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Lemmings hit me like a lightning bolt in the summer. It was the most unexpected game to ever reach my hands.
I had first read of Lemmings on game magazines. I looked to some weird looking screenshots without paying much attention to them. Somehow, I didn’t felt attracted to Lemmings all that much.
Then a fellow Amiga owner who lived close to me got a hold of the game. I went there so that I could borrow some of his games while I took some of my own to borrow him. He was playing Lemmings. I looked at his Philips CM8833-II monitor and said: “what the heck is that?” and he happily replied: “It’s Lemmings!”
At the time I was totally unaware that, in reality, there are this fluffy little mammals called Lemmings who, from time to time, commit mass suicide for some yet unproven reason (most ethologists think they do this instinctively and as a mechanism to reduce their numbers so that the surviving lemmings get enough food to propagate the species).
The gaming concept of Lemmings was totally revolutionary for the time. The player did not control the main characters of the game. He controlled their trajectory but not their “will”. It decentred the player from the “playee” (sorry for the neologism). After I stared at Lemmings for a few minutes, I was instantly and hopelessly hooked. The game felt like a revolution and, indeed, it was.
You know those movies that are weird and, because they’re weird, they’re very enjoyable? Like “Dark City”, for instance? Lemmings feels similar. It was a very odd game and a very compelling one. It kind of chained you to your seat. And it was terribly frustrating when you failed to save your Lemmings (saving your lemmings from doom is the only objective of the game). Frustrating in the sense that you felt like you must repeat the level that you just lost no matter how many times until you finally save your lemmings.
The game itself can arguable be considered a mix between puzzle and strategy. You have to “design” a course and a strategy to guide your lemmings through peril and to safe haven. At the beginning of every level, you’re given a quota of lemmings that have to be saved. If you fail to meet the quota, you either repeat the level or give up.
You have the ability to endow the lemmings with a few selected actions (like digging, serving as a blocker, climbing, etc.) and, in some levels, you will be forced to sacrifice some lemmings for the salvation of the rest of them (as in real life).
As a game, Lemmings is very fun, even if in an infuriating and sometimes frustrating way. It’s the kind of game that has you glued to the screen trying desperately to overcome that level on which you’re stuck for almost a week. Good piece of entertainment.
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Very simplistic graphics, although they’re very colourful. The small sprites are well animated and the levels are nice to stare at, but the graphics won't make your chin hit the ground.
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Very good music. Some tunes have even become personal favourites of mine. the Music is absolutely great. Sound FX, even if of good quality, are minimal and used on a spartan way.
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Lemmings' strongest point. Using your Amiga mouse, you have to choose which action you will give to which lemming. It's very simple theoretically yet it's a challenge to play. There is an option to play a two player game (one-on-one) but you'll need two mice.
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| Another classic that helped to project the Amiga computer throughout this small floating sphere. A very enjoyable game that ranks high in the list of many Amiga owners. In my (not so) humble opinion, Lemmings is a unmistakeable must in every Amiga games library worthy of notice. |
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