#41: Lemmings

Nice hair-do!

Lemmings is a port of an Amiga game that sold so well they ported it to pretty much every system known to man. The game was designed for use with a mouse primarily, which makes the controls on the SNES a little wonky. Scrolling around is slower than it probably should be, for example. At least they figured out a way to use 5 of the buttons on the SNES controller!

KABOOM!

The game itself is a "puzzle-platformer", the first of the genre, and was ground breaking. The way the game works is a small army of lemmings spawn from an entry gate. They walk in a straight line until they hit a wall, reach the exit, or die. If they reach the end of a platform they just walk off and fall down. Fall too far and they die. Spinning blades? They'll walk right into those and die. Bear traps? Walk in and die. Flame throwers? That's right. They'll get lit on fire and die.

LEMCON ONE!

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to guide most of your lemmings to the exit. In this case, 60% of the 50 lemmings need to be saved. The other 20 are completely expendable! The way you make things happen is by turning one of your lemmings into one of eight different professions. Make him into a digger and he'll dig down into a hole. Give him an umbrella and he won't die when he falls long distances. Turn him into a bomb and he'll explode in 5 seconds! KABOOM!

Wikipedia claims that Lemmings was the inspiration for the entire RTS genre. The idea is it was the first game to have computer controlled characters that you, an external overlord, to whom you would give orders. Lemmings itself was created when some dude tried to demonstrate that he could take an 8x8 pixel box and make a perpetually walking animation. Someone else saw this walking animation and wanted to make a game with the characters just walking along forever. So StarCraft 2 owes it's existence to some dude fooling around with an animated gif!

Lemmings uses famous music tracks. I recognized London Bridge is Falling Down and She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain.

The game itself is actually really fun. I played through 21 levels in about an hour and will likely go back for more later tonight. It does have a couple things that could have been better. An 'end turn' button which fast-forwards with no more input from the player would be nice. Solving a puzzle and then having to wait a minute for it to play out gets tedious. It could use variable scroll speeds so you can move around the level faster. I wonder if there's a new version out there for the PC...

Rating: S-