You stupid Lemming! (Lemmings)

Member Name: mpeh

Product:	Lemmings
Date:	22/02/02 (988 review reads)
Rating:

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My first computer was a Commodore Amiga 512. Essentially an Amiga 500 with a small block plugged into the back that apparently made it faster. It was a Christmas present to my little brother and myself when I was about ten I think. It came in a glorious big red box with a bundle of applications (remember Deluxe Paint III anyone?) and a few games. 'Bart Simpson and the Attack of the Space Mutants', 'Captain Planet'- a dire dire attempt to convert a cartoon into a computer game I think there was another which I don't remember but more importantly (and as you have probably guessed) there was 'Lemmings'. An unassuming little game by Psygnosis that came in a small black box with a picture a small creature with a shock of uncontrollable green hair and a blue dress essentially, stood looking very proud on the top of some mountain or something. We played the other games in the package but Lemmings was the classic.

I'm now a student at university and have rediscovered lemmings as it has been converted to the PC (and most other platforms that will support it) and so I once again have access to it. It isn't as difficult as I remember it being- maybe I'm now a little cleverer than I was at eleven (I don't think so) or maybe it's because I have played it before and hence have already gotten into the necessary mode of thinking. Whatever. I will describe lemmings on the Amiga (that s where this review is placed) and then proceed to tell you the differences in the windows version for PCs.

Now although I'm sure that you all know what this game is I have to give a decent description of it just to make this review complete so here goes. Lemmings are small creatures that fall from the sky, well out of a trapdoor actually, and then walk in a straight line until they hit something which causes them to turn around or die. Fortunately for us and the computer game industry they inhabit a two dimensional world which we c
an view from the third dimension i.e. side on. Lemmings is divided into levels, each level begins with lemmings falling in a steady stream out of a trapdoor and then walking in one of the two possible directions until they die or the time limit for the level runs out. Walking lemmings can walk up or down any surface as long as the gradient is less than vertical. If it is vertical then lemmings will fall down it if they are above it, at the top of a cliff, or turn around and walk the other way if it is a wall to them, the bottom of a cliff for instance. On each level there is a home, a small decorative archway into which the lemmings will hop if they reach it. Your job is simply (simply, huh!) to guide the critters from their trapdoor to their home within the time limit.

The screen is split into three main parts- the actual level itself with full colour graphics and lemmings galore. This fills the main part of the screen, all but the bottom two inches really. Levels are only as high as the screen you can't scroll up to see more or down to see more. Horizontally though levels can extend for screens and screens. When the mouse cursor hits the edge of the screen the map will scroll in that direction until you reach the end of the level map. The second part of the screen is the tool bar- this is where the different things you can make the lemmings do are stored. Also there are the options to pause the game, quit the level. The third and last part of the screen is a small scale level map in black and white. It shows the entire level in a very small scale with lemmings appearing as very small green dots. There is also a box overlaid on the map to show you which part of the level is being displayed on screen at the moment. The tool bar and mini map fit into the two inches at the bottom of the screen below the main level display. As well as these three items there is a small area at the very bottom that displays how many lemmings there are out at the moment, ho
w many lemmings are home at the moment and the time remaining.

Unfortunately there are many things which will make a lemming pass away- a fall from too great a height will result in the lemming becoming a small puddle of pixels and then disappearing with a sound very like 'euch'. It really is a very distressing noise that you will get used to hearing, but more on the sound effects later. Walking into any liquid, be it water, acid, bubbling stuff or green ick will result in the lemming drowning. If it is a low hazard fluid then the lemming will float for a very brief period going glub and then drown. If it is a high hazard fluid then the lemming will die immediately. Walking off the top or bottom of the map will result in lemmings dying. There aren't any levels with mountains that allow lemmings to walk off the top of the screen but there are plenty with holes in the ground for lemmings to calmly destroy themselves through. Just to spice things up there are a range of traps that appear on various levels which also kill lemmings with varying degrees of efficiency; jaws that snap off the ground, a noose trap that hauls lemmings up by their ankles and then squishes them, bits of the ceiling which lower when lemmings walk underneath and then get squashed, I'm sure I've forgotten some but you'll just have the pleasure of discovering them for yourself. The thing that varies the most with the traps is whether they are visible or not. Some you can see right from the start of the level and some you can't see until they activate- lemmings come into contact with them and die.

