Lemmings Amiga
DMA Design released the original version of Lemmings for the Amiga in February of 1991. Lemmings is an icon-driven, mouse-controlled puzzle game famous for its playability, audiovisuals and icon-driven control. The ST/Amiga versions of Lemmings are also notable for featuring two-player split-screen mode. [1]
Lemmings was programmed by Dave Jones, drawn by Scott Johnston, animated by Gary Timmons and composed by Brian Johnston and Tim Wright. Lemmings levels were designed by Scott Johnston, Gary Timmons and Mike Dailly.
In Lemmings up to 100 little animated sprites representing anthropomorphized lemmings (little "men" with green hair and blue clothes) drop down from a trapdoor in the ceiling and begin walking unwittingly across a landscape, to their doom.
To be clear, lemmings have no sense of self-preservation whatsoever. For example, they will step off a towering precipice and drown in the raging seas below or get splattered on rock-hard ground, one after the other, like tomatoes. It is up to players to intervene and save the lemmings by facilitating safe pathways to an exit that the lemmings would otherwise have no hope of reaching because they are not even looking for it.
In order to guide the lemmings-horde safely to exits, players click on icons that represent commands and then click on lemmings sprites to assign those commands to those lemmings (point-and-click).
The commands confer abilities to the lemmings that have been assigned the command; that is, they create a type of lemming that carries out a specific command (an assignment) for as long as it is able to or until it has been assigned another task.
Lemming-types include walkers (default), climbers, floaters, blockers, builders, bombers, bashers, diggers and miners. For example, the assignment of the builder is to build bridges, the assignment of the digger is to dig the earth and the assignment of a bomber is to detonate.
The idle, event-based, walk-cycle and assignment animations are impressively detailed considering their small size.
Bashers, diggers and miners modify the landscape by digging tunnels and shafts that the lemmings can walk through and fall down into. Bashers dig horizontally, diggers dig vertically and miners dig diagonally. Diggers continue to dig until there is no more diggable ground in their path or they have been reassigned. A digger could dig a shaft, tunnel sideways and then mine diagonally downward, and so on, thereby creating a network of tunnels.
Commanding multiple lemmings to undertake the same assignment can increase the rate at which that assigment is carried out. It stands to reason, for example, that two bashers can bore a tunnel twice as fast as one. However, the efficiency of stacked assignments is subject to activation and animation timing to which players naturally become accustomed.
A single bomber blows out only a small portion of the landscape when detonated, but this can suffice to break through thin vertical and horizontal barriers. Blockers assume a stationary position, thereby directing lemmings to reverse their course. Climbers climb upwards on 90° walls, builders build bridges diagonally upwards and floaters safely descend from heights via parasol, aka umbrella.
Lemmings can be nuked at any time. When the Nuke 'em icon is double-clicked a five-second countdown begins and the lemmings call out, "Oh, no!" and detonate en masse in a pixel-powered fireworks display that became famous in 1991. Nuking is used to trigger a level-restart in no-win fail-state scenarios.
Blockers only stop blocking if they are nuked or have the ground excavated beneath them, and builders only build bridges of twelve blocks in size. A builder that has laid down twelve blocks can be immediately reassigned as builder in order to keep building a bridge as long and as high as usages and level layouts allow. Bridges can also zig-zag upwards into the sky like the winding staircases of a tower.
All lemmings but the blocker and bomber can be reassigned commands via point-and-click. One lemming can bash through a barrier, climb a cliff and then float down the other side via parasol, but a lemming can only be assigned one ability at a time (commands cannot be queued up). Lemmings that have completed their assignment will return to their default state of walking unless, of course, the completion of an assignment results in them falling to their doom or otherwise getting killed.
Lemmings consists of 120 single-player levels and 20 two-player levels. It takes about six hours to play through the 120 levels. Each single-player level in Lemmings is time-limited; that is, players must complete the level within a certain time-frame (e.g. five minutes). The number of different commands are often limited as are the usages of each command. For example, a level may only allow five blockers and five bombers; it is up to the player to utilize that command pool wisely in order to complete the level.
On top of that, each level requires that a certain percentage of lemmings survive the level; that is, that a certain percentage of lemmings reach the exit safely. In addition, the rate of release of lemmings from the trapdoor varies from level to level. The rate of release can be increased or decreased on the fly via +/- icons, but cannot be reduced below a level's settings.
On many levels players are forced to sacrifice some lemmings in order save the vast majority of lemmings (e.g., blockers and bombers).
