“Take command of the wackiest collection
of misdirected rodents ever seen on your screen.”
This is the description of Lemmings on the back of the Amiga box. In the manual it also says that the Lemmings ar cute, but stupid.
The first time I played Lemmings, was on a PC DOS-machine in the beginning of the 90’s. It’s been a while, so I doesn’t remember exactly. Bu the game was first released on Amiga, on February 14, 1991 and it sold very well. Because of the popularity, it was convertet to almost all computers and console under the sun at the time.
For those of you who haven’t played Lemmings before (and for those who have, but started to forget), these small creatures have only one purpose in life: to walk. They walk and walk unless they’re told to do othervice, or walk of a cliff or something and dies.
Luckily, you can tell the Lemmings to do other stuff too:
- Climber – can climb the walls
- Floater – has a paracute and can jump off high places without dieing
- Bomber – destroy everything around themselves
- Blocker – blockes the path and make the Lemmings turnaround and walk the other way
- Brigde Builder – build bridge/stairways
- Basher – can smahs rocks
- Miner – digging diagonally downwards
- Digger – digging downwards
- Nuke ‘Em – every Lemmings on the screen turn in to bombs
Which ability you can assign to a Lemmings, varies from levels to levels.
There are four difficulties in the game: FUN, TRICKY, TAXING and MAYHEM. Each harder than the other. They all have 30 levels which makes it 120 levels in total.
There is also 20 levels of 2 player fun. I haven’t tested that, but from what I’ve seen, it looks like fun.
When you have passed a level, you get a password so you can continue from there next time you play.
I like it best on FUN. You can mostly get the levels on the first try. The MAYHEM-levels are way harder. In the first levels of FUN, all the abilities are available for you to use. In that way you can learn how they works until you reach the harder levels.
The graphics is very good. Even though the backgrounds only have one colour, the landscape is very detailed. The Lemmings is only 8 pixels high, but you can see them walk, digg, the hair waves. The Amiga is able to show 100 Lemmings on screen at the time.
The sound is also good. You will recognize many of the tunes. The developers wanted to use old themes from movies and TV-shows, but dropped it in the last minutes, to not come in conflict with copyright holders. They used public domain tunes or made their own. And you got to love the “Oh! No!”-sample.
It’s been 25 years since the release of the game, but Lemmings is still a great game. It’s fun and very entertaining.
“A forgotten Blocker, a rogue Miner or
a misplaced bridge could spell disaster for every Lemming on screen.“