DraikNova
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Everything posted by DraikNova
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That's not Lloyd. It's lime, like the ghost-things.
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Yeah, you're right. Meanwhile, his legs make his body resemble the classic LEGO "pathetic cage hanging off the side of the main build". The fact that it the main build doesn't help. Not all too good. Super blurry, more so than even the initial IfB summer prelims.
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I'm probably only getting the Mystery Machine (and whatever unrevealed set turns out to be unexpectedly great), but I've got to say that Velma should have removable glasses. I have no idea how that could be done, but preventing kids from recreating the "I can't see without my glasses!" scene? That's just wrong. Not too much of a fan of Scooby's overly cutesy look, to be honest. He kind of hits uncanny valley, which could have been prevented by making him blockier (which would have the nice side-effect of giving him a more classic LEGO look). Shaggy's facial expression seems kind of awkward, but I'm pretty sure I have at least one minifig head with chin stubble.
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Can someone please send me the link via PM?
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Sure looks like it. You can see the plastic bubble and the three "wings" on the edges of the tornado. Not too happy with that design, it's pretty ugly.
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That's kind of the point. One of the new pieces is just an uglier looking version of that piece. Sorry, I meant Skull Basher.
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The only one that looks even moderately finalized is Ekimu. I'm really hoping that's the case, as all of the other sets, plus the Skull Grinder, seem really, really horrible. It's a misunderstanding of the term "bare bones" that disrespects even minimal knowledge of anatomy. Did all of the budget go to the Vahki staff 2.0 or something? I mean, it's a nice piece, but not that nice. The only thing I like about the villains is that Skull Grinder uses tr. pink. I can't even tell what the Skull Slicer's mask is, or if it is in fact just a mammoth's skull. ... Ironically, of all the sets, the pathetic-sounding Skull Warrior seems the best of this mess, with reasonable-looking armor and a proper weapon. Also, I love how Ekimu's saw blade shield is customized. I might just get the Skull Grinder set for him. I'll just have to order the parts I like from the rest of them*, which is nice, as it'll leave me with enough money for Ninjago's best wave yet. *if my fears are correct and these sets are beyond the "major redesign" stage. I can't stand the look of the Skull Scorpio (which I thought was going to be a great set) and I dislike the minotaur design of the Basher. The new torso piece is just the worst. It truly and utterly is. And what's with the deformed CCBS bones? If that's a permanent change, I just might have to abandon constraction.
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Just noticed: the Morro Mech has tr. neon green versions of the shortest CCBS bones. This summer will be very very expensive. EDIT: And the Morro Dragon has either tr. neon green or lime Ninjago blades.
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Thanks! EDIT: I am absolutely in love with the Morro Dragon. It has the best color scheme EVER. And tr. neon green Chima claws? Yes please! And that build. So serpentine. The tail seems like it might be solid, though. Hopefully, that's just the blurry pictures and it'll be fully poseable. Then again, it looks like it is built using curved bricks and significant SNOT to give it it's "tank tread" look. Those wings seem mighty interesting too. The Wu dragon is rather pathetic, though. That seems like it could be just due to being further behind in the design phase, so there's still hope. Not sure what to make of that temple, or that hammer/gun thingy. I do want to know how a car counts as a "Walker". I mean, they've never referred to Jay's last name in the sets, and the only time it ever appeared at all, it was in the credits. The Titan Mechs are a mixed bag. On the one hand, there's the one that shares it's colors with the Morro Dragon. On the other hand, there's the very plain mostly white one. I think the Morro Mech makes this one worth picking up. Also, Nya. The Cole bike seems like a nice set, although I'm not too fond of the way it uses the gatling gun pieces. They seem rather exposed. I love that they're showing Spinjitzu on the box art again. It's almost become an artifact (sub)title. The Ronin R.E.X. seems like a better version of the main Atlantis sub, which was one of my favorites. It also includes the fire pieces used for the Chima Phoenix in what looks like either yellow mixed with black or yellow mixed with dark blue. I may pick this one up if I still have money. The new Bounty seems far more substantial than the first one. And it includes a mini-dragon with neon green and black versions of the aforementioned fire piece. Definitely picking this one up if I have a chance.
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Could you please either tell us where or send me a link via PM?
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Oh god, the only thing that could make that more perfect if what came back when the Protector threw the boomerang was a CCBS Takea. The Protector is just so goofy. Oh, and to anyone saying that Bionicle was dark, look at my sig. That's an actual quote.
