Battle for Mata Nui

This time, I'm going on a bit of a tangent and talking about the 2002 Shockwave game The Battle for Mata Nui. I first opened this game with the help of dirOpener back in February, and I made a post at the time about the strange prototype(?) models used for the Toa. Recently, I ripped the other assets, many of which are copied from Lego BIONICLE (GBA). And when I say "copied", I mean it.

Almost all of the Matoran huts have stray pixels around their border, and these pixels are all the same color as the corresponding pixels in the GBA maps. Keep in mind that Battle for Mata Nui was likely made after Saffire had lost contact with Lego. This suggests that Lego themselves sent maps of the GBA game to the dev team, who kinda sloppily copied and pasted the huts into Macromedia Director.

Looking at the comparison above, you might notice slight variations in shading or color between BfMN and GBA. In order to explain properly, I guess I have to talk about indexing. Indexing is a process that converts a full-color image into an image with a limited number of colors, or palette. When an image is indexed, it loses fidelity, but it takes up waaay less space. Each 8x8 tile in a Game Boy Advance game uses at most 16 colors, and there are at most 16 different 16-color palettes used for the background. In other words, every map in Lego BIONICLE (GBA) uses at most 256 colors.

The Battle for Mata Nui also uses indexed colors. However, everything in each level shares a 256-color palette. Lewa, Kongu, (the Le-Koro version of) Nuhvok, and the Le-Koro backgrounds all use this color palette:

 

This effectively means that there are fewer shades of each color to choose from. For example, there is no light tan like the one used in the GBA version of the huts, so light green is used as a substitute.

I was hoping that this game would use higher quality versions of the original GBA assets, so to find out the opposite is true is disappointing. That said, there are still some interesting things I'd like to point out.

For starters, I mentioned that "almost all" of the huts were direct copies. The two that buck this trend are in Ga-Koro. The one facing southeast is slightly larger than in the GBA game, and they both seem to have the left tentflap open and the right one closed. My theory is that the dithering (tl;dr: pixel shading) inside the GBA huts didn't translate well to the new color palette, and so parts of these two huts were manually reshaded. During this process, the center tentpole seems to have been misinterpreted as part of the right tentflap.

Many other elements are copied and pasted. Below are the ones that were scaled or otherwise altered. The Le-Koro background is new, but it seems to be made up of trees from the GBA game and in the style of the background in the GBA game.

(As a note for the future, the suva's filename is "itemalther," presumably a misspelling of either "altar" or the Danish "alter".)

Not everything is directly copied from the GBA game, but unfortunately, much of the new content went unused. Here's a sampling of new assets:

Additionally, despite their apparent similarities, most of the tiles do not correspond 1:1 with any elements in the GBA game. This is most notable in Ta-Koro, where the gray ground tiles have no equivalent in Lego BIONICLE (GBA). (Also strange: the Ta-Koro tiles use the prefix "tomb", while the Le-Koro tiles use "lewa" and Ga-Koro uses "gali".)

It's possible that some or all of these "new" assets could be reused from another game, but I would prefer to give the devs the benefit of the doubt and assume they were made specifically for this game. (The destroyed huts alone prove that they had some good artists on board, imo.)

The background color is chosen for maximum contrast and is

otherwise meaningless.

Finally, it looks like each of the "nature powers" in the game was supposed to have an on-screen effect. From left to right: the magnetic force, the magic storm, "itemhintchystal" (admittedly out of place), the fireball effect, and the rust bees. The one piece of behind the scenes info I have is that LEGO vetoed the fireball effect for being too violent. I assume that, rather than replace those two sprites, the devs commented out the effects entirely? (Unfortunately, the tool I used to remove the game's protection can't recover the actual code, so this is just a theory on my part.)

Not to get all misty-eyed over a middling toy promotion game, but it's kinda sad how many of these elements went unused in the final game. If the assets are any indication, I suspect the devs had more ambitious goals than they were able to achieve. Imagine what this game could be like if the Bohrok actually moved around destroying huts instead of spinning in circles next to them...

Anyway, in case you missed the link at the top, all the assets are on spriters-resource now. (nb: the characters are sorted by the names they use internally, including "Wakama" and "Matua".) Feel free to use 'em for whatever you want, with or without credit – just be sure to send me a link when you're done!