The levels span a variety of themes: caverns, hell-fire, ancient, ice, acid, horror and spider-web. Some levels pay tribute to other games such as Awesome, Menace and Shadow of the Beast.
Amiga Lemmings displays in 16-color 320x200. The active drawspace is 320x176. Lemmings levels employ edgescreen scrolling, which means the screen is pushed to scroll by the hardware mouse-cursor at the screen's edges.
Lemmings was distributed on 2x 3.5" 880kB DD diskettes. It was not installable to hard disk drive.
Lemmings Two-player split-screen mode
It goes without saying that Lemmings is one of the highlights of the ST/Amiga games catalogues. And while the single-player mode is good enough fun for a time, Lemmings' two-player split-screen head-to-head, coop and race modes offer the most fun and replayability.
[1]
Criticism of Lemmings
There is not much to criticize Lemmings for; almost nothing, really.
- Amigas could have handled slightly larger sprites
- The screen-scrolling could have been smoother
- The original Lemmings Amiga palette was EGA-ified for porting to IBM PC MS-DOS
- Overall, Lemmings doesn't take advantage of the Amiga's custom chipset all that much
- Passwords instead of savegames means the game cannot give players end-game readouts
Overall, I give the original version of Lemmings 9.6/10.
Little lemmings-like sprites would reappear in DMA Design's Walker of 1993, which was named after the walkers of Lemmings of 1991.
Oh No! More Lemmings DMA Design 1991
DMA Design released Oh No! More Lemmings in 1991 as an expansion to or standalone version of Lemmings. Oh No! More Lemmings added 100 levels, 10 two-player levels and six tunes. It takes about four hours to play through the 100 levels. Logically, most of the levels in Oh No! More Lemmings are more difficult than the levels in the original Lemmings (though the first few levels are easy).
Oh No! More Lemmings was distributed on 1x 3.5" 880kB DD diskette.
Lemmings 2: The Tribes Amiga 1993
The Amiga version of Lemmings 2 was programmed by Dave Jones, Andy Whyte and Brian Watson. The mythos of Lemmings 2 was written by Steve Hammond.
While the Lemmings 2 intro is not as good as the iconic intro of the original Lemmings, the overall presentation and audiovisuals of the sequel are superior. That said, I doubt many Lemmings veterans would have purchased the sequel two years after Lemmings and Oh No! More Lemmings came out, but I don't doubt that Lemmings 2 sold well enough as a worthy sequel, which it is.
In the above infographic you can see that there are new Lemmings-types and themed levels (12 tribes of lemming), but that Lemmings 2 did not increase the sprite size of the original Lemmings. However, Lemmings 2 does have smoother screen-scrolling and hardware mouse-cursor movement than the original Lemmings. As well, its color palette is not EGA-ified because VGA had hit its stride on IBM PC MS-DOS by 1993. Thus, Lemmings 2 is much more colorful than the original Lemmings.
To speed up tedious segments of the gameplay a fast-forward icon was also added. Nevertheless, it takes about five hours to play through the 120 levels of Lemmings 2.
Lemmings 2 was distributed on 3x 3.5" 880kB DD diskettes, and can be installed to hard disk drive.
Lemmings 3 All New World of Lemmings Amiga 1995
DMA Design released Lemmings 3: All New World of Lemmings aka The Lemmings Chronicles on IBM PC MS-DOS in 1994 and Amiga AGA in 1995.
The Amiga version of All New World of Lemmings was programmed by Andy Whyte, Cameron Rattray and Allan Finlay. All New World of Lemmings was animated by Gary Timmons and composed by Raymond Usher.
Lemmings 3 reduced the number of lemming tribes from 12 to just three (classic, egyptian and shadow), but each tribe has its own music, theme and landscape and lemming sprites and animations to match. There are 30 levels of play for each tribe, and it takes about four hours to play through the 90 levels.
In addition, the icons are animated and the sprites have been increased in size as well. However, the sprite animations play too slowly.
Lemmings 3 modified traditional Lemmings mechanics. For example, Lemmings 3 adds tools such as the bomb, grenade, sucker, shimmier, hadoken, spade and bag of bricks as well as auto-tools such as the swimmer, umbrella and clock. Tools appear on the landscape as objects that lemmings automatically pick up. Then, the lemmings are commanded to use the tool, via icon.
Thus, a lemming cannot be assigned to dig until a spade (a tool) has first been acquired. In addition, the spade tool grants the ability to dig in three directions whereas before there were three separate dig assignments: dig vertically, bash horizontally and mine diagonally. "Mine" can now dig diagonally upwards as well. Arrow overlays appear on the playfield to indicate the direction of digging and building. Only one tool-carrying lemming at a time can be highlighted via right-clicking.