In order to negotiate these hazards you are equipped with a number of things you can give to lemmings. Abilities that mean they can do more than just walk. To give a lemming an ability you choose the ability by clicking on the icon and then move your mouse pointer over a lemming. The mouse pointer is usually a cross hair but when a lemming walks underneath it
it becomes a box around him. By clicking again you gift the lemming under the cursor with that ability. You only get a finite number of each ability- these vary with the levels and once a lemming has been given the ability the counter goes down by one. You can't give lemmings an ability you have run out of. From the left the abilities are:

Climber:
Er, pretty obvious really. Once you have given a lemming this instead of turning around when he reaches a vertical surface he will climb up it. Lemmings climb much slower than they walk and can only climb upwards they will still fall off the top of things. Once you have given a lemming this he has it for the entire level- he will climb every vertical surface he comes to. Lemmings can only climb vertical surfaces- if they reach an overhang they will fall off- if it is too high a fall then they will go splat- if it isn't then this acts to turn them round. In other words a lemming will walk from left to right to a wall, climb up it until he reaches an overhang and then fall back to the bottom and walk from right to left. If a lemming climbs a vertical surface and then reaches a less steep patch he will haul himself over the ledge and continue walking.

Faller:
Also called Floater sometimes. The Icon associated with this is an umbrella. When you give a lemming this he has an umbrella and when he falls from something he deploys the umbrella like a parachute and falls more slowly. This results in him having a nice safe landing after a fall from any height. Upon which he packs the umbrella back into the folds of his dress and continues walking. Like climber once a lemming is given this ability he has it for the entire level. If you give a lemming climb and fall then he is called an athlete (as opposed to a climber and faller).

Bomber:
Also fairly obvious. The icon for this is a bomb. Once you click on a lemming with this he gets the digit five above his head. It counts down to
zero at which point he curls his arms over his head and shout Oh no! and then explodes in a shower of pixels destroying a small egg shaped patch of scenery directly around where he was. Some scenery cannot be destroyed by bombers- steel tends to withstand it although not always. Whilst the counter is counting the lemming continues with whatever it was he was doing prior to being chosen, walking, digging, climbing or whatever. This means that sometimes if you need a particularly positioned explosion you have to time where you imbue the lemming with the ability very carefully.

Blocker.
When you give a lemming this he stops walking and turns to face you. He stands with his legs slightly apart and his arms spread wide. He taps his foot in time to the music and turns his head from side to side. He will continue doing this for all eternity (well until the time limit on the level runs down). More importantly lemmings who walk into your blocker will then turn around and walk the other way. Blockers also have other effects but that would be giving too much away. Blockers rock!

Builder.
When you give a lemming this a small red sack materialises o his back. He pulls a small white block from his bag and places it in front of him, he then stands upon this and repeats the process eleven times resulting a in a small staircase of twelve steps up which he and other lemmings will walk and then fall off, when the builder himself lays his twelfth step he will turn to face you and shrug giving you a small amount of time to click on him before he falls off his staircase. As he lays the last three bricks he clinks, clink, clink, clink, shrug fall, this gives you a warning when a builder is running out. Thus builders can be used to get lemmings out of holes or up cliffs or whatever. If a builder reaches a point where he bangs his head he will stop building and turn around. This is really important to some levels. Also if a builder reaches a wall and bangs his
front fist or block on it then he will stop and continue walking as usual.

Basher:
This lemming will dig a tunnel through the scenery, he will bash in the direction he was walking for as long as there is scenery to bash, once he runs out of things to bash he resumes being a walker. Fortunately gravity doesn't affect tunnels and so if you dig right through a piece of scenery it doesn't fall onto your head. Bashers cannot bash through steel or some other types of scenery and simply stops bashing when he meets it.

Miner:
The lemming produces a pick axe from nowhere and then proceeds to hack at the ground. He digs down diagonally for as long as there is scenery for him to mine through and then becomes a walker again. Like a basher he cannot dig through steel and if he meets it goes clink and stops.

Digger:
Like basher and miner but vertically downwards. Same rules apply.

There are a few other buttons on the tool bar a plus and minus sign with numbers above them. These alter the flow of lemmings from the trap door. When a level begins the trap door opens with a creak and then a lemming falls through. After a set period of time another lemming will fall through and so on until all the lemmings allocated for this level are out. Each level has a minimum flow rate which is what it starts at. You can increase the rate above this but not decrease it below. The values range from 01 to 99. At 01 lemmings are about an inch and a half apart as they walk, at 99 the lemmings are a caterpillar nose to back of head. If you have lemmings in an enclosed space- i.e. they drop straight into a bit you've blocked at both ends then they can share the same space. What looks like one lemming on screen could be all eighty of them. Usually the lemmings are not in phase and so you can tell that there is more than one but sometimes they can get perfectly aligned and you think you've got one lemming and in fact you have sixteen
. If you click an ability on a group of lemming close enough together to all be covered by the mouse pointer then the ability is transferred to the lemming furthest away from the home, almost always not the lemming you wish to confer the ability upon.

