Bamzooki

[bbsuperstars]

Long time since I ever thought of BAMZOOKi, but , I still have the quarter finals framed BAMZOOKi poster hanging on my wall.. for those that have no idea what I'm talking about, myself and my team appeared in season III of BAMZOOKi as the "Basketball Superstars" (we really didn't give the name much thought, but hey, we were around 11 years old at the time, now nearly 23, ha!). I made all of the zooks that were a part of the show, including the modifications for our "uber-zook" in the final, which we ended up winning. We played against C2 in the quarters, Cheltenham Batapillars in the semis, and Canary Woolf in the finals.

Below is the framed poster - I've added a few green circles to show which were the ones from my team.


I was pretty active over at Canary Woolf's forums when that used to run.. THEMAGNIFICENTSHOE/Shoeman, Zog, mistywertys, Pinguster... some names I've found from a quick snooping around. Had a secret wee club developing the best in the world over there for a while, no idea when it dried up..

I was also personally contacted at a later date to get involved with the newer 'BAMZOOKi Street Rules' beta development kit, and made 3 house-zooks for that show (technically 4, as two were known as 'the twins' - Punka and Punkalicious, one had slower and broken movement cycles with green eyes, whereas the other was faster and had red eyes). I've highlighted them below:


Sooo.. yeah.
Hey everybody! Just thought I'd pop in, say hi, and uh.. see what's still going on in this world.

[yugitom]

Oh, wow, I didn't know I was going to attract people from a long gone Bamzooki forum with this little thread on GTM, let alone attract a series 3 champ :P Really cool to see you, man! Would you consider making a 3 zook team for the Bamzooki tournament going on atm?

[bbsuperstars]

I looked up at the lil' poster on the wall and for some reason felt compelled to find out if videos exist for it.
...and the internet delivered, haha.

It's a long time since I touched either the SR version or the old school zook kit, but I'll have a dig around my old computer and maybe even some old USB drives (if I can find 'em) for my old creations.
I know I have all my house zook versions as email attachments, just need to find my old TV-series zooks and the project I had in development (called PR, if I remember correctly).. perhaps I'll just enter my old ones - I'll have to read this thread through again properly to see what exactly is going on about your tournament.

[Joelu Of Eagleland]

(Image removed from quote.)

Long time since I ever thought of BAMZOOKi, but , I still have the quarter finals framed BAMZOOKi poster hanging on my wall.. for those that have no idea what I'm talking about, myself and my team appeared in season III of BAMZOOKi as the "Basketball Superstars" (we really didn't give the name much thought, but hey, we were around 11 years old at the time, now nearly 23, ha!). I made all of the zooks that were a part of the show, including the modifications for our "uber-zook" in the final, which we ended up winning. We played against C2 in the quarters, Cheltenham Batapillars in the semis, and Canary Woolf in the finals.

Below is the framed poster - I've added a few green circles to show which were the ones from my team.
(Image removed from quote.)

I was pretty active over at Canary Woolf's forums when that used to run.. THEMAGNIFICENTSHOE/Shoeman, Zog, mistywertys, Pinguster... some names I've found from a quick snooping around. Had a secret wee club developing the best in the world over there for a while, no idea when it dried up..

I was also personally contacted at a later date to get involved with the newer 'BAMZOOKi Street Rules' beta development kit, and made 3 house-zooks for that show (technically 4, as two were known as 'the twins' - Punka and Punkalicious, one had slower and broken movement cycles with green eyes, whereas the other was faster and had red eyes). I've highlighted them below:
(Image removed from quote.)

Sooo.. yeah.
Hey everybody! Just thought I'd pop in, say hi, and uh.. see what's still going on in this world.

So I saw who you were and... hoo boy. I recognized your team right away. I would've never expected to see one of the series 3 grand finals winners here. Your team had my favorite Uber Zook too! I loved Alley Uber so much!

So much so that recently after seeing your final on YouTube, I tried to attempt the design myself.



