To reply more directly to this particular comment:
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".
At no point did I mention anything about randomized elements. Perhaps I should have been more clear: when referring to "not always knowing the result" of a particular skill assignment or click of the mouse, I was referring to examples such as the following:
- In a crowd of lemmings, not knowing whether you'd select a right or left-facing lemming (as per your example)
- Not knowing whether you'd placed a builder such that the end of the build would reach over a gap, or the top of a wall, or a similar target, until the builder had finished building
- Those
truly annoying moments when you assign a basher a frame or two too late, and they turn around before actually starting to bash
- Assigning bombers too early or too late (this was probably one of the game's biggest trial-and-error elements)
- Mining towards a narrow area that includes steel blocks which you may or may not miss
- When attempting to free a blocker with a miner, having to make sure that you assign the miner at the right point so the blocker doesn't turn him around
- In a level like
Down, Along, Up... In That Order, positioning the blockers and the builders
exactly so that the builder reaches the next platform
I could go on.
The point is that, whilst these aren't all necessarily
action-oriented, they require a certain amount of manual precision: and that, without the aid of assign-whilst-paused, direction-select, skill shadows, etc. This, I believe, is where DMA coined the term "action puzzle" - sure,
Lemmings a puzzle to be solved, but you've also got to play it just right as well!