There is an icon of two lemming footprints which is the paws (pause) button and that pauses the level... You know what this does really. If you push the P key on your keyboard then this is equivalent. Pressing once pauses the level, pressing again unpauses the level.

The remaining icon on the tool bar is a mushroom cloud. This button nukes all the lemmings on the level- makes them into bombers. This is for when you have made a mistake that means you can't complete the level and don't want to have to finish watching all the lemmings troop around for the next five minutes. Trust me you'll use this a lot. What's very useful is that you have to actively double click on this icon to nuke your lemmings, this means that you can't accidentally destroy your entire level- which is very useful.

The first lemmings game has one hundred levels split into four groups of twenty five called Easy, Tricky, Taxing and Mayhem. When you start the game you get a menu screen with various options- choose level, alter sounds effects, turn music on and of, the usual, and you can select to begin from any of the sections- level 1, level 26, level 51 or level 76 but until you have completed one of these you can't proceed to the next one. The first few levels are very very easy, they teach you how to use each of the abilities and demonstrate the things that you'll be up against in later levels. The difficulty is gradually increased until you're pulling your hair out. On the Amiga when you complete a level you are provided with the password for the next. If you play straight through then you have no need to type the password in but if you stop playing and switch off you can come straight b
ack to the level you are on by typing in the password. This is slightly annoying as you end up writing down reams and reams of passwords and you need to keep an accurate record of which one is you most up to date but it works as a system.

The graphics on lemmings are nothing special. Very simple colourful and well rendered background scenery and simple animation on the lemmings. this said it works brilliantly, the lemmings are cute, I might even go so far as adorable especially because they are so irritating and frustratingly stupid. The walking lemmings bounce up and down and each of the abilities is simply but effectively animated. Debris from digging or explosions simply disappears after being thrown into the air and holes through the scenery are simply the background colour, dark blue or black, so as not to confuse you between scenery and not scenery. Because the lemmings are cute and the animation of the actions are over emphasised you can immediately see what any lemming is doing on the map with a glance which is really useful. By keeping things simple Psygnosis did a great job.

Each level has a tune that plays whilst you do. There are a selection of tunes that the game cycles through although each level always has the same one. The tunes can get annoying but they fit right in to the mood of the game. They are all upbeat and bouncy although for people who live with you and aren't playing a long period of time stuck on the same level will eventually drive them mad as they will hear the same tune over and over again. The sound effects are good too- each one tells you something about what is happening on the level, very useful if you are doing two (or more) things at once. You may have a lemming building on the far right of the map and someone digging on the left who you are watching. When you hear the clinking start you know you have about three seconds before you have to refresh your builder. Much more common is setting some lemmings fre
e to walk and then going and doing something else and hearing a long chorus of 'euch euch eueueueueueueueueuech' as your entire supply of lemmings drop themselves off a cliff.
The level begins with a 'Lets go' and the creaking of the trap doors and then when the lemmings jump into their home they yell 'Yippee'.

The thing that makes lemmings so good is the simplicity and variation. There are all sorts of levels that require different approaches and so the appeal remains even after you've played sixty levels. You will become hooked very quickly and your house will reverberate to sounds of 'Damn that lemming!' and 'Nooooooooo to the left you stupid lemming'. In fact 'You stupid lemming' will become a stock phrase. By making levels with different scenery and different tunes Psygnosis have added another variation. There are levels which require thinking about really hard for four days before you realise how to do them. Seriously you'll get stuck on a level, get fed up with not being able to do it for a few days and then suddenly in the middle of watching Frost on telly you'll go 'That's an idea- I could dig a bit to the left and then...' and you'll be tearing off to the computer to try it out before you even realise. There are levels which are easy conceptually but require a perfect combination of timing and mouse control- in some senses I'm not as fond of these levels as I think that the game should be based around thinking your way through a level not just being able to use the mouse precisely. Some levels, especially the earlier ones those in tricky, will require you to see a certain trick. A combination of abilities that result in the lemmings doing something else. Until you see the trick the level's just impossible but when you see the trick you'll be so proud. Some levels give you eighty lemmings, some give you two, some require you save ten percent some require y
ou save one hundred percent. Usually you get between sixty and eighty lemmings and you have to save between eighty and one hundred percent, this means that when you get a level different to this it is a nice change and you know what they say: A change is as good as a rest. Some levels require you to do eight things some require you do eighty (seriously), some have one puzzle to work out some have four in sequence. Some levels have multiple trap doors which lemmings fall through in turn some have multiple homes for you to choose from, some have both.

