flying animation are different from those used in the final game. I'm willing to bet that they are also pixel-perfect silhouettes, just like those for the unused swooping animation. Second – though this could just be me seeing things – I think that there are more frames for the normal flying animation than are in the final game. (If I had to guess, I'd say there are twice as many.) The picture above hopefully illustrates my point; if it doesn't, well, that's fine.
00:29: One of the birds hits Takua, knocking him from 11 health to 0 health. Neither a damage animation nor a death animation plays. In any case, the bird uses the unused swoop animation, and it seems to include the frames that are missing in the final build.
00:31: As the video fades to black, the bird on the right swoops at Takua's previous position. This animation also includes frames missing from the final build. Note that its shadow appears to be directly below it (that is, not offset left or right). This will be important in a future post.
There are nine screenshots and one video of development builds of Lego Bionicle GBA, and I plan on analyzing them all. But, before I get too deep into things, I should probably establish where and when they all came from.
The video, mov_tales.avi, is included on the Power Pack CD, and was last modified on March 7, 2001, like most everything else on the disc.
mov_tales.avi.
The first batch of screenshots we have were posted by IGN Pocket on Monday, March 26, 2001, following Nintendo's Camp Game Boy Advance press event, which happened over the weekend. Thankfully, the images are still hosted on IGN's servers. (They're numbered 1.jpg through 8.jpg, if you want to look for yourself.)
The eight screenshots from IGN Pocket.
The next set of screenshots was posted by NintendoWorldReport some time later. Since the five images they posted are captioned Electronic Entertainment Expo 2001, it's likely that they were given these screenshots at that conference, which took place from May 17-19, 2001. Four of the five screenshots are functionally identical to those posted by IGN; the only differences are the jpeg artifacts and the IGN watermark.
The five screenshots from NintendoWorldReport.
There are other versions of these images, presumably because the press kits with these images were distributed to gaming sites. The IGN and NWR sets are just the only ones that mention a specific date. An extreme example of this is the European gaming site GameReactor. It's unclear, but it seems like they posted their versions in 2003, in the mistaken belief that they were screenshots from Bionicle: The Game (GBA). They have the same five screenshots as NWR, but they are resized to be 500px wide. This is kind of a double-edged sword; they're blurrier, but the jpeg artifacts are less of an issue. These versions of the screenshots are the ones in the BS01 "Quest for the Toa" gallery. (BS01 also has a pixel-perfect version of the Le-Koro screenshot, which I haven't been able to source.)
The five screenshots from GameReactor, for completeness' sake.
To put these dates in perspective, NWR reported on July 18, 2001 that the game had been finished "for a while," and was waiting on Nintendo's approval. That means that the Power Pack demo footage and the IGN screenshots were distributed around 3-4 months before the game was finished.
Anyway, that's a lot of text to say very little. Next time, I'll start actually analyzing the differences between the demo footage and the final game, which should hopefully be more exciting!
Tl;dr: the Power Pack demo video is from before March 7, 2001. At least 8 of the 9 screenshots are from before March 24, 2001. For reference, the game was supposedly finished "a while" before July 18, 2001.
Remember when I said I wasn't going to rip another spritesheet anytime soon? I lied. While I was doing research for another post, I noticed that the Unnamed Bird Rahi had sprites that aren't used in the final game. One thing led to another, and here we are:
At this point, you may be thinking "wait a minute, there are twice as many shadows as birds there!" Weird, huh? Also, the "used" shadows are shaped differently from the "used" birds, while the "unused" shadows are pixel-perfect silhouettes of the "unused" birds.
My going theory is that the "unused" shadows were temporary sprites dating back to a demo version of the game where the bird's animations used 10 frames. As for why all ten frames are still in the game, it looks like someone stopped revising the bird's sprites midway through once the decision was made that the "unused" sprites would, well, not be used. This also explains why they weren't revised to look more like true shadows.
Did you know that each Toa stone has a unique sprite and color palette?
Did you know that I don't know how to arrange
images horizontally on Blogspot?
I frankly have no clue why Lewa and Tahu's stones don't have shadows. Maybe somebody just forgot.
The Toa stones appear, of course, in the ending "cutscene":
The Gali, Lewa, and Tahu stones are clearly identifiable in these screenshots, and I think the Toa stone glowing purple to the left is Onua's. That means that either the Pohatu or Kopaka stone is glowing yellow, and the other one is glowing purple. Since the stones don't seem to be arranged in any particular order, it's hard to say which is which.
