I'm curious if you can go into any detail as to what you liked/didn't like about them?

Of course! I actually thought that would be a little constricted reply if I only ordered the levels without commenting any of them, although I think that was the main idea of this topic and hardly anyone else have commented their orderings either.

TM pack 1 surprised me positively and after playing your levels I had to play the other packs, TM2-4 too. All my top 3 levels are puzzle levels, which I had to try many times before I beated them. Turning lemmings around in "get up stand up" was tricky without blockers and builders, since release rate was 50, too. Invocation reminds me of ONML Havoc 9, but your level is harder. The player needs to multitask and think about which lemmings should go in which exit. Special Relativity was my clear favourite. The level has a very simple skillset and layout, and the time limit prevents all the backroutes I tried. In the end, the solution which I found, involves 4 (!) lemmings to do the work - in such a simple looking level with only 8 skills. I liked this puzzle a lot!

Bells and Whistles fell the last because I beated it in a very trivial way just turning one lemming around to build the bridge for the others. It seemed a little odd when the other levels around it were much more difficult.

At first I voted only dirt and thought that fire, marble and crystal are equal and pillar pleases me least of these. Now I voted dirt and also crystal, which is beautiful, mysterious and a little gloomy tileset, but I've started to like it more and more now, probably due to some nice crystal style custom levels I've played.

Dirt is of course very memorable and nostalgic style because the starting levels of fun, tricky and mayhem are dirt styled and the last level of the whole game is a dirt level. I find this bumpy underground tileset laid-back and sometimes even pretty: for example I've always liked the idea and the layout of taxing level "Upsidedown World".

In addition, both crystal and dirt are the least used tilesets in original Lemmings game.

Havoc 20: LOoK BeFoRe YoU LeAp!



Lemmings: 60
Save: 50 (83%)
Release rate: 1
Time: 7 minutes
Skills: 1 climber, 1 floater, 40 bombers, 2 miners

Good: This possibly deserves to be the last level in the whole game due to its difficulty. It’s also an example that a level can still be difficult even though it lacks steel and builder skills. Placing miners and bombers can vary to some extent in different solutions. Two entrances bring a little diversity, since you need to think which skills you can use for which lemmings without losing too much of them…

Okay: …but you aren’t forced to multitask, because the time limit is so plentiful. Nevertheless, the more you wait, the harder are bomber assigning and timing in crowd.

Bad: Okay, it’s supposed to be a bomber level, but still, that’s just it, the difficulty relies mostly on bomber timing and it’s pretty obvious where you have to use the other skills. So, executing the solution can be frustrating. It could be more visually pleasing, although the level is supposed to be some kind of a rough level maybe?  Mixed capitalization of the title can bother, too.


Yeah, ONML level reviews finished !

Very nice topic, I shall also share my childhood memories.

Lemmings has always been my clear favourite computer game series ever, no one game is close to it - and so it is still nowadays. Most of my memories relates to ONML, which was the most important game for me for some reason, but I remember playing original Lemmings, Lemmings 2, Lemmings 3 and even Lemmings 3D (demo version), too in the 1990s. The only thing I remember from L2 is the first level of Beach tribe, and afterwards nobody found that game from our computer anymore, what made me a little sad. From L3 I remembered best the training level but not much else. My parents recorded sometimes with a camcorder our live and in one video my big sister plays Shadow tribe level 2 of Lemmings 3. I recognized that level from that like 16-years-old-video when I played L3 last spring and it was quite a nostalgic moment.

My mom was the one who played the game with me and we wrote levelcodes down to a paper when we made progress in L1 and ONML. I'm born in 1991 and these memories are probably from -95-96. I remember clearly when we solved a snow level in Wild ranking and it came a time for me to go to sleep. I asked my mom still: "Can I have a look at the next level?" My mom clicked the next level button. The title screen of a brick level came in front of us. "Can I look closer at the level?" I asked, and we clicked so the level started and we pressed the pause button. The level looked interesting and we perhaps yet thought how to solve it, but then I went to sleep. I clearly remember that moment, so I can nowadays tell that the level was THE SILENCE OF THE LEMMINGS. Then the snow level had to be ICE SPY, even though I remembered only the tileset of that level.

I also remember that one day I went to a sauna (yeah, we Finnish people go sauna very often http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauna), took a shower and dried myself with a towel. Then I went to the computer room and took a look at the levelcode paper, and few waterdrops still dropped from me and hit the paper, and the colour of the letters written by some red pencil spread a little. The trails are still there, but the letters are fully unterstandable, so the incidence didn't do any harm. I remember also that we were proceeding already in mid-Wicked at that time, and I guess we played ROCKY ROAD that night! (Haha, my memories focus seemingly on the all-caps titled levels...)

Finally, Havoc 5 "There's a madness in the method", was the level we got really stuck on. One day I and my mom searched the levelcodes for the rest of the Havoc levels from the Internet, and those codes (Havoc 6-20) are written in our paper with a blue ballpoint pen, all the other with some red pens. I tried many levels, but I'm quite sure that I didn't pass any of them immediately. Also, for some reason, the levelcodes were wrong for levels 18-20, so Where Lemmings Dare was the hardest level I got access to. And I tried it so many times without succeeding, I wanted so highly to see how the very difficultiest levels of ONML looked like. I remember that I thought that Havoc 20 had to be a massive brick tileset level which probably requires 100% saved. So, when one day we searched again the levelcodes from Internet and the code for Havoc 20 worked, I was really excited. It was a surprise for me that the boss level of ONML wasn't a brick level, it was a rock level ! It was though very hard.

I have all our levelcode papers still and I think that I'd never throw them away. I also drew many my own levels in papers and I have a lot of them still. The only existing level I have drawn is Where Lemmings Dare, maybe I tried to solve that level with my drawing! When I was 11, I drew levels that I saw in my dreams. For larger maps I linked many A4-papers with adhesive tape. I have found drawings of my imaginary levels in all tilesets but Pillar and Crystal. In addition to L1 and ONML maps, I have also drawn one Lemmings Revolutions map.

We moved into a new house in 2002 and I know that I finally beated both L1 and ONML for the first time in that house, so I have been more than 11 years old at that moment (And I was the only one in my family who still played Lemmings...). Then was the long period that Lemmings didn't work in our computer anymore. When in autumn 2010 my brother helped me with DOSBox, the first games I played with it were Lemmings games (of course..)! On last winter I got a HUGE Lemmings itch again by accidentally watching custom level videos in Youtube (it was Pieuw whose miraculous levels strongly amazed me). Thanks for DOSBox (thanks my brother :>) and Abandonia (heard from my sister about this page, thanks :>) (and thank you my dad and especially my mom, for everything... :'>), for the first time of my life I played through Holiday Lemmings 1994, Lemmings 2 and Lemmings 3 in this winter-summer 2012 period, achieving some of my greatest childhood dreams ever.