Incidentally, the level title is Inroducing Superlemming, with no "t". I never noticed that when I was a kid :P At one point namida asked whether the NL version of ONML should change this level's name now that we no longer have the Superlemming gimmick, and I proposed that "inroduce" should be a neologism meaning "to introduce a feature that is later abandoned".
Your (1991-1991) header is wrong, because there certainly have been at least some Superlemming custom levels made while the gimmick was available.
Briefly resurrected some years later by the Lemmings community as an optional gimmick in NeoLemmix 1.43, the SuperLemming enjoyed something of an unofficial return to glory
Well you can always kind of revive it:
Turn fast forward on in NL and don't turn it off for the level. ;P
Briefly resurrected some years later by the Lemmings community as an optional gimmick in NeoLemmix 1.43, the SuperLemming enjoyed something of an unofficial return to glory, only to be further rejected, maligned and eventually removed from the game with no hope of ever returning.
Your (1991-1991) header is wrong, because there certainly have been at least some Superlemming custom levels made while the gimmick was available. I think I remember at least one (with more than one lemming, as well!) from the CustLemm or Lemmix days.
[EDIT: Post overlap. "Desert Quest" definitely isn't the level I was thinking of -- that one does have only the one lemming.]
Nice to see NeoLemmix hi-res in action. With cheating preview bridges LOL. I didn't know about that. Too long time been away here :-)
Superlemming did not make it's first appearance in the custom level scene in Neolemmix 1.43 . It had appeared before on Custlemm and Lemmix , back when the custom levels scene , was just beginning ( and before Neolemmix existed ).
Now that I think about it - Lemmings Plus II, back when it was a Lemmix rather than NeoLemmix pack, had one level using this gimmick too.
If that's the case, surely you'd want to restore the SuperLemming gimmick so that your pack works as intended...? I suppose you could just put a pre-screen suggesting that the player use FF whilst playing the level.
First, there was Lemmings. A game released by DMA Design in 1991 as an "action puzzle", with ingenious levels that required both a good brain for puzzles and considerable manual dexterity to pull off the solutions.
A large part of the game in those days was just that: the ability to click the mouse at just the right time, not always knowing what the result was going to be.
And there is absolutely no randomized elements in the game, so as far as "not always knowing what the result was going to be", the most common case of it is probably when you have a crowd of lemmings and you'd like to assign a skill to someone amongst the crowd facing one specific direction, but the game doesn't have the means to do so making it somewhat a matter of "luck".
I'm not wrong about precise clicking being a big part of the original game, though: try solving levels like Save Me, Mind The Step, No Added Colours or Lemmings, the non-backroute solution of Stepping Stones, Pea Soup, Livin' On The Edge and The Ascending Pillar Scenario without the aid of Assign-Whilst-Paused, Framestepping and Skill Shadows: it's still a huge challenge long after you've figured out the puzzle's solution!
Heck - even some of the Fun levels like Smile If You Love Lemmings, We are Now At LEMCON ONE and even something as innocuous as Origins and Lemmings all become a lot harder when played as originally designed, simply because you have to get the clicks just right, or you're nuking the level and starting again.
But this post is really about celebrating that other part of the game, which I believe the SuperLemming level epitomises: click at the right moment or fail the level!
And as far as pausing goes, do you count the very common technique of pausing, then move your mouse cursor to the lemming, then unpause and quickly click to assign the skill? This is possible in almost all ports of Lemmings AFAIK, unless if pausing cannot be triggered except only through the button on the skills toolbar (which is quite rare--computers often can pause via keyboard, and consoles often have a dedicated pause button on the controller). It is in many ways basically like an actual assign-whilst-paused.
Also worth pointing out that it's also common to move the cursor ahead of your lemming, then spam-click a bit while waiting for the lemming to finally move into range of cursor and receive the skill assignment. So rather than dealing with clicking at the right time per se, it's often more about finding the right position to do the clicking at and wait there.
Those levels don't seem to be good examples since being in rating Fun, their save requirements and skills available are generous enough... It's making me a little curious now what it looks like when you played those levels in the original games for the first times.
The double-speed could've made a very execution-focused level, but the one and only level we ultimately ended up with featuring the gimmick seems middling when it comes to execution.