Well, it took me a couple of years, but I finally got around to making an honest-to-god spritesheet for the Brakas:
The Brakas uses 9 shades for its primary color, 5 shades for its secondary color, and a nondescript dark shade for shadows. We also know from this prototype image that it was going to be red and blue. The only Rahi in the game that uses 9 shades of blue and 5 shades of red is the unnamed scorpion found in Po-Wahi:
This exact colormap doesn't look right when applied to the Brakas, but if you rearrange the colors, separating the reds and blues, then it looks pretty decent.
Overall, compiling this spritesheet was easier than I thought it would be, especially considering it started out looking like this:
(It's actually less of a mess than it looks, since all of these 8x8 tiles are more or less ordered. That is to say, all of the tiles for animation 1 sprite 1 come first, then animation 1 sprite 2, et cetera. It did take a lot of time, though, so I'm not going to do it again immediately.)
Welcome to Quest for the Trivia, a blog dedicated to weird things about Lego BIONICLE (GBA) (2001)! For my first post, I'm going to go over a few anticipated questions, namely:
Q: Pitch this blog to me.
A: It's likeSupper Mario Broth, but for one incredibly niche game as opposed to a super popular series. Hey, why not?
A: I keep poking at this game and finding marginally interesting undocumented or obscure things. Most of my "findings" don't warrant their own forum topics, but if I post them in a Discord only like 5 people will see them before they get buried. This way there's a permanent record without cluttering up someone else's site. Also, with COVID-19 and all, I don't have anything better to do.
Q: Will you be putting any of this on TCRF or BS01?
A: I mean, I'll put the things I think are canon and notable on BS01, sure. I don't have a TCRF account and I'm not sure what their standards are, so I probably won't put anything there. Of course, if you're a TCRF contributor, feel free to use anything on this site you want (preferably with attribution). Contact me if you want more details.
Q: What tools do you use?
A: I use mGBA for emulation, Tile Molester for tile viewing, and GIMP for image manipulation. Hex Fiend is my hex editor of choice, but tbh they're all the same.
Q: How often do you plan on updating?
A: Irregularly. If I haven't posted in a while, probably I'm just busy with other stuff. When I'm out of things to say I'll let you know.
Alright, let's get started. Here's the spritesheet for the inventory. Notice anything strange?
That's right: at some point in development, the inventory would've contained the Toa stones, health and energy pickups, and a key (presumably the one used to open Vakama's cell). Also present is Takua's Copper Mask of Victory, which is overlaid on the head in the middle of the inventory screen if you beat all the minigames.
The Toa stones use different renders from the pickups seen in the final game, and they look pretty good. Lewa notably appears to be holding his axe in his left hand, as seen in some prototype versions. Also, while it's almost certainly coincidental, Pohatu's stone reminds me of Macku's doll of Hewkii from MNOG2.
But wait, what's that brown thing next to the health pickups?
Well, in the final version of the game, the brown thing (now green) is a health pickup, identified in-game as a bula berry. However, it's odd that its inventory sprite would be a different color from the other health pickups, not to mention that it doesn't have a black border or a heart in the upper left corner. And maybe I'm just seeing things, but the prototype health pickup, as seen in the game demo from the PowerPack, doesn't really look like this mysterious brown thing. (The demo video is so low-quality that a screenshot wouldn't really prove anything. You should watch it for yourself and draw your own conclusion, imo.)
And another thing: the inventory has sprites for every pickup in the game except the Vuata Maca tree crystals. Curious, huh? Here's an interesting excerpt from the game's script:
… You have found a Vuata Maca Tree crystal! You will need to find 2 health potions to fill $'s health. When $'s health is full, your quest is complete. Congratulations! You still need to get more health. You have found the first Toa Stone! …
Okay, I call it the "script", but it's really more like all of the lines in the game are stored in plain text, one after the other, in the middle of the ROM. I've included the line before and the line after for context, but the bold part is what interests me. These lines do not appear in the final game, and they describe a fetch quest for two objects. Is it possible that the original idea for the Vuata Maca Tree quest was to find health potions to heal an NPC, rather than finding crystals to heal a tree? If so, this brown thing could have originally represented a health potion rather than a bula berry. That would explain why it doesn't look like any of the other healing items and why the tree crystals are absent.
Anyway, moving on from that tinfoil hat theory, here's the spritesheet for the inventory items as they appear on the HUD in-game:
Note that the energy pickup sprite appears here as well. We'll come back to that in a later installment, probably. There are also some minor differences between the two sets of sprites, most notably in the shape of Whenua's drill:
