Quote from: mobius on February 25, 2021, 01:46:38 AM

-big or huge sprawling levels

I disagree; I love these sorts of levels as long as there are plenty of skills to craft out your own solution, or as long as the solution is relatively obvious. Conversely, large maps that are also complicated puzzles: yes, yuck!

Quote from: mobius on February 25, 2021, 01:46:38 AM

-when the terrain appears to have been thrown onto the level without much planning or artistic input.

Agreed.

Quote from: mobius on February 25, 2021, 01:46:38 AM

unusable bombers never bothered me one bit; I always chuckled a bit at them then moved on. While they may be the most used case of a skill you don't need in a puzzle level; any extra unnecessary skill can be inserted into the level to throw the player off

Having recently completed a speedrun of L1 on Amiga, I've come to the conclusion that the unusable Bombers were put there deliberately so that it would be possible for a player to accidentally assign a Bomber instead of, say, a Blocker or Floater (the adjacent skills). Since I have done that a couple of times whilst going through the run (mostly due to relying on arrow keys for skill selection, in real-time, at speed), I would say that this is almost certainly the reason they're there.

Levels like All Or Nothing, Stepping Stones and even (to some extent) We All Fall Down prove that the designers knew that the game had a layer of difficulty that had more to do with the controls than the puzzles, and putting random Bombers in there as another way to add execution difficulty seems like just the sort of thing that they would have found amusing at the time L1 was designed.

The thing is, since NeoLemmix has removed that element of difficulty from the game, it no longer has the same effect, it's just annoying.