I'm going to blame the YouTube video quality as the cause for why this ended up flopping. Literally.

I could've never have guessed that you made some of the SR House Zooks... The two "twins" were my favorites when I was watching the program back in... whenever it aired.

I recognized the name "Pinguster". I never went on the Canary Woolf forums before, I just remember seeing a large number of zooks that were high-ranking in some of the trials with the name "Pingu" in them. First time I saw one, my reaction was the 7 year old who hadn't heard the word "sh**"'s equivalent of "OH sh**". Shoeman is someone I've only seen on YouTube so far, mainly from his custom contest video. I'm surprised custom contests are even a thing. I guess the community for Bamzooki was a little larger than I first thought. I'd love to find out more about the Canary Woolf forums and this "iLand Creator" I've been hearing about, but it's hard to find any real information on Bamzooki's community now.

That aside, great to see you here!

[bbsuperstars]

So I saw who you were and... hoo boy. I recognized your team right away. I would've never expected to see one of the series 3 grand finals winners here. Your team had my favorite Uber Zook too! I loved Alley Uber so much!

So much so that recently after seeing your final on YouTube, I tried to attempt the design myself.

(Image removed from quote.)

I'm going to blame the YouTube video quality as the cause for why this ended up flopping. Literally.

I never thought I'd put myself back out there as existing again, so that makes two of us!
"hi imma big fan.png" haha! That does have a good likeness to Alley Uber - not a bad recreation... I think when I returned to the game as I was getting involved with the SR stuff I looked back and found most of my old zooks - I definitely have all of the versions of the house zooks I made stored away in email attachments, found those.. as well as the earliest version of the PR zook I was mentioning (only PR1, when I think I got to PR24 in the end). However.. I don't think I have a copy of Alley Uber, only an edited version of it that I sent to somebody (Pinguster I believe).

I do distinctly remember that Alley Oop's design (amongst many others) was completely broken by the SR kit - if you were to re-create him in the old software it would probably work just fine.
Many of the big bugs and problems I had with the SR kit were not fixed before launch (just do the block push and look at the collisions... ew). The old kit was much sturdier but also had less features. I think I have a couple of contest files laying around somewhere as well.

I could've never have guessed that you made some of the SR House Zooks... The two "twins" were my favorites when I was watching the program back in... whenever it aired.

Cheers! They did go around all the creators to see if they would be interested in starring in a web interview about the house zooks but I was informed that there wasn't enough interest, so the creators of them remained anonymous I believe. Making them for the show was basically a constant back and forth between me and my contact, simplifying, reducing component counts etc.. they had big creative direction when it came to Peach, and they made me remove 80% of Centie's legs to keep components down haha!

The twins were born from a single submission I named 'Prototype' - Punka and Punkalicious was their idea.. after my final submission they further wanted to reduce component counts so they removed a number of legs.. if you look in the program you'll see that Punka had a kind of stutter/jump when running - and that is because they fudged up when trying to fix the movement cycles of the legs that remained.. from a quick look, it seems like the one they kept at closer to "maxed out" (Punkalicious) might have had this issue fixed as per my instruction at the time..

I recognized the name "Pinguster". I never went on the Canary Woolf forums before, I just remember seeing a large number of zooks that were high-ranking in some of the trials with the name "Pingu" in them. First time I saw one, my reaction was the 7 year old who hadn't heard the word "sh**"'s equivalent of "OH sh**". Shoeman is someone I've only seen on YouTube so far, mainly from his custom contest video. I'm surprised custom contests are even a thing. I guess the community for Bamzooki was a little larger than I first thought. I'd love to find out more about the Canary Woolf forums and this "iLand Creator" I've been hearing about, but it's hard to find any real information on Bamzooki's community now.

That aside, great to see you here!