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Here's why none of the toa, even if they all worked together, could ever beat HF: HF seems to manage an entire galaxy. I looked up what the average amount of stars in a galaxy is, and while there isn't a clear consensus, most estimates are in the 100-500 billion range. Let's say the HF galaxy is relatively small, and has about 100 billion stars. Then we assume that there's usually only one planet per star (which is very innacurate, but this is still enough for our purposes) and only one in a hundred worlds is populated (either indigenously or through colonization). The average birth rate here on Earth is 4,8 people per second. If we make a guess and say that the average birth rate/construction rate per world is about 3, that means that per hour 3*3600=10800 people are born per populated world, and 108 * 1011 in the whole galaxy. An hour is a good estimate for how long an average act of crime takes. If one in a thousand people performs a (significantly) criminal act once in their lives, that means that per hour, 108*108 people will perform a criminal act. If the total number of dangerous situations is twice that of the number of criminal acts, and it takes an average of two heroes per situation, that means that, at any given moment, 432*108 heroes will be out there. That's 43 billion. But wait. Every single villain Hero Factory has ever captured escaped during the Breakout, and they had enough heroes to send one after each of them. Let's say that HF was active for 50 years (a low estimate, considering that, if Makuro's speech in Rise of the Rookies was at all accurate, several Alpha Team leaders have existed and been decommisioned in that time). 50*365,25*24*108*108 = 4,73364*1015 heroes. There were at most 10000 toa in the MU at any time, which means they would have been outnumbered forty billion to one. The average hero might be around 2,1 meters tall. The Matoran Universe was 40 million feet tall. That's 12192000 meters. Therefore, the MU weighed (12192000/2,1)3 = 1,95689254 * 1020 times as much as a hero. Advantage: MU. That isn't the whole story here, though. In a galaxy of any size, there's bound to be a few Death Star-type weapon platforms. All HF would have to do is surround the planet the MU is on with them completely and start to fire on it. The MU has, as Teridax demonstrated, a weakness to blunt instruments. If it tried to take off, it would crash into one at a far higher speed than the "moon" was probably moving. If it used it's gravity powers, it would be crushed by them. If it just stood there and tried to fire lasers at them, it would be hit by the fire of several of the weapon platforms, destroying the MU. Suffice to say, HF has advantage in numbers. Specifically, the advantage in the number forty billion.
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I'm pretty sure that HF would have isolated Surge from his own weapons. For that matter, all of the heroes, being robots and therefore especially vulnerable to electricity, would probably be built to resist shocks. Meanwhile, in the process of using her powers, Gali would be providing a low-resistance route for the electricity, straight to her. Sure, Surge's electrical weapons would probably be useless afterwords, but HF also has generic guns, like the plasma blasters. Meanwhile, HF has cloaking tech (if I remember correctly), antigravity systems (like toa of gravity) and the ability to make people insubstantial (is that the right word for it?) while still somehow remaining capable of reflecting light and avoiding sinking to the core of the planet they're standing on*. All they'd have to do is cloak a couple of heroes** to assassinate the toa one-by-one. Sure, the toa don't need tech to access their abilities, but that's not much of a comfort when you're running on a single, slow-to-recharge battery*** and your opponents can basically throw away and replace their weapons as often as they want. Nova Blasts might level the playing field a bit, but they would also level your teammates. *They would also have to find a way to keep air from entering the space they're in while the heroes are insubstantial. You can't hear any sound from air rushing into the spot the heroes were standing in when they used that at the end of Rise of the Rookies, in case you're wondering. **Or turn them insubstantial, or use any one of the technologies invented by the HF civilization. Like I said in my first post on this topic, HF has a massive advantage regarding the sheer number of (tech-enabled) abilities they have access to. They can combine these to form billions of potential tactics and pick the best one of these. And even if I'm wrong and it was never mentioned in the episodes, invisibility is probably easier than antigravity, considering that we've managed to do so on a small-scale already. Google metamaterials if you're curious. ***Elemental energy needs to recharge, after all.
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The weaponry Hero Factory has is pretty closely matched when compared with the elemental powers of the toa. Need I remind you that HF is almost always using what is considered non-lethal force in the episodes? And even those weapons tend to cause Michael Bay-class explosions. Add in a vulnerability to getting punched in the face and the toa get curb-stomped within minutes. EDIT: Also, the toa code prevent them from killing. HF has been shown to be willing to kill infants if there's even a chance they will turn out to be criminals. See Breakout (Evo) and Invasion from Below (everyone). Note that Evo was not told to stop because of you know, the fact that it would be infanticide, but because there's a chance they might hatch.
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Hero Factory would win. HF is, first of all, better organized than any of the Toa teams, allowing for better use of tactics than the haphazard and uncoordinated operation of almost all organizations in BIONICLE barring the Order of Mata Nui and the Shadow Hunters. Need I remind you of the way the Toa acted for the first few years? "I work alone, even though every time I've tried that resulted in Makuta almost beating us." Second of all, the fact that the civilization HF comes from is capable of space-flight gives them the ability to retreat after fighting Toa and let's them do hit-and-run-style attacks. The fact that HF has an R&D team means that, if these attacks went on for long enough, they could probably analyse and duplicate any abilities the Toa have. Thirdly, HF has been in operation for a long, long time, and the current level of technology of the civilization in which it resides indicates that they've been able to store data reliably for a similarly long (probably much longer) period of time. Not to put all too fine a point on it, the HF civilization has hundreds of years of advances in psychology, tactics and pretty much every field of science, due to the aforementioned and the fact that it has had cross-contamination from various wildly varying cultures of completely different species and therefore minds. Meanwhile, while legends are passed on for thousands of years in the Bionicle universe, very little of that time has been spent* trying to study things or develop new things. *by anyone other than the GBs.