Other changes, some of which can be considered "blasphemous":
- Blockers can be commanded to stop blocking
- Jump, walk, and block command usages are unlimited
- The direction in which lemmings walk can be changed by just clicking on them
- Creatures and NPCs have been added to some landscapes as obstacles, such as the Lemme Fatale and her siren song
- Cinematized main menu instead of just... a proper menu. The player is forced to mouse-over objects just to see what they represent
- No 2-player mode
- Trashy soulless forgettable tunes
The above changes were likely to confuse, annoy and/or otherwise disappoint Lemmings veterans, but perhaps they would have appealed to a new audience.
Overall, Lemmings 3 veered into platform-puzzle territory and became a strange mutant of a game instead of just building upon the traditional Lemmings-type formula with AGA/VGA graphics. It isn't a bad game, but I can't say it's a good one either -- it's a disappointment.
Lemmings 3 was the third and final Lemmings game that was developed by the original creators, DMA Design. To be fair, by 1993 most people were sick of Lemmings, anyway; it was old-hat and had run its course with the fans by Lemmings 2 at the latest, but the franchise would remain profitable for years to come, so why stop?
Lemmings IBM PC MS-DOS 1991
DMA Design released Lemmings for IBM PC MS-DOS in 1991. The PC version of Lemmings was programmed by Russell Kay.
The hardware mouse cursor movement and screen-scrolling of PC Lemmings are not as smooth as those of Amiga Lemmings.
The IBM PC MS-DOS version of Lemmings requires 580K of free conventional RAM for full audio support. The minimum free conventional RAM requirement is 490K.
PC Lemmings audio supports PC Internal Speaker, AdLib and Tandy.
PC Lemmings supports mouse, joystick and keyboard control.
PC Lemmings was distributed on 3x 5.25" 360kB floppy disks, 1x 3.5" 720kB DD diskette or 1x CD-ROM and extracts and installs to hard disk drive via Lemmings Installation. The install size is 500 kbytes and consists of 31 files.
PC Lemmings DOSBox setting: machine=vgaonly.
Lemmings 2 IBM PC MS-DOS 1993
DMA Design released Lemmings 2: The Tribes for IBM PC MS-DOS in 1993. PC Lemmings 2 is the equal of Amiga Lemmings 2 in almost all respects. For example, the scrolling and mouse cursor movement of PC Lemmings 2 is much smooth than PC Lemmings.
The PC version of Lemmings 2 was programmed by Russell Kay and Steven Reid.
PC Lemmings 2 audio supports PC Speaker, AdLib, AdLib Gold, Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster Pro, Roland, Roland with Sound Blaster, Tandy and Pro Audio Spectrum.
PC Lemmings 2 supports mouse, joystick and keyboard control.
PC Lemmings 2 was distributed on 2x 5.25" 1.2MB HD floppy disks, 2x 3.5" 1.44MB HD diskette or 1x CD-ROM and extracts and installs to hard disk drive via Lemmings 2 Installation. The install size is 4 megs and consists of 229 files.
The Lemmings Chronicles IBM PC MS-DOS 1994
DMA Design released The Lemmings Chronicles aka Lemmings 3: All New World of Lemmings for IBM PC MS-DOS in November of 1994.
Lemmings Chronicles audio supports Sound Blaster and Gravis UltraSound. Lemmings Chronicles displays its menus in square-pixel SVGA 640x480 and square-pixel VGA 320x240, but the actual game only displays in VGA 320x200!
Somewhat pathetically, the Lemmings Chronicles intro of 1994 consists of a cheap pre-rendered slideshow whereas the original Amiga Lemmings of 1991 featured a fully animated intro. It is true that intros are not important but the Amiga Lemmings intro became iconic.
The original PC version of Lemmings Chronicles was programmed by Keith R. Hamilton, Russell Elliot, Steve Reid and Robert Parsons.
Lemmings Chronicles was distributed on 4x 3.5" 1.44MB HD diskettes or 1x CD-ROM and extracts and installs to hard disk drive via Lemmings Chronicles Installation and LHA's SFX 2.13L by Yoshi. The install size is 12.6 megs and consists of 574 files.
Indexes:
- Amiga Games Reviews (Index to all Amiga game reviews)
- Computer Game Reviews (Index to all computer game reviews)
- The First REAL Amiga Game
- Best Amiga Games
- History of Computer Games 1976-2024
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.