Aye, Pinguster and I seemed to share quite a bit back and forth in emails, THEMAGNIFICENTSHOE was all about Pokemon tournaments iirc, can't remember much else.
We basically just hung out in a small chat box at the bottom of the Canary Woolf forums, was great fun.

Nice to be here too - I didn't expect to find an updated thread!

[datzookboi]

they are based of those zooks but are not straight up copies and were made completely from scratch by me in the last few days. I will not deny i took heavy inspiration for beast and blu ray from their TV appearances but did not just enter those two zooks into the contest, for example domino has no similarities with its TV counterpart other than the name, beast is much lighter and has a different body / "appendages" to the house zook incarnation and BLU RAY is designed to resemble the tv version but is not just a straight up copy of the zook as his legs, weight, tail and most likly leg patterns and movement cycles are all different.  and if u were inferring they were from the cbbc site then allow me to put your mind at rest and tell you that is not the case. however if it is prefered i can enter another team rather than those three?

[Mystic2000]

jesus, a Bamzooki thread on a RA2 based forum attracted a former champ... if he enters the tourney... this guy may be a threat... a serious threat... also dunno if i should try to make a team for the tourney given that i have literally 0 experience with zook making (that i don't even know what event i must make the zooks for)

[bbsuperstars]

jesus, a Bamzooki thread on a RA2 based forum attracted a former champ... if he enters the tourney... this guy may be a threat... a serious threat... also dunno if i should try to make a team for the tourney given that i have literally 0 experience with zook making (that i don't even know what event i must make the zooks for)

You're talking about a guy who played this literally half a lifetime ago!
Don't worry - if I were to even enter anything, I'd probably give myself some kind of time limit, or just edit my old ones from the series; they are quite beatable.

I think I will leave this here for any of you, or the old guys who may be traversing this forum still:
https://discord.gg/FrMnYhy
A BAMZOOKi discord server, to chat and share stuff.

EDIT:
Look who I found waddling around my old old files:

As I thought, he's broken in the new kit - the physics were different in the newer series - can only make him work (aka. not fall over) by making his legs jelly.

[R01]

I've never seen this Bamzooki stuff before but it seems to be interesting(going more into the animal instead of vehicle direction and being more challenge than combat focused(so it's what Technogames was to Robot Wars?), looks like the site(which surprisingly is still up) can only be accessed from the UK.
Guess they wanted kids to still have engineering stuff to do, and what better way to do that than making it all virtual, no cost for parts or any of that, playing all that with augmented reality must've been fun and I can only imagine how a Robot Arena 2 like game would've worked with that.

Nice to see that we got the series 3 champion here, you might enjoy Robot Arena 2.

[bbsuperstars]

looks like the site(which surprisingly is still up) can only be accessed from the UK.

Which site do you mean? The CBBC site for the original series was taken down long ago, and the one for SR is just one page with nothing really on it unfortunately.

Guess they wanted kids to still have engineering stuff to do, and what better way to do that than making it all virtual, no cost for parts or any of that, playing all that with augmented reality must've been fun and I can only imagine how a Robot Arena 2 like game would've worked with that.

Nice to see that we got the series 3 champion here, you might enjoy Robot Arena 2.

Yeah, it was great fun as a kid, and now I've nostalgia pulsing through my veins!
Robot Arena reminds me of an old Robot Wars game I used to have.. BAMZOOKi has one major difference in that you don't get to control them - and to be honest, you wouldn't want to as most of the best ones would likely be too fast to control.

[wakkydude]

It is in this moment I am ashamed to admit that yes... as razer, I was also an incredibly avid member of that forum at the time. Let's just say that I was "the annoying kid who shouldn't be here", and this time I didn't get a meme to my name in order to make me even remotely relevant. Absolutely not, indeed. I met up with some of the users again a couple of years ago after digging incredibly hard in Google to find their current identities - they're mostly doing alright and some have even moved onto bigger things (one is a professional Hearthstone player?). It was a fun, if not cringeworthy for everyone else, experience, and it's good to see it being remembered here.