Red Magnifying Glass...

I'm not super versed in Alpha Team lore, but the long and the short of it is that the criminal mastermind Ogel used powerful mind control orbs to transform innocent civilians into strange, skeleton like minions. In the final year of the theme, the secret agent force known as Alpha Team* tracked him down to a secret base in the arctic. From within this arctic base, Ogel was staging a new plan to use ice orbs to freeze the world. Alpha Team used state-of-the-art transforming vehicles to brave the snow.

Also Ogel is a descendent of Lord Vladek. Sometimes LEGO Castle is depicted as being in the past during the actual medieval era, sometimes its depicted in the present on the planet Ashlar, sometimes its even depicted in the present and still on Earth somehow. So it's not clear how many generations "descendent" really means.

*Not to be confused with Alpha Team 1 from HERO Factory

I like how they’re firing a stupidly huge missile at some unarmed guy who appears to be surrendering.

@Monopoly:
It’s rubber-tipped, for safety. And non-explosive. It’s just going to punch him with about 93% of the mass of another minifig. He’s surrounded by snow. It’ll be a soft landing!

The original Mobile Command Center. There’s been three. I was just looking at the Agents themed one last night. Uncanny.

I love Alpha Team because of the game. I'm not talking about the OG 2000 PC game, but the trilogy of Mission Deep Freeze games on Lego.com. You can still download them and play them quite easily, the first third is very slow (I thought it was a racing game the first time I played it, there were tons of Lego flash games like that) but the game really picks up and is quality and long enough Lego could've been greedy and sold it, but they didn't, even given their financial trouble they contracted this game not just to promote Alpha Team, but be an enjoyable STANDALONE experience from the products. It's probably aged better than the 2000 game given the flash game used cutting edge features of early Adobe Flash such as vector graphics. I haven't gotten the pleasure of trying the OG game because 1. you'd have to pirate it and 2. it's old and would be difficult to work on modern computers. I'd emulated the Gameboy version however, and it was... interesting. All the characters were like five pixels tall.

As far as the Mobile Command Center was portrayed in the game, it is the largest, slowest vehicle with the most firepower, and the last you unlock. The features of the physical set, apart from the detachable snowmobiles, are well integrated into gameplay. It can only fire straight while moving, but in Alpha Mode it opens up as shown and the cannon can rotate freely, sacrificing mobility for firepower. Ingame you now control a targeting reticule while the Command Center is rendered immobile, and can rain death in a wide radius, I believe this was called the "Solar Cannon". The crane at the back can pick up ice orbs, the crystal balls one of which can be seen in the lower right corner. The ice orbs have a printed minifig head inside which when viewed under one of the trans red elements reveal a pattern, "disarming" them. In the game ice orbs were hazards which freeze you and slow you down, and only the Command Center could remove them in the late game, by backing into them, gaining useless score points and making life easier while unlocking new areas "metroidvania" style.

In the story, the Mobile Command Center initially appears in cutscenes, piloted by Agent Radia (the gunner in the photo with the purple arm), until she *spoiler alert* is frozen and kidnapped by Ogel. However the narrative is a bit strange, as even upon rescuing her you don't get to play as her or drive the command center until later still when another Alpha Team Agent, Arrow (the one with the yellow/missing sleeve driving the snowmobile) joins you with the Command Center. I would have rather played as Radia given she has an established personality and has been with Alpha Team the whole time. I even used to think she was the Alpha Team leader based on the flash game where she was more of a background figure who gives orders to everyone else on the team in the cutscenes. It would make sense for Ogel to kidnap the leader, but I guess it's cause she needs to be a damsel in distress as Dash is actually the leader. Dash is my favorite, because he's a cool guy with a cool jet that turns invisible and you play as him to usher in the cool part of the game, singlehandedly seizing one of Ogel's bunkers. But Dash doesn't really strike me as a leader type given what little characterization he had in the game, he seems too independent. But anyway, Arrow replaces Radia as pilot of the Command Center as you get to play him. Unfortunately, Arrow is a nobody with possibly the worst characterization of any Alpha Team character, apart from Zed and the "Super Ice Drone" from the franchise's last 2 sets in 2005. All we know is Arrow is the team's mechanic who replaced Cam. I don't remember him having any dialogue in the game at all. Diamond Tooth, the other new agent, was much better characterized in the game. The "Magma Drill" Alpha Mode of his vehicle, the Tundra Tracker, matches his job of "Mining Expert." Diamond Tooth you play as for the entire first third of the game and actually has dialogue. It makes sense for players to meet him first considering he was the new guy, before meeting the older more experienced Agents. But since that game was my introduction to Alpha Team as a whole, I wasn't aware of the previous waves and the theme's history, but I still think Diamond Tooth was a good way to introduce a new character. Arrow is a bad way to introduce a new character. He is the very last Agent you meet, with no explanation who he is or why he's there instead of Radia. At least he can hack yellow computers. Design wise I feel like given his face print which feels different to the rest he is supposed to be Asian or Indigenous Native American or Pacific Islander. I wish I could just say "Mongoloid" but that has a history of racist connotations. Lego made lots of weird racially-coded minifigs back in the early 2000s, but given the limits of printing on 1cm² yellow heads you can't get across much without stereotypes, so they stopped that eventually. But the real weird face in this set was TeeVee, the android. Pure nightmare fuel. Good riddance he isn't in the game.