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I can't really see how one could confuse the two. You have to look at the parts while you're building anyway, which means that, if you're actually paying a normal amount of attention (i.e. any), you'll definitely see the shape of the ball joint.
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Yeah. It's really annoying that we're only getting it in gray or in specialized colors. And they're not even being consistent about the colors, what with the lower limb bones being black. I hope that we get it in black again either with the Summer villains or in 2016. At any rate, I'm going to have to order some from Bricklink. Also, looking back at the beginning of the topic, we seem to have predicted Invasion from Below to the letter.
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Just to give you an idea of the conversion rate between euros and pounds: one pound was, last time I checked, worth about 1,3 euros. So, if that's correct, these sets would have a price point of about 16,9 euros. However, if you convert it to US dollars, you'd get a price point of $20. So the price points of these sets are still very much up in the air. Considering that a lot of sets seem to be rather cheap in Britain, even with the conversion taken into account, I'd say that these could all be $20 sets. All of them seem to have some feature that could warrant the increased price.
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You make a good point, but just for future reference one meter is 3 1/3 feet. The average human is 1 meter 80 centimeters. Could you clarify what you meant please?
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If Makuta stays the primary antagonist of the story, I hope that he eventually turns out to be either more evil than the MoUP (which could be the source for some grade-A terrified mask humor) or to not actually have been corrupted by the mask at all, having wanted to cause the destruction he did when he put the MoUP on anway.
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Yeah. Even a simple piece to allow for axle-based stuff to connect to shells (think of the way Breakout Rocka had his shield attached in the episode) would be more appreciated than another add-on. A three-way bone connector piece would also be useful, although I can't think of a way that a set would use such a piece. I think there's a topic for this sort of stuff hidden somewhere in the depths of this board, though, so I'll stop my rambling. Maybe the mask will be named Teridax? I can't see LEGO making it more than just an in-joke, though.
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Personally, I can't really understand why people think the CCBS is less complex. I've found it far easier to build complex and large designs with it than with the old system. Unlike the CCBS, the "traditional" system would only allow you to make large MOCs (with a reasonable amount of freedom) if you bought both Bionicle and Technic sets. And then there's the added bonus that large CCBS MOCs can be made hollow while still retaining a reasonable amount of strength. I'm pretty sure that my Dragon Bolt MOC (which I still haven't gotten around to finishing) is at least twice the size of Kardas, and it's just slightly too heavy (but mostly just too wide) to hold in one hand. And the supposedly more complex aesthetic of Bionicle always looked messy and unfinished to me. It doesn't make sense from an in-universe perspective either. If you're going to design robots for a multi-millenia job, why not cover their internals with a plastic (not metal, corrosion would be a death sentence) casing to prevent dust and grime from getting in and mucking up the systems?
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That's not completely true. The personalities of Evo, Nex (in the two episodes he appeared), Stringer and to a lesser degree Rocka fluctuated enormously over the course of the Hero Factory storyline. However, Furno, Breez and Stormer each had distinct personalities. Stormer had a definite protective yet cynical tendencies, and almost seemed to have been suffering from depression during Rise of the Rookies. Furno seemed to be a generic, eager-to-please/prove himself type of hero, which may count as less of a personality, depending on whether you consider the character archetype automatically bad or think it exists for a reason. Breez was protective towards the other heroes, but less cynical than Stormer. Optimistic but not stupid, and acted as a voice of reason to the rest of the team. Surge got very little screen time, making it hard to gauge his personality. Back on topic, I didn't see your Scorpio attempt, GK733, but I'm going to go look for it now. Also, I agree on the wildlife thing. That's what really appealed to me about the original BIONICLE, the incredible amount of background world-building. And adding wildlife doesn't complicate a story needlessly either. EDIT: found it, and I've noticed two things. First of all, shouldn't the Skull Basher have a hammer? Second of all, the Scorpio seems a little small and squashed, and from the small amount I can see of it's frame, it seems rather technic-intensive. I'd guess that the Scorpio probably just uses a normal torso of the longest size with a Waspix connector for the third pair of limbs. If it has claws, I think they might use two Waspix connectors so that they can add the claws to the balljoints normally used for a characters legs.
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Really? I kind of hope that it's the opposite. A mere six villains (not counting the by then presumably defeated LoSS) against six heroes can work, but not if the heroes are as powerful as their golden masks will likely make them. I'd prefer for the Skull Slicer and Skull Warrior sets to represent the vast bulk of an army, with the Basher and Scorpio acting either as what tvtropes calls "the Dragon" to the Skull Grinder or as elite troops. The Skull Scorpio could also work if it was basically a normal creature that had been skull-ified, kind of like the original Nui-Jaga having infected kanohi. Rysgrynsgrot, does the Scorpio have a pair of claws in addition to it's six legs?
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Personally, I hope Makuta doesn't stay as the main bad guy. I'm kind of sick of the whole corrupted by power thing. For once I want to see a villain who thought about things for a while, consciously decided to be evil and then attempted to impose his/her will upon the world. Maybe next year we'll see a proper villain.
