BZPower was THE number one fansite and community for following the BIONICLE saga back in the day. Or at least it felt like it for me browsing it as a kid.
Both in the later years and in retrospective readings, U've read plenty about how the place wasn't the best message board. Back then the site was almost as high-strung as LEGO itself about staying family friendly, blocking you from talking about other forums (which is probably what kept other BIONICLE sites from competing. RIP to Mask of Destiny) just because of the lack of "safety" in that, and for the longest time any talk or link to YouTube was barred. Language censor was stringent to the point where the word "stupid" was treated as "cool dude" as well, which got me annoyed more than a few times.
Still, for the longest time it was my internet home. I was entertained by the MSPaint comics for years (until my impulsive young self created enough stupid posts to get heat from the moderators, leading me to exile myself from the comic subforum), tried my hand at entering building contests, and earned myself a big 15 minutes of fame when I was THE first guy to find one of the 2007 sets at Walmart (which took me completely by surprise since I had seen no images indicating its coming arrival, which you have to understand for the infohungry BZP community was very unusual). Heck, I even was one of those to email GregF with questions and get replies.
Best memories from the site hands-down though was participating in a text-based RPG with folks in the general LEGO forum. We crafted an epic crossover story between LEGO themes based on a one-year line of mutant dinosaurs invading LEGO cities, and we still talk to each other about it today due to how much fun we had and the friendships we built. (Also we annoyed TVTropes by making a big damn page for our adventure on their wiki. :P )
Not to say BZP isn't still active, but after a decade and the short-lived 2015 revival, it's a shell of its old self. Good memories there, though unfortunately a lot of them were lost with at least two forum database moves and a few hacker devastations. Shit sucks, this is why I say the "Be careful, what you put on the internet is there forever!" people are talking bullshit.
earned myself a big 15 minutes of fame when I was THE first guy to find one of the 2007 sets at Walmart
Was it Nocturn? I think the only reason I own that set is because of what you posted on BZPower, he had such a nice set of parts.
You bet your fragile lime green crotch piece it was! Glad to know I inspired people, though I can't take much credit. When I found the set, I was still relying on allowances, so I couldn't even buy it that day. It took other people to get it and unbox it for the internet to see.
Aw well. Still, at least my discovery gave us the first glimpse of the Toa Mahri.
Some of the old Stick Online community got together and made a game very similar to it. You can find it here.
Oldpunch, hasn't been the same since
wow, i've played a little bit and yeah this is just what i needed. any idea if it has active players? theres 1 guy online but hes afk.
I miss the old Charles' Fun Server from Zombie Master. Was such a cozy place to hang out in after school.
Last time I was on months ago there were about 5 people playing
I used to hang out on a bunch of WikiFoundry sites (back then it was called Wetpaint) before we all fell apart around the turn of the decade. Even had a few sites of my own (though two were crap) and made a banner for another site that eventually was featured.
Also Nexuiz, with its three-mile-long CTF maps and instagib on an open soccer field map. Before all of these super competitive shooters popped up and I wasn't self-conscious about my aim.
I really hate being nostalgic because it makes me sad in a way,but I really miss the DeviantArt chatrooms and the section that showcased the funniest moments from them,dAmn it. Is DeviantArt still that nerdy place for people to draw fanart or is it something else,I haven't gone on it for so long.
I remember back in 2008 or 2009 I really wanted to play blockland but couldnt buy it , so I played something which I think was like a lite version of blockland or maybe a very early build of it and it was free , it didn't have as much features as blockland , there were a few servers for it and some people , do you remember what its called ? it was like an early version of blockland but modded I don't know how to describe it maybe it was a ripoff clone
there was blockland v0002 and roblox at that time was "free" but other than that im not sure what else was out there.
The Matrix Online, back when I was an awkward teenager who didn't know how to interact with people.
The Sci-Fi Channel Doctor Who forums because Sci-Fi is where I discovered Doctor Who and the community was made up of super nice people.
miss thisispain
guy could talk mad shit. so many blowhards on this forum, some real pretentious fucking grocery baggers pretending to be professors in the news forum and he'd come in and just rip the fattest tungsten rod of shit in every thread. was a joy to watch. guy gave no shits.
There was a old Freak Fortress 2 server I used to join like 5 years ago, the servers were located at the US so i had like 250-300ish ping and downloading the models took like forever (though i was too dumb to realize at that time)
I loved the people there and sometimes stayed up till 7 in the morning to play with everyone but eventually some conflict happened between admins and users and it got completely abandoned last year
I met some friends that I still talk to today and i even got nominated as the player of the month, that was fun
It's hard, you know? To think back on all those people you've left behind in life's twisting journey, or even those who've left you behind.
So many folks in Runescape that show up as "Offline" anytime I check.
Seeing Guild Wars uninstalled in my library, remembering venturing across the lands with my guild and how I literally only know who one of those folks is now, many years later. It's nice to at least have that one friend from that game, we get together online sometimes to play other stuff which is awesome.
Also had a great friend from my last 2 years of highschool and we didn't hang out in person outside of school even though we had planned to before I moved out of the country but we used to play Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 together a lot, great guy. He's a member on this forum, I think. He may even see this and know that I'm talking about him. Either way; those were some of the best gaming times ever. If you see this; hope you're doing well on that crazy island, dude.
