Official LEGO Alpha Team Topic

I liked the Drones.



But that's just me, and I do enjoy those single-sets.



~A~

Some interesting factoids for any of you still listening:

The LEGO Alpha Team videogame was developed before the sets were designed. Originally, it was meant to be a multi-theme crossover, including the pink-and-purple-poodle-pampering sets aimed at girls. The premise was a group of minifigures, from pizza men to cowboys to mad scientists, each with special abilities, moving through Rube Goldberg style LEGO contraptions, in order to stop the evil Ogel.

LEGO's marketing division insisted that the crossover motif be replaced by something with more testosterone, so the secret agents were designed. Each of the original team members was based on the special abilities of the pre-agent motif characters - for example, "Dash" would run in a straight line until he passed over a plate with an arrow on it. The other characters could interact with motors (Cam), lasers (Radia), pulleys (Flex), electricity (Charge), and explosives (Crunch). Tee Vee was an inexplicable Southern-accented commentator who explained how things work. Interestingly, if you chose to skip his exposition, he’d give a refreshingly polite, “Oh, you know that already. Sorry,” By dragging pieces and characters around, you’d create complex Rube Goldberg devices which could free other agents or cease production of the Mind Control Orbs.

A surprising amount of background is also provided: the fact that Dash wasn’t Team Leader until the events of the first game surprised me; the first game was also the first appearance of the Mind Control Orbs which Ogel used to turn everyday minifigures into “zombies,” now better known as Skeleton Drones; however, Ogel had faced off against Alpha Team before he had invented the Mind Control Orb, but this was his largest-scale operation until then; and perhaps most interesting of all, it’s explicitly stated that Dash was the only team member not captured at the start of the game, which means that the members of Alpha Team were originally finitely Dash, Cam, Radia, Charge, Crunch, and Flex.

Aqua Raiders and Atlantis - and even Mission Deep Sea, if you want to go there - have heavy shades of Aquazone. No surprise that I find Aquazone superior to Aqua Raiders and Atlantis, I suppose.

And of course, Alpha Team only had that much story in the first place because it was based on a videogame.

I think that LEGO Island had similar origins, too, as a videogame adapted to sets. Other story-driven themes like Knights "Heart of the Shield of Ages" Kingdom II, Oriental Expedition, and even later Alpha Team lines, meanwhile, got their story developed in comics.

Any thoughts on the functions built into the earlier sets? Or their disappearance in Mission Deep Sea, and their ultimate replacement with transforming vehicles in Deep Freeze?

And the mobile command center didn't really transform, did it? It just sort of opened...

Sadly, I never got the Ice Blade, but I did pick up the Tundra Tracker, Chill Speeder and the Blizzard Blaster. It was the orange cannons - y'know, the ones that used to be on all of the Star Wars Pod Racers - on the Blizzard Blaster that made me get it, and the little Skeleton Drone's vehicle. Trying to fit two opposing forces into every single set is often a bad idea, because we get things like Dash's hang glider, but that beetle or whatever is adorable.

I think it's odd that the Chill Speeder's transformation hinged (excuse the pun XD) on the same piece both of Ogel's early command centers used in their skull entry way. Since I got a few of the first wave and several Deep Sea sets, I was disappointed when Ogel's Deep Freeze lair didn't have the same skull door. I suppose turning the whole mountain into a skull is the same idea, but those doors were a bit iconic.