Exams finished; Lemmings too!
On this day, the sixteenth of January of the year 2009, I bear great news for the unwashed few: the Lemmings have been vanquished. It took me well over a decade, but I finally mastered the art of construction and forward-thinking well enough to beat them.
And finally, the exam period has come to a full stop. At least, temporarily. Though that’s hardly news compared to beating Lemmings!
We have an old Acorn computer on which are installed some of the greatest games to this day, Lemmings and Pac-Mania. If you don’t know them, Lemmings is a great “puzzle action” game, and Pac-Mania is like a semi-3D version of Pac-Man.
When we were kids, this is what we spent days playing. But alas, this was not meant to last. With the advent of Macs in our family, we moved away from RISK OS to Mac OS, and those wonderful games stayed on the Acorn, as if frozen in time.
Back when we moved, I decided to set up the Acorn again, and see if I could play those games that accounted for such fond memories. While Pac-Mania was still as fun as ever, Lemmings refused to start. So, while waiting to find the Lemmings disk once more and try to re-install it, I perused the internet, looking for a temporary fix to my new-found addiction.
At first, it was Pingus, a free game for Mac, which caught my attention. It was fun, but proved not to be quite the same as Lemmings.
And then came the discovery: someone made a port of the old PC version of Lemmings to the Mac (to Intel Macs, rather).
So I started trying out Lemmings once more. And during this exam period, I immersed myself fully in the game.
The first few levels, I remembered. Somewhere around the 20-25th level of the “Fun” difficulty rating, I started to feel lost, my memories not going that far. Most probably, I had never managed to get past some of those levels.
Then came the “Tricky” difficulty rating. At first, I didn’t really notice a change. But then came the blooming “Level 23: From the Boundary Line”. Lo and behold, that made me flinch. It was such a challenge that I had to look up a solution, provided by YouTube. Even with the solution, it took me a few tries to get it right.
The difficulty then seemed to drop a little for a while, but I found that in the “Taxing” difficulty rating, levels became steadily harder. There were at least a couple of instances that took me many tries to figure out or do properly.
Finally, the “Mayhem” difficulty rating deserved its title, sending awfully complex levels at me every now and then (with “easy” ones compared to them in between).
It was hard, it was tough, and I must have sacrificed thousands of lemmings during my many tries to beat levels.
But I succeeded!
Yay! Huzzah! One thing to cross off my check list of “things to do in my life”, right above the “recreate the Pac-Mania songs on the piano”, also done.
By the way, for those who would like to try it out, someone created a web version of the Lemmings game, 40 levels included!
8 February 2009 at 00:43
Acorn Archimedes – My form room in Secondary school was the IT Room, Full of Acorn’s (with CoCo on them for Lego Control) and BBC Micro’s.
The Acorn’s had Lemmings on them (I only remember the name of one level – Kelly’s Eye) and a game called Lander which was in 3D (OMG!)
There was also one computer that had Wolfenstein on it.
This was at least 16 years ago. wow
8 February 2009 at 12:26
Lander was way too hard for me to achieve any kind of score
Still, good times.