This is a big one
. Probably the one most subjective and therefore hardest to grasp.
While there are a lot of great packs out there, and a lot of levels with very clever solutions, many of them stray from what would be considered Lemmings at first glance quite a bit. I've asked you guys before about what stuff turns you off immediately in a level, as well as what makes a level rewarding to you. Even though the latter may be the counterpart of the former, "reward" is something that can only be assessed after the level has been completed. This here, in contrast, is more about what draws you in, when you see the first glance of a level, what makes you think "Oh, I really wanna play this thing!"?
It's also about what we associate with Lemmings directly and indirectly. In a nutshell, given the age of most forum members, we're talking about nothing less than "
how can we convincingly revive our childhood?"
Ideally, a pack or level fulfilling these criteria should feel as if DMA had just decided to do another Lemmings release. You know, the thing we were basically all hoping for after having played through (or gotten stuck on) Oh no! More Lemmings back in the day?
Here's what I could boil my list down to:
- It all starts with the main menu: The big Lemmings title logo, perhaps slightly modified, like in "Oh no! More Lemmings", but still recognisable. And then, new rank names, preferably adjectives, increasing in intensity, and the font must be somewhat warped, slightly raised to the right. No straight letters, no custom backgrounds, just white font with a black outer border on the green background of the rank sign. And don't forget the yellow bars below to indicate the difficulty!
- Next, the level preview screen: The feeling when it "rolls open" starting from the middle, revealing the first sight at a new selection of levels. This is, as said before multiple times, the biggest immersion-breaking aspect of the New Formats player, currently. Because the change was made for talismans, and original packs didn't have talismans. Neither did they have an author field. So don't put your name here if the entire pack was made by you anyway.
- No level preview-texts.
- Tileset choice. As awesome as many of the custom-made tilesets look, many of them were directly taken from other video games. Custom-made sprites, in contrast, often can't quite keep up with the original Lemmings and ONML tilesets, or at least have a very different tone to them. L2 tilesets are also fine, although many of them look very similar in shape (very block-ish). So I'd probably restrict myself to mostly original and ONML graphic sets, and avoid graphic set mixing wherever possible. If you add new graphic sets, make sure they blend with the existing original Lemmings ones as well as possible. This can be easily achieved by e.g. taking original hatches and exits and merely recolouring them. The rest of the terrain and objects can look whatever way you want, but don't go all crazy with the design of the hatches and exits if they are going to look drastically different in one tileset while all the others are very similar to each other.
- Level shape. Most original Lemmings levels looked abstract, but still very much like a landscape. No copy-and-paste sections of repetitive terrain, no disjoint-unions or "miniature levels", no large number of unconnected, free-floating platforms, no long detour paths or awkwardly placed hatches to enforce specific timing-based solutions, no random flags planted everywhere across the level, and most of all: No vertical scrolling! Just a landscape you can navigate through, and that you can cover with your camera only moving left and right.
- Music. Sticking to the original Lemmings and ONML music is certainly a good start; a lot of the L2 tunes, in contrast, are not very memorable, at least to my ear. That said, there are a couple of pieces that fit well among the original tracks, as if they had always been part of that selection. For me, Amiga 02 / DOS 01 is THE most iconic Lemmings soundtrack, and since it is very heavy on strings and piano, other songs relying on these same instruments might fit as well. For example, there are two songs by Vanessa Carlton which always seem to remind me of the Amiga 02 / DOS 01 track, "Ordinary Day" and "A Thousand Miles".
- Level concept. In contrast to original Lemmings however, I don't need execution difficulty ("All or nothing") or repetitive reaction-time challenges ("We all fall down") for a pack to feel like Lemmings; an entire pack worth of "No added colors or lemmings"-like puzzles will feel just as much like Lemmings, while at the same time being a lot more entertaining and challenging for the average NeoLemmix user .
- Skill choice. And here comes the funny part: One would expect to say "Stick to classic skills only" here. And a lot of packs already do that anyway, in fact it's possibly the only point from my list a lot of packs stick to rigorously. For me however, skills somehow are not the main determinant of what makes original Lemmings feel like Lemmings to me. Actually, a lot of the negative aspects of original Lemmings are associated with classic skill restriction, for example, iffy builder-fests in places where you'd rather want a platformer to go beneath a low ceiling. Stubbornly sticking to classic skills in such a case just makes the execution fiddly and annoying. Likewise, the reason Lemmings 2 doesn't feel like Lemmings to me at all is more associated with the vertical scrolling, the un-catchy music, and the jump-and-run-style platform structure of the similarly unmemorable levels - not with the abundance of skills that Lemmings 2 provides. Since NeoLemmix doesn't even include all those weird and redundant skills from Lemmings 2, but only has had a comparatively small number of skills added, each of them after careful consideration, I don't see a reason to refrain from using them, even in a scenario where one tries to recreate an "authentic" Lemmings experience.
As you can see, none of my packs really fulfil a lot of the criteria on this list. Paralems started out with original Lemmings reruns, but in the end evolved into a huge mess of movie- and politics references, tileset mixing, oversized levels with vertical scrolling, and not clearly defined music choices.
Pit Lems was just a collection of mechanically semi-challenging random puzzles.
Lemmicks was all about the gimmicks, thereby deliberately getting away from original Lemmings as much as possible.
And Lemmings World Tour, while doing a twist on the original music, through its artistic approach made clear right from the getgo that heavy tileset mixing and more realistic-looking levels, rather than the above mentioned abstract landscapes, would makes this feel very different to a DMA-made Lemmings expansion.
So that is probably what I'm going to shoot for in my next pack, whenever that may be: Mechanically-driven puzzles, largely in original Lemmings tilesets, featuring only a couple of levels in new graphic sets that blend well with the classic ones. I'll likely keep the music theme from Lemmings World Tour, meaning the music I've recorded + the level titles refering to songs. Because otherwise, without an overarching theme, I fear this would simply devolve into Pit Lems 2.0. I don't like level titles that feel as if they had been randomly selected; it severely reduces the sense of "progression" when solving them one after another.
Finally, other stuff Lemmings is associated with in my childhood: Star Trek: The Next Generation; Bryan Adams; Jingle Bells (Christmas Lemmings was actually the very first Lemmings game I played, even before original Lemmings). Bryan Adams was pretty much the only musician I was familiar with at that time. And Star Trek: The Next Generation used to be aired here in Germany on the channel
Sat.1 - a channel whose logo looked very similar to the
loading icon on the old Macintosh I used to play Lemmings on
.
Okay, that's enough on my part. What requirements does a pack need to meet in order to feel like authentic Lemmings to you?
Just in case this hasn't become clear: This is not meant to be a dogmatic list of rules, more of an associations game...