Let's go!

02 Jan 2015
6

Let’s go!

Welcome to my Lemmings Diary! The goal here is to play every official and unique level from each entry in the Lemmings series, in order, one per day, until I beat them all*!

Lemmings is a pretty important game to me. As a little girl, I played a demo of Lemmings that was on a CD full of shareware and demo versions of MS-DOS games. After that I didn’t see much of Lemmings for awhile until I met an elementary school friend who had the full game. This friend also introduced me to emulation, where I learned that the game console I had growing up, the Sega Genesis, had its own version of Lemmings! This is the version of Lemmings I played the most, though the majority of my childhood.

Unfortunately, my elementary school brain couldn’t figure out how to get past the halfway point in the “Tricky” difficulty, and I gave up, before messing around with the sequel, Lemmings 2: The Tribes and getting equally stuck around that game’s midpoint.

Remembering I hadn’t beaten Lemmings a few years later, I asked for a Lemmings game for Christmas. Unfortunately I didn’t specify which one and wound up with Lemmings 3D on the Playstation. Whoops. While I personally think it’s a passable game and played much of it, from what I understand, generally opinions on it are… less than kind.

After picking up and putting down Lemmings again and again throughout the years, I finally decided it’s time to bury the Lemmings hatchet once and for all and finish these games. Once I got to the harder levels, and with my other things I do throughout the day, I realized I was completing about one a day and that more or less sprung this idea: A Lemmings diary.

I’ll be starting with the first game in the series, in its original Amiga incarnation, starting tomorrow. But before we do that, let’s get a quick introduction to the first Lemmings game out of the way.

In Lemmings, our blue-clad green-haired lemming friends emerge from a trap door with a cheerful “Let’s go!” at a rate you can raise from a minimum, as seen in the lower left most corner here. Lemmings will keep falling out of the trap door until there aren’t any left for a given level.

In line with the old story about real lemmings, our digital lemming friends walk in one direction, one after the other, turning around when they hit a wall and never stopping unless something decides to stop them. Which means…

Yep, they walk right to their deaths.

That’s where you come in. At the botom of the screen on the left is a series of skills you can assign to your lemmings to get them to safety. From left to right, they are:

Climber: Assign this to a lemming to make them climb any 90 degree surface they come across. They can only climb straight up. This skill remains on the lemming you assign it to permanently.
Floater: If a lemming falls from too high, they die when they hit the ground. Turn a lemming into a floater and it will open a parasol shortly after falling, allowing it to land safely. Like the Climber skill, the Floater skill is permanent, and you can combine it with the Climber skill to make an Athlete lemming.
Bomber: Set this on a lemming and a five second timer will appear above its head. When that timer runs out, the lemming explodes. The explosion is small, but it can destroy anything that isn’t metal.
Blocker: This stops a lemming in its tracks and makes it stick its hands out on both sides. Any lemming that walks into a Blocker turns around as if they hit a wall. Blockers are also permanent, and once you turn a lemming into a blocker, they’re a blocker for good, unless the ground beneath their feet disappears somehow. Otherwise, the only way to relieve a blocker of its duties is to blow it up.
Builder: This makes a lemming stop moving and start building a staircase in the direction it was facing. After running out of pieces to build with, the builder will shrug and continue walking blindly. If a Builder bumps into a Blocker, the builder will turn around and keep building.
Basher: Turn a lemming into a Basher near a wall and the lemming will start digging through that wall with its fists! It’ll keep going until it reaches the other side of whatever it started bashing through, after which the lemming resumes walking without a care in the world. Bashers can bash through anything that isn’t metal and anything that doesn’t have arrows pointing towards the Basher.
Miner: Miners are like Bashers, except they dig diagonally down and in the direction it was facing previously. Like Bashers, they’ll keep mining until they run out of wall, and they can’t mine through metal or anything that doesn’t have arrows pointing towards it.
Digger: Finally, there’s the Digger, which digs straight down until it has nothing else to dig through. They can’t dig through metal either.

Next to the Digger’s icon is the pause button (get it?) and next to that is the “Nuke”, which turns all of your lemmings into bombers, and next to that is the minimap, which shows the general shape of the level in green and your lemmings in yellow. You can navigate anywhere in the level by clicking the minimap or holding your cursor on the edge of a level.

But what do you do with all these things?

You have to save the lemmings! In this level there’s 100 lemmings total, and you need to save 50% of those lemmings in 4 minutes.

Use your tools…

…to get through the level…

And lead the right number of lemmings to the safety of the goal!

Once you’ve created a safe enough path, you can increase the release rate to speed things up a bit…

…and finally…

…see how you’ve done!

If you saved as much as or more than you needed, you get a password and can move on to the next level.

That’s all there is to it, but it’s a lot harder than it seems. There’s four difficulty levels in the first Lemmings game: Fun, Tricky, Taxing, and Mayhem. Fun is of course the easiest, where Mayhem is as cruel as it sounds. Each difficulty level has 30 stages, so with 120 stages in all, there’s a lot of lemmings to save and a lot more to lose.

And that’s Lemmings. Join me every day as I pick off each level one by one!

*Probably not going to play past Revolution, though!