Hey Akseli,
you seem to be really active lately, and you're doing pretty awesome work! It's a bit unfortunate the level designing community is in a bit of a lull right now.
I myself haven't ever seriously done level editing stuff although that was my dream when I was a little kid, but nowadays when making levels is possible, I don't feel to have enough will and time for that, and I haven't get used to Lemmix editor for example. But I love to play other lemmings people's levels and I find it fun to review and talk people's levels, like I did very briefly about möbius' levels last July. Maybe it is ok to write that kind of stuff about different levelpacks in this topic and I'd like to do more that some time.
It can't hurt to try out designing a few levels, can it?
I think the Lix level editor is quite a bit easier to get into than Lemmix. Level designing can be pretty fun and rewarding if you have some good ideas and people playing them. I think for a level designer, getting a review and discussion is the best thing that can happen. It lets you know there's someone appreciating your levels, and also give feedback what they like and what they don't, something to learn from. I know from myself that I immensely like reading someone's review on my levels, it's really rewarding. Definitely don't hesitate to review levels, I hope I'd find the time to join into discussions. Of course, reviewing levels from someone who's still active here would be nicest, but of course also levels by some other designer can be discussed.
This is one of my favourite topics in these forums and I'd like too that there would be more action here. Geoo's levels are the very hardest levels of the Lemmings Level Database for me, so take a look at them if you want some insane challenges. I've now played almost half of the levelpacks from the database and rated the difficulties for them, check those out. And I could also recommend some nice levelpacks with different difficulties and so!
From my old levels, some are pretty elegant, but some also rely on glitches a lot (and are near impossible if you don't know the glitches), so looking back at them with the additional experience in level design I gained over the years, I think the packs aren't too nice except for a couple of levels.
It's awesome you're playing so many levels and rating them. Don't be afraid to use the 'Fun' rating too, even though it's subjective of course. For me, there are way too many levels to play through by now, but there are probably some gems hidden there, so finding them is what the fun ratings could be pretty useful for. I sure don't mind recommendations either.
Actually, I originally registered to these forums when I found tseug's levelpack and I wanted to see solutions for those levels from Tseug's levelpack topic, so the same thing happened to me which happened to you: I watched ccexplore's replays of those levels last winter and I was like 'Whoaaah!!' but after that I decided that I would never again spoil my fun like that and I'll try myself to solve levels. That was then when I was just starting to play custom levels and so. But now later when I played Tseug's pack I passed "Oh No, Not Again!" quite trivially without using climber or floater and keeping RR the same all the time, replay attached.
Haha, I had the same experience with a different game called Supaplex. There was one amazing levelset which I watched the solutions to before seriously trying, and I remembered some of them later, so I regretted it and swore to myself to never do that again. So when I came to playing Lemmings, I didn't do the same mistake again. (I do watch challenge replays every now and then though, as there's way too many for me to ever do, and even though some solutions are pretty elegant, I feel that there's not someone else's level design idea intrinsic to them, so on average I think they are more technical and less elegant.) I have a clean slate here, not watching any replay before solving the level, and so far I think I've managed to solve every level I've seriously tried (except for ccx' Lix level Brickout, which I'll have to wait out on until the backroutes are fixed).
The solution you got to "Oh No! Not Again" happens to be the same one I found when I first solved the level. The difference is that it took me over a year to find it! I think ccx struggled with this one for quite a while too. We're still puzzled why it is so hard, because it seems so simple once you know the solution.
Hehe I beated that level like two months ago but it was a quite cunning level. So möbius, your other levels are all for Lix? Maybe I should get more familiarised with Lix and play it more.
Lix has over 400 levels by now and counting, by RubiX, Clam, and from the community pack. What I think is remarkable about them is that they've been made with a lot of experience from designing previous levels. So I feel the levels we got for Lix now are of really good quality! I find the usability and customizability a bit better than in Lemmix too, and as I said I think the editor is a bit easier to use.
Then there's also Cheapo, for which a lot of good levels have been made too, including my alltime favourite levels set, Insane Steve's pack of 90 levels, which taught me how to play Lemmings at a high level. Really good difficulty curve, every level was challenging when I first played, but at the end I was a lot better at solving levels and some levels seem comparatively easy, looking back.
With the advent of Lemmix and now also Lix, Cheapo has fallen into oblivion though, no-one designs levels for it anymore, but there's still good levels to play.
By the way, does anybody know any lemmings level download sites other than the next ones?
I think you've listed all of the ones I remember off the top of my head. But I think I still have quite a bunch of levels lying around on my computer, some of which you'll probably already have, but probably also some that are hard to find by now, I remember Shvegait's, Ben Conway's or tumbleweed's for instance. I'm happy to dig through these a bit for you if you want and bundle them up; perhaps they could also be put on the levelpack database at some point, so everything is in one place and they could be rated.