Wow, I left this hanging for almost a year, but I finally updated the OP with all the LPs that have happened since then.
Also, despite no feedback on it, in case it wasn't obvious already, in response to the question of whether I would continue LPing or not, I have decided that I will keep doing them, just not with the same high frequency as before. In other words, I'm spacing out my LPs way more than I did before so that by the end of the year I've only done about 10 LPs or so. In addition, though I kind of get the feeling that my videos in the past year and lately have been getting ignored, in actuality I don't think that's the case at all and that I'm just worrying for nothing. That kind of factored into me thinking of retiring from LPing, but nah, as stated before it was more to look out for myself so that I don't suffer from massive burnout. Besides, it's great to take extensive breaks from LPing from time to time.
Not to mention that I kind of lost interest in maintaining this topic of mine, but well, I have finally returned to get it up-to-date! I hopefully got all of them and didn't miss any!
Lemmings Plus VIThe final NL pack in the Lemmings Plus series by namida, this one dials back on the difficulty in response to how people thought the two packs before this one, Lemmings Plus Omega 2 and Lemmings Plus V, were too difficult. However, it's not to say that LPVI is an easy pack in contrast to those two. Rather, it's just not as hard as them. Indeed, the LPVI's first rank is already unusually high in the difficulty, though probably still easier than the first rank of LPO2 IIRC. Also, as namida has told me, the talismans here are definitely worthwhile ones IMO. Some are far harder than the "normal" solution, eg, Maniac 1. This is also a pack that namida probably considers his greatest quality-wise, and I completely agree, as I really liked this pack when I LPed it. I absolutely enjoyed it from start to finish, even if the pack isn't as hard and that I prefer hard levels in the game of Lemmings. Some of the levels in both the Maniac and Delirious ranks, the third and fourth ranks, respectively, are pretty challenging, but as you might had guessed I really enjoyed many of them.
Festival Millas 2021The fourth holiday-themed pack in the FM series by GigaLem, this was yet another really enjoyable pack, even if it isn't as difficult as LPO2. This pack once again features levels by both GigaLem and Nessy. However, as it's a much smaller pack than LPO2, the difficulty increases faster. Even then, I didn't feel the high difficulty until the third rank. The final two ranks are definitely difficult, though I have already played some of these levels from when they were nominated for LOTY2020. Even then, as it's been a while, I couldn't remember the solutions to some for a time. Doesn't really matter, as I'm able to figure them out again given enough time. It's also good exercise for the brain to play them from "scratch" again instead of loading an existing replay. The final level is pretty challenging IMO, though I found it more annoying than very hard due to how I constantly needed to keep rewinding to adjust some things because I kept missing some important skill assignments. This is one that I self-inflicted, as replay editing would help tremendously here, but well, I don't use it at all in my LPs
Bodyworks Voyager: Missions in AnatomyThis was a pretty fun game that my dad got for my brother and me when we were growing up. As the title suggests, this is all about learning about the human body by studying a medical database of the various body systems and then get quizzed on them in the form of a multiple choice question or matching terms with definitions. Once successful, you are then presented with an arcade-like play-style where you need to fight microbes, some of which attack your ship and others which attack the patient. How hard and how many questions you need to answer depends on the difficulty that you pick at the start when you sign in with your name. The highest difficulty for the questions requires you answer 3 questions correctly, while the higher difficulties for the arcade style playing requires more microbes to be destroyed per mission. I believe to see the true ending it is required that you just play on the highest difficulty for both the questions and arcade play. If you elect to go in order with the lowest difficulty for both first, each is 60 missions long. Once you finish all 60, you then repeat the same 60 missions but for a higher difficulty for both, which the game automatically increases for you once you finish all 60. Therefore, the game is 180 missions long if you do this. Thus, it is somewhat of a long game, especially if you keep answering questions wrong on the highest difficulty or keep losing the missions because you got your ship damaged enough or you allow the patient's health to deplete completely.