There's a lot of people and timeperiods of my life that I miss and would love to revisit. Sadly there's not much to do about the matter other than the occassional "Hey man do you remember..." or sometimes the best you can do is reinstall the game/revisit the forum/rewatch the vid and cry as the emptiness calls back.
i joined a forum back in... 2005? joshcube's old "super smash bros. 3" forum, which was basically just for people to speculate about what brawl was going to be before it was even announced. there's a couple guys i remember hanging out with all the time, went by the names "fire fox" and "speeddemon". we spent most of our time dicking around on msn messenger up until around 2008 when joshcube deleted the forum because people kept making fun of him for having a crush on marin from link's awakening. after that i didn't see them online so much. i guess they got busy with school/work and didn't have time to hang out. once msn messenger went down i lost all contact with them and haven't been able to find them since. a few years ago i found a forum that a bunch of people from that community migrated to, but it had already been dead for years, and the old friends i was trying to find weren't there. luckily there's another community i joined in 2006, 72dpiarmy, who are still mostly hanging out together on discord. hard to believe i've been with them for half of my life
Do you guys remember "flipnote hatena?"
I remember of all the dumb animations that I used to see on there. I miss all of them, even the stupid "awesome face" ones.
I found it , it's return to blockland , as far as I can see it was a modloader or a launcher of some sorts for blockland but I remember being able to play for free on it with other people , I spent many many hours goofing around in it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCtAgK_WAb4&t=84s
FPUK TF2 became my only reason to play TF2. Nothing else came close to filling the void that server left. FPUK as a community was fantastic in general, then it got nuked.
Still hang out with a bunch of ex-regulars on our discord, but I don't think I'll ever be a part of something that had so many dedicated regulars ever again.
The Project Reality community, including my old clan. A lot of the better, more courteous and helpful players and clans lost interest in the game once it went free/stand-alone and the mechanics were changed to reward twitch-aim reflexes more than they did clever postioning, timing your movements and coordinating with your teammates.
When one has been around for so much time, the list is long.
In the beginning of the times, my first Steam game was CS:S, but before buying the Multiplayer Pack ( CS:S, DOD:S and HL2:DM ), I played around a year with a pirated CS:S version. I remember playing surf and over all, Zombiemod always as I could. I met there my first Steam friends as well ( but sadly they are all gone by now ).
Zombiemod itself is a sad history: being so popular on the late 00's, all of the sudden it collapsed around 2014-15, and no newer versions were developed. Descendients of it like Zombie Infection and other sourcemod plugins continued the work, but they don't feel the same way. Same story with the ZM/ZE servers. As soon as the main group fell, one per one the servers stopped having the recommended gameplay values so they turned into an unbalanced mess which you ended being frustrated rather than having fun.
I miss the CS:S clan which I was part of. Sure, it was very elitist and several of the "captains" were unlikable dicks to others, but I met a lot of people there and even we met in real life! Everything was going fine, winning the matches ( "wars" ) we had with other clans and starting to train hard as we wanted to participate in the ESL. And then one day half of the captains betrayed us by joining another clan and everything went to shit ( to the point some even stopped altogether playing CS:S and some members fighting each other in real life due the whole shitstorm ).
Team Focata, a friendly clan which I almost inmediately landed barely after some days playing TF2 ( which I started during the free weekend of the "War Update" ). We were very close together each other and active both in our server and our forums, until the last chief had to resign because he couldn't take care anymore of the group, and no one wanted to take on the leadership, so we quietly dissolved ( although we keep each other in contact on Steam and Twitter ).
HLSpain and HL2Spain, gone but not forgotten. Probably one of the most popular, if not the top one, fan site for HL2, modding and other topics related with Valve in spanish, on both sides of the ocean. Learnt there internet etiquette, and before this decade I worked as "journalist" writing reviews, interviews and other articles. Around 2011-2012-2013 we lost a lot of traffic due the lack of activity from the bosses, and their refusal to change the status quo by electing a new team. By 2014 it was pretty much a ghost ship with a bit of activity at the forums and without new articles. Eventually due the lack of maintenance it started to had PHP and JS errors everywhere, and they were taken down finally last year ( or it has been already two years? ). Thanks to them I got my first view into modding and game development, and helped me not only "remembering" the HL games, but also discover so many different mods, Obsidian Conflict among them.
We used to have a small group of friends which we played together KF1 with Skype. How many evenings and nights we had, beating the maps on the hardest difficulties. Those were the days.
The world changes and we have no choice but to move forward, but hell if these moments weren't gold. Made my hard adolescence better to carry on.
I miss Snark Cafe as well :C
I have / had a lot of Steam friends in the same situation, all of the sudden gone and never heard back again. For some, I learnt that some died in accidents / commited suicide, for others, they became so busy in real life that they just gave up on returning ( or because they moved to other platforms ). And for a bunch, they just vanished from this world, no one ever seeing or hearing them again.
One of the goners were a captain from the CS:S clan which I used to be part of and I was very close to him. One morning after a training, he said he had to leave to do some shopping, and that we would continue training later that day. The hours passed and he didn't return. Days later, we learnt from his sister that a car ran over him while he was crossing the street. We held a "symbolic funeral" at our server. Everything was so tragic...
For the ones I don't know what they became of them, I want to believe that they are actually alright, somewhere.
Heh, I was in Gaia Online for around a year, but because I found a group to watch online anime together until it was closed down
We never died, just we went under the radar. The fight lives on!
People still playing the old public version from time on time ( especially during asia-europe timezones ), just make sure to uncheck "Show map list" at the server list window:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1695147016
And if we are lucky, we will finally release the new version on Steam, just be patient.
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