Because of all the variation and the fact that the game actually relies upon your own brain power lemmings has a very long length of game play. There is no way you will do every level on the first attempt unless you work in the gaming industry. Potentially you could criticise the fact that once you've done all one hundred levels that's it game over but it is hard to see how this could be avoided. Also there is an extension game called 'Oh No More Lemmings' which s a cheap extra one hundred and twenty levels which actually et hard very quickly and will more than double your game playing time. That said I am not as fond of the scenery on Oh No More Lemmings but if that's the best criticism I can come up with...

There is a two player option with twenty levels. The second player as a second mouse and their lemmings are in reverse colours (blue hair and green dresses). The screen is split in two and the lemmings come out of different trap doors and aim for different homes but you are on the same map and so what you do effects the other person's lemmings. This is a great touch and very amusing as you finish your preparation and then release your lemmings only to find that the other person has built some stairs over your hole and they all die or something similar. Although this is good fun it isn't the real appeal, you'll enjoy battling it out with another player but it isn
9;t the same as trying to beat the computer.

So how different is the Windows version? Not very is the answer. There are a few upgrades or new functions but nothing that changes the game . The one hundred levels are still the same and everything about the game itself remains but there are a few extra options. When you complete a level the computer remembers and so there is no need to write down a long list of passwords- a very good thing, to avoid people getting mixed up if more than one person plays lemmings on the same computer they can log into the game with different user names so that everyone actually has to complete the levels for themselves.

When you finish a level either by completing it with the necessary number of lemmings or by nuking or by the time running out there is an option to see an action replay. Now although this may sound unappealing it's true use is this: If there is a very long level which you have done correctly right up until the last moment where you make a fatal error then you can choose to watch the action replay and intervene at a suitable time. As soon as you click on a lemming the action replay stops and goes back to real time. For many lemmings purists this is cheating- you should do a level all on your own all the way through but it is a useful function.

There is also a fast forward button on the tool panel in game so that once you have done all the necessary tasks and are waiting for the lemmings to walk home you can click this and they will all run in and then you can continue. Be warned there may be times when you click this and there is a tiny mistake and the finish screen will come up saying- you saved no lemmings and you will have no idea as to the reason because when you fast forward you cannot follow what the lemmings are doing. The other real pain with this is that if you screw a level up and press fast forward to finish you can get locked into an action replay loop. The level replays the wa
y you did it last time and if that isn't what you want you press nuke or fast forward and then the level replays again, even if you choose play level not action replay. The way to get out of this is to click on the choose level option and choose to play the level again, this resets everything and you can continue as normal.

In the Amiga version- and most other ones, when you click an ability over a group of lemmings the cursor selects the lemming furthest from the home (unless one of the lemmings is already doing something in which case it selects him). so picture the situation; eighty odd lemmings walking back and forth in a gap of about 2 cm on screen and you have to build them out but only to the right, it's nearly impossible to be sure you'll get a lemming waking in the right direction, and usually you don't due to Murphy's law. On the PC all you have to do is hold down the arrow key in the direction you wish to build and the cursor will select one of the lemmings walking in the relevant direction. Again many purists (myself included here) see this as cheating, there was a level of skill in choosing the right lemmings and a level of luck. Thus some levels should be done with that choice of building the right direction in mind and you as a player should have to be sure that you can mange it, i.e. not allowing all your lemmings in a small gap so that you can't differentiate those going left from those going right. On the other hand to do an entire level and then fail it because you happen to get a lemming in the wrong direction can be infuriating so it is a useful feature.

The worst difference between the two versions is that the PC version doesn't scroll. When your mouse pointer hits the edge of the screen it stays there the only way to scroll over the map is to move the view window over the minimap which requires moving your pointer away from the main game view- not something you want to do.

The windows v
ersion also has no two player option simply because windows cannot support two mouses (mice) but that doesn't matter too much. On the plus side you get all the extra one hundred and twenty levels of Oh No More Lemmings for free which is great and extends your gameplay for hours and hours and hours.

As it says on the box: 'The management accept no responsibility for lack of:
Hair
Sleep
Sanity'

You have been warned.

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