Note that this is a Dos game, so it can be somewhat difficult to get it to run properly on modern machines. The only major brick wall I ran into with the game is that Dosbox would complain that there isn't enough memory to install it. I forget how I got it working, though I think I might had grabbed a copy of the game from the Internet Archive rather than from the CD, which I still have a physical copy of. In addition, there doesn't seem to be a download of the music that sounds exactly the way it does in my LP. This was how I remember the music sounding and a lot of the tracks are great. Instead, there is a link to download the MIDI versions of them, but they sound very different. Even then, I think I was pretty eager to share the music pack for the game with this community, but I found out that you won't be able to use these for music for Lemmings levels because this file extension isn't supported. Instead, you would need to convert them to a different format. I don't know anything about that, as I haven't used any music editing software myself, nor do I think I ever will get myself into using them. My knowledge is just limited to music theory, but that's pretty much it in regards to my extent of knowledge of music
The Incredible Toon MachineThis game should be familiar to those who know about The Incredible Machine series of games. This is essentially a "cartoony" version that isn't as well-known as some of the other games of the series, but it's pretty fun IMO. There's a similar one called Sid & Al's Incredible Toon Machine, but this is just a Dos version of The Incredible Toon Machine, which in contrast is a Windows game on CD. Unfortunately, this one is extremely difficult or impossible to run on modern machines. I'm able to get the game to install just fine, but there are issues running the game, such as sound/music not working. Once again, I don't remember how I got the game to run, but I was able to using the CD of the game that I still have to this day and running it thorugh a virtual machine on Windows XP. The great thing is that it works well and I was quite happy to relive some of my childhood by playing the game again after so long. Before this, I did play it some years ago in the last decade, on my previous laptop before my current one, I think.
Just like all the other games in the series, there are several modes you can choose to play, but the main one I did for the LP was "solve a puzzle." There are 100 puzzles in total, some of which are either single padlocked or double padlocked. The single padlocked ones are unlocked once you solve all the other puzzles in that difficulty. The double padlocked ones can only be unlocked after you solve all the puzzles, including the single padlocked ones. The former are unlocked by entering in a password that the game shows you on the jigsaw puzzle screen.
Back in the days, I pretty much only bothered myself with the Cake Walk difficulty, but starting in high school, once I actually played the All Brawn, No Brains difficulty for real, I found it wasn't so bad at all so I decided to try and solve all of the puzzles. I managed to get all of them solved except for the second level of the Looney Bin difficulty. I actually had to get my brother's help to get it solved. I pretty much had all of the solution correct except for one tiny but crucial part that I didn't program the timer correctly. It really needed to be that particular timer or else you will not get the level solved. Not sure why it never occurred to me that the timer needs to be halfway exactly
In any case, it's very misplaced to be at the very start of the difficulty and would had been far better if it was at the very end instead.
Before I made a serious attempt at getting all the puzzles solved, I would pretty much always mess around in the "build your own puzzle" mode. Nothing serious there, I just liked messing around with the editor, especially with placing plenty of Al's and Sid's on the screen and seeing the ensuing carnage/mayhem. They are the titular characters of the Dos game, with Sid being the mouse and Al being the cat. Some nice wordplay here, where Sid Mouse = city mouse, and Al Cat = alley cat. They are voiced by veterans Rob Paulsen and Jim Cummings. I figured out Sid Mouse easily, especially as I learned about him through my Wikipedia readings online in high school, and I made that connection once I got to playing the game again after so long. However, I never guessed that Jim Cummings was the voice of Al Cat.
Lots of fun no matter how old you are, though again as I said this game is very difficult to run properly on modern machines. Your best bet is through a virtual machine and with the CD if you still have it. There are downloads of the game you can find online, but I couldn't get the music to work properly.
If anyone knows how, please let me know!