@Norikins said:
"I love Alpha Team because of the game. I'm not talking about the OG 2000 PC game, but the trilogy of Mission Deep Freeze games on Lego.com. You can still download them and play them quite easily, the first third is very slow (I thought it was a racing game the first time I played it, there were tons of Lego flash games like that) but the game really picks up and is quality and long enough Lego could've been greedy and sold it, but they didn't, even given their financial trouble they contracted this game not just to promote Alpha Team, but be an enjoyable STANDALONE experience from the products. It's probably aged better than the 2000 game given the flash game used cutting edge features of early Adobe Flash such as vector graphics. I haven't gotten the pleasure of trying the OG game because 1. you'd have to pirate it and 2. it's old and would be difficult to work on modern computers. I'd emulated the Gameboy version however, and it was... interesting. All the characters were like five pixels tall.

As far as the Mobile Command Center was portrayed in the game, it is the largest, slowest vehicle with the most firepower, and the last you unlock. The features of the physical set, apart from the detachable snowmobiles, are well integrated into gameplay. It can only fire straight while moving, but in Alpha Mode it opens up as shown and the cannon can rotate freely, sacrificing mobility for firepower. Ingame you now control a targeting reticule while the Command Center is rendered immobile, and can rain death in a wide radius, I believe this was called the "Solar Cannon". The crane at the back can pick up ice orbs, the crystal balls one of which can be seen in the lower right corner. The ice orbs have a printed minifig head inside which when viewed under one of the trans red elements reveal a pattern, "disarming" them. In the game ice orbs were hazards which freeze you and slow you down, and only the Command Center could remove them in the late game, by backing into them, gaining useless score points and making life easier while unlocking new areas "metroidvania" style. "

I used to love that game so much as a kid. Alpha Team Deep Freeze was one of the first Lego themes I really got into, and I proudly managed to acquire every set back in 2005 after most of them had been discontinued. Took a lot of clearance hunting.

@NatureBricks:
There is, but it has a different frame. Four magnifying glasses have been introduced in 1998, 2010, 2011, and 2019. Alpha Team used the original frame, while The Batman uses the fourth. The targeting reticle from The LEGO Batman Movie uses the third frame. The second frame had a removable lens that may have been hastily discontinued over safety concerns, or because a small clear lens is excruciatingly difficult to find if it gets dropped on many surfaces, as pretty much every hard contact lens wearer can probably attest to.

Ah one of the first of many fold-out truck bases. Everyone seems to have one these days, Alpha Team were real trend setters

Wanted this set for Christmas 2004, received it, still have it. Think my favourite part is the snowmobile deployment mechanism.

@GSR_MataNui said:
"I'm not super versed in Alpha Team lore, but the long and the short of it is that the criminal mastermind Ogel used powerful mind control orbs to transform innocent civilians into strange, skeleton like minions. In the final year of the theme, the secret agent force known as Alpha Team* tracked him down to a secret base in the arctic. From within this arctic base, Ogel was staging a new plan to use ice orbs to freeze the world. Alpha Team used state-of-the-art transforming vehicles to brave the snow.

Also Ogel is a descendent of Lord Vladek. Sometimes LEGO Castle is depicted as being in the past during the actual medieval era, sometimes its depicted in the present on the planet Ashlar, sometimes its even depicted in the present and still on Earth somehow. So it's not clear how many generations "descendent" really means.

*Not to be confused with Alpha Team 1 from HERO Factory "

In an 'interview with Ogel' from LEGO's website, Ogel refers to Vladek as his "great-great-great-great-great-grand-father" (that's five 'great's, seven generations). If we take him literally and assume that minifigs have similar lifespans to humans, that would put Vladek as living around two hundred years before Ogel, which is...quite an interesting number. In our world, that would put Vladek as living sometime around 1800-1850, well after 'knights in shining armor' had become obsolete. Perhaps, since LEGO Castle has consistently had dragons and wizards, cannons and firearms were not as widely impactful as they were to our history (LEGO's historical themes do sort of skip over the Industrial Revolution...).