[ Ссылка ] - Played by: MadMatty

Lemmings, Original game by DMA Design for the Commodore Amiga in 1991. Conversion to the Commodore 64 by E&E Software and published by Psygnosis in 1994.

“A unique mindboggling game of multiple skill levels. Take command of the wackiest collection of misdirected rodents ever seen on your screen.”

Lemmings was a very late release for the Commodore 64 and likely the last boxed release you could pick up at your high street game shop. It wouldn't be long now before the shop shelves are gutted and all the 8 and 16 bit systems are relegated to history to make way for the 3D console gaming era! The game was in development a long time and covered in Commodore Format Magazine as well as right from issue 1 of Commodore Force. As much as I wanted this game, it released too late for me as I got an Amiga for Christmas 1993. I dare say that is true for a lot of people at the time no doubt hurting sales of the game at a time when the C64 era was truly at an end.

All that said, the game did turn out pretty good. Not just a cheap cash in like some late Ocean releases, the presentation of the Amiga original is fully intact here. We have an intro, proper menu screen, 100 levels, multiple in game music tracks, level passwords, mouse support and pretty much the same ending. It’s good that the developers didn't cheap out on what wasn't going to be an easy project given the C64 hardware limits. You can choose Music+FX or just FX. There are no extra FX with music disabled unfortunately. Would have been nice to use the memory saved from not having music used for the Oh No and Lets GO! samples.

Just having lemmings on the C64 is a technical feat in its own right, but there are problems making the game more challenging that it should be. Due to the maps being compressed into two screens (the Amiga can use 5 screens), obstacles are tightly packed together and quite often you need pixel precision to have your lemmings in the right place. This is especially true in the mayhem levels where you can be time limited and given very few abilities and often with a high lemming survival requirement. Just one pixel out and your builder might not reach the next platform or hit it too early and not be able to climb up. Sometimes you might have a small space with 30 odd lemmings it, but due to them being overlapped you may not select the correct one and .. may as well be game over. And sometimes you click the front lemming to turn into a blacker, only to find 2 more were walking at the side of it! The Pause button becomes essential in the later levels as sometimes you need to scroll or select two abilities within a split second of each other. The precision required seems insane at times and it's only through emulation and save states that make them not impossible.

With that said, It’s lemmings. It always was a challenging game. Just that with the C64 limits imposed it makes it more so. 100 levels is more than enough. For the longplay, I have not beaten the levels in the most optimal way. As long as I achieve the required lemm count, I am happy. However later levels do require a pretty much perfect play to succeed. Now there is a one level playable demo without music by Digital Excess that looks and plays much more like the Amiga version. It really makes you wonder how else Lemmings could have been on the C64. At the end of the video after the End Sequence, I quickly cut to a game breaking bug in one of the levels. It requires very precise lemming placement and for some reason placing the last blocker releases all the blockers that have been placed. Solution was to place lemming one pixel to the left but that didn't give the builder much room to work with and initially I didn't think I would beat the level.

00:00:00 - Intro
00:05:10 - Fun Levels
01:01:10 - Tricky Levels
02:13:50 - Taxing Levels
03:31:30 - Mayhem Levels
04:54:50 - Game Breaking Bug + Fail message -
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