Lemmings 3D Winterland/Lemmings Plus 3DThese next two packs had me return to the custom Lemmings level scene. I played both of these on namida's engine for Lemmings 3D called Loap. It's essentially the NL of L3D, as it has features such as rewinding and time skips, etc. As I haven't used Loap before, I decided to test the waters by doing Lemmings 3D Winterland first, an expansion to L3D with 6 new levels. These levels were decently challenged, with the ones near the end quite difficult, with the 5th level being the hardest IMO. That one apparently took me well over an hour on camera before I got it solved. The 6th and final level isn't anywhere as hard, but it's a completely non-trivial primarily bombers level and also the best level of the game IMO. Took me sometime to get used to the controls of Loap, especially as I ended up finally upgrading my mouse to play the game with on the engine just so I can get the panning with the middle mouse button/wheel to work properly instead of remapping the mouse buttons to different functions through the Logitech software for it.
Having completed Lemmings 3D Winterland and now being mostly familiar with Loap as a result, it was time to take on the final pack of namida's that I have yet to play, LP3D!
Once again, a great pack from start to finish, though I got stuck pretty badly at various points of the pack, even as early as the Tricky rank. However, the Taxing rank is where the difficulty really picks up, as the first few levels managed to stump me pretty badly. There are fortunately some breathers later in the rank, but it already starts off pretty difficult, culminating in the penultimate Taxing level which is considered one of the hardest levels of the pack outside many of the Mayhem levels. The Mayhem rank is a wild card when it comes to difficult levels, as pretty much all the L3D enthusiasts struggled with different ones. Even then, there are several that are agreed to be quite difficult by all, but I believe the ones that don't have any doubts are the final 5 levels of the pack.
For me, I consider Mayhem 16 the hardest of the entire pack. For those not in the know, this is essentially the equivalent of the "No Time to Die" level that you can find in all of the numbered packs of the Lemmings Plus series. The differences here is that you also have 9 turners and 4 minutes instead of 2, but don't be fooled by having double the amount of time! The time limit is still surprisingly very tight. However, what makes the level quite difficult is not only the route but how you need to save any turners you end up using, and it's not easy considering that they cannot turn themselves. It's not freeing them that's hard, it's how to get them to the exit once freed. On top of all that, the save all requirement is what makes LP3D's NTTD level very nasty. This is why save all levels in the game of L3D is very rare and how very few levels that don't require 100% are possible to 100%, even with glitches, which I'm not really aware of, as I didn't grow up playing L3D. I only played the official game a few summers ago.
Despite how I got stuck pretty badly on a lot of levels in LP3D, I can honestly say that I came away from the pack and learned so much about L3D. Especially with what is possible in L3D, as there were so many things that I didn't even know was possible in the game.
Needless to say, I can highly recommend namida's LP3D pack and is very worth it, as it touches upon a lot of things that even L3D didn't. In particular, it makes far more use of the 3D aspect, and those are some of the highlights of the pack!
Once again, I want to thank namida for all the LP packs, including LP3D and Doomsday Lemmings! It's really hard for me to believe, but I honestly can't believe I have played through all the LP packs (LPI to LPVI, LPO/LPO2, HLP [Holiday Lemmings Plus], and LP Alpha) and Doomsday Lemmings. It might have taken me 3 years, but I managed to play them all!
Lemmings CraniumThis is a level pack compiled by Crane, who finally took to the task of putting together a pack of most of his levels from the mini-Dos packs and contest entries from over the years. I helped Crane convert the levels and get them up-to-date in the NL format, as well as help hunt down some music tracks and even got to do some pre-testing for him. Starts off easy for the first two ranks, but then gets difficult rapidly with the third rank and beyond, though the fourth rank of Challenge are just subsets of the official levels and is kind of a breather before you get into the very difficult final rank of Chaos that follows immediately after. I ended up backrouting a lot of the levels, but I did manage to finish the pack after struggling so much in the third and fifth ranks. I had already LPed the Challenge rank from about 1.5 years ago before LPing Lemmings Cranium. Sad to say some of the levels got to me and pushed me beyond my breaking point of frustration, but that is all just due to how I self-inflicted too much unnecessary precision where they got patched out. There are still some things I disagree on, but at the same time I also need to clarify up some things that caused Crane to worry about our falling out. For the time being, let's just say there were some other things that I was upset about that caused me to not be myself and I ended up feeling really dumb about, in particular:
A level that requires cancelling a digger with a blocker that I completely forgot about, which is ironic considering that the very first Lemmings level I ever made uses it
It never occurred to me that that was all I was missing until I was sent a level replacing one of the Curious ones that can be thrown out that teaches the player it. That's what caused me to feel so stupid and got upset for a few days, but well, it at least has reminded me of the "trick" and therefore it wasn't a spoiler by any means. In other words, I know the trick and therefore it's not a spoiler, I was very stupid for not realizing that was the only thing I was missing.
In any case, thanks Crane for the level pack!
Logic QuestOne of the many games by The Learning Company, this one focuses on logic and reasoning. You go around in the challenges collecting robot character pieces and commands so that you can program the robot to pick up the key and unlock the door in order to get to the next level. It's one of those that I played when I was in elementary. It was pretty difficult for me back then, and I needed a lot of help from my brother. After a few levels, I understood how it's played and was able to finish all the challenges. There are 12 in total, 6 Courtyard Challenges and 6 Castle Challenges. The former are the easy ones, while the latter are the much harder ones. In addition, all Courtyard Challenges are single floor, while all Castle Challenges except the first one have multiple floors. It's not too long of a game, especially if you understand it and that the game is nice enough to not glitch out on you completely that renders you trapped in some areas of the Castle Challenges. Castle Challenge 4 was the only one that took a long time because the game kept getting me trapped at the tops of stairs in different areas, and when that happens there's nothing you can do except for restarting the current level and having all your progress for the level wiped out.
Castle Challenge 4 is the most infamous level where the faulty stairs glitch happens.You can also choose to play the challenges with or without bats. Even playing with bats, the levels aren't that more challenging, especially as you can toss fruit to make them take a nap. You have an unlimited supply of fruit. If the bats catch you, it's stated that they carry you off to another part of the level, but from what I remember all it really does is make you go left and right for a bit before you can back up with the down arrow key to make them let go of you.
As this is for Windows, it runs fairly well on modern machines compared to some other old games, but there are still some annoying issues, such as the game crashing when you do certain things, such as clicking on the arrows to zoom the playing area in/out, or when you collect all robot character pieces and the game crashes either way. As a result, I've lost a few recordings this way and after a few of them I just played off-camera for a bit to make sure I find all the correct settings to use so that if the game does crash I at least won't lose video footage this way. The only way I got this to work all fine was recording through a virtual machine.
In the final video of the LP, I ended up showing off a few of the custom maps that you get access to after beating all 12 challenges. Just really a "playground" for you to mess around in.
Gizmos and GadgetsYet another game from The Learning Company, this time the focus is on science. You build vehicles to race against Morty Maxwell, aka, the Master of Mischief. There are 15 races total, 5 vehicles per building. This game is much longer than Logic Quest, though most of it is due to how you often need to go through all or nearly all doors in order to find all the bets parts. The levels therefore can be very time-consuming, especially the final two races of each building, where the warehouse is the biggest possible. These are also the vehicles that require at least 7/8 parts, with the most ever required being 9.
You go around the warehouse looking for parts to build your vehicle, as well as solve science puzzles when going through puzzles. Just like Logic Quest, you can play with or without Chimps. Playing with Chimps does make the game harder to an extent, though most of the time they can drag out levels longer than they need to if you're not able to find the part you're looking for because you're unaware that a Chimp might have it instead of you not picking up all yellow boxes in the warehouse. The first three levels have the slower bipedal Chimps, while the final two levels have the much faster, unicycle Chimps. In addition, the latter ones don't sleep as long as the former when they're fed a banana.
This was one of the most educational games I ever played in my childhood, though it was very difficult for me. I had to get help from both my brother and dad, though the latter was mostly for the science puzzles instead of the vehicles. In addition, I kept simply throwing in whatever parts I collected to make the vehicles and didn't think about whether they were the best parts or not in order to win the race. That's where my brother pointed out to me that I can find out the best parts by looking at the blueprint. Once I was told this, then it wasn't that bad at all. Even then, this game was a lot of fun back when I was young, and I was definitely very happy to play this game again for the nostalgia!
Unlike Logic Quest, this game is more frustrating to get running properly on modern machines. The biggest problem is getting the music to work properly. It installs fine, and you can get the game to work by setting the correct compatibility settings, but the most prominent issue is the music. It took a very long time for me to find a solution to this problem online.
This involves creating an empty midi.cfg file and placing it in the Windows/system32 folder.Finally, just like The Incredible Toon Machine, this was originally a Dos game, but I grew up with the enhanced version on CD, which added speech. I'm glad I grew up with the latter, as the voice acting is great.
Festival Millas 2022The fifth holiday themed pack in the FM series, this one is a little bit longer than the previous pack of the series. It's also much harder as well, especially the levels at the end of each rank from the second one onward. Even then, like most packs, I enjoyed this from start to finish. However, there were a few levels that I unnecessarily overcomplicated and therefore resulted in some frustration. Personally, I class this as a
Medium - Very Hard pack.
With the completion of this pack, I'm pretty much all caught up except for the most recent FM pack, FM2023, which was released earlier this year. I will probably get to it around July/August.
Lemmings Halloween 2023Finally, assuming there weren't any other packs/LPs I've missed, this is the latest one I completed. This is a Halloween pack by Armani. Definitely a very high quality pack like Armani and Icho have said, as I too enjoyed this pack a lot. Even though it isn't anywhere near as hard as Uncharted, I didn't find this pack that much easier than Armani's second level pack, Xmas 2021. If anything, the difficulty is probably about the same as one another. There are two ranks of 15 levels each, with the first one, Festive, having no zombie levels, while every level of the second rank, Funeral, are all zombie levels. Though I often struggle a lot with zombie levels, I still found the Festive rank to be pretty hard. If anything, I would consider the Festive rank
Medium - Very Hard, while the Funeral rank is probably
Medium - Hard. Though, the second rank probably does reach Very Hard at the end or is very close to it. However, I would ultimately class this as a
Medium - Very Hard level pack in the difficulty, so I guess this is where Icho's assessment differs from mine. Even then, I consider him a much better solver than me, and it likely means he didn't struggle as much with the pack as I did. So, at least to me, the difficulties of FM2022 and Lemmings Halloween 2023 are similar and that one isn't harder than the other.
The hardest level of the pack would definitely have to be Funeral 14, as is quite accurate by Armani's personal assessment. Even though it doesn't look like it, it's definitely very hard to see the correct ways to approach the level. Skills run out very quickly, particularly the jumpers/walkers, and you cannot waste the lasers whatsoever. This level was also the very first time in the longest time in which I made two attempts on video before I had to switch to off-camera time to get it solved and then recorded again once I was successful. Turns out the solution isn't that hard to execute, though there are still a few minor variants and ways to do the level. Seems the level is liked enough to be nominated for LOTY2023, and I would have to guess it was Icho who nominated it, as he's the only other person other than me who has played this pack. However, if it wasn't, then I don't know
I do have to apologize for a lot of the videos being so long
I definitely went overboard here on the video lengths. I even told myself very early in my LPing days that I would use a stopwatch, but the ironic thing is that I haven't ever and am still aren't using one
Hopefully it won't happen to this extent for future packs I LP!
Overall, like Icho, I can highly recommend this pack!
All rightie, I should all be caught up now
I'll likely be back to LP sometime in June, but we'll see. Been taking a break from the game of Lemmings and go through other games I played in my childhood. That's always a lot of fun, right?
Hope 2024 is going well for all!
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