Modern Playstyles: In-game convenience tooling, or pause only, RTA, TAS, ...

[Simon]

Split off Simon blogs.

Modern Lemmings

I like to call Lix's/NeoLemmix's predominant playstyle "modern Lemmings" or "contemporary Lemmings". By that, I mean: Solving puzzles in engines that remove execution difficulty and help me turn my imagined solution into level-solving skill assignments with little hassle.

But that name is not precise. It's merely the dominant playstyle these days. There are many more playstyles. Purely by gut feeling, I'd order the playstyles from most popular on Lemmings Forums to least popular:

• Singleplayer puzzle solving with in-game tool* assistance
  
• Real-time competitive multiplayer
  
• Real-time singleplayer: pause-free challenges, RTA speedrunning
  
• Out-of-game tool**-assisted plays: TAS, research
  

(*) In-game tools: Frequent pausing, advancing individual physics updates, rewinding mistakes, asynchronous solving in skill-inserting mode a.k.a. the blue R, and assignment tweaking a.k.a. in-game replay-editing.

(**) Out-of-game tools are the typical TAS emulators with savestating, rewinding of the entire emulated machine, input listings, and RAM investigation.

I haven't mentioned hand-editing replay text files. It feels like it's both in-game tooling (the games take human-readable replay files) and out-of-game tooling (it's done in a text editor). In any case, it's so rare that I'll ignore it here.



There is no clear and precise name for the most popluar playstyle, i.e., for singleplayer puzzle solving with in-game tool assistance. I'm tempted to continue to call it "contemporary Lemmings" at the cost of imprecision. After all, each of the above four wildly different playstyles from the above list is a distillation of 1991 Lemmings's mixture of ideas. Each playstyle relies on more modern and contemporary tech than we had in 1991.

-- Simon

[Silken Healer]

I thought there was only two playstyles: the one that tolerates no execution difficulty and the other one. I'd group playstyle 1 and 4, and playstyle 2 and 3 together.

[WillLem]

There is a problem with playstyle 1: this descriptions fits both the extensive and numerable player-assist tools of NeoLemmix/Lix and the comparitively extremely limited player-assist tools of DOS/Amiga. Pressing pause on Amiga still constitutes using a player-assist tool, but it can hardly be compared with using framestepping, direction select, clear physics, fall distance ruler, skill queuing and all the many other tools in addition to pressing pause on NeoLemmix.

Incidentally, pressing and holding pause on Amiga causes a pseudo-forwards-frameskipping mode in which physics advances a single frame every few hundred milliseconds. But, we still can't even assign a skill whilst the pause is active, and so it still requires a certain amount of execution skill from the player to employ it usefully.

It seems appropriate to further distinguish this playstyle by separating it into two, then, but how to do so without arbitrary quantifiers?

[Silken Healer]

I'd group that with 2 and 3.

[WillLem]

I'd group that with 2 and 3.

Those are concerned with real-time play. Pressing pause immediately disrupts this, so even the only player-assist tool available is capable of necessitating a different category for this playstyle.

[Silken Healer]

I personally think there's too many categories. I thought there was just "no tolerance for execution difficutly at all" and "everything else."

[WillLem]

I personally think there's too many categories. I thought there was just "no tolerance for execution difficutly at all" and "everything else."

I disagree, I think it's more interesting and necessary to distinguish between the more nuanced playstyles. Solving a level using glitch exploits for a TAS solution, for example, is very different from solving a puzzle-oriented level exactly as intended by the designer. And yet, both of these playstyles are likely to rely heavily on player-assist tools; should they be grouped on this basis when their approach and motivations are so different?

Similarly, multiplayer is all about real-time play, but the goal is to create a solution as you go, and respond spontaneously to changes made by other players to your solution. This differs greatly from singleplayer real-time play, which is most likely about executing a very specific pre-determined solution without using the pause button. This can be practiced many times and executed to perfection, which is generally not what happens in a multiplayer environment, where anything can happen and levels are usually not played the same way twice.

[Silken Healer]

I'm not sure, NeoLemmix tools is essentially like a TAS maker.

[Proxima]

Yes, but the activity done with those tools is different. There is a group of people, mainly on the discord, who use TAS tools to put together replays for the console versions of the original game. This is different from regular solving in a number of ways: it's carried out on the original game (which the players already know solutions to); the goal is speed rather than just solving levels; it uses tools external to the game. Those are significant enough that it's worth discussing them separately.

There is a problem with playstyle 1: this descriptions fits both the extensive and numerable player-assist tools of NeoLemmix/Lix and the comparitively extremely limited player-assist tools of DOS/Amiga. Pressing pause on Amiga still constitutes using a player-assist tool, but it can hardly be compared with using framestepping, direction select, clear physics, fall distance ruler, skill queuing and all the many other tools in addition to pressing pause on NeoLemmix.

But in context, Simon was listing modern playstyles. Playing the original Amiga (or any other) version is something one can still do today, but it isn't a modern playstyle

[Simon]

Right, the main point is that many styles are "modern" in the sense of requiring more recent technology than we had in 1991. The most popular style is solving puzzles in engines that reduce execution difficulty.

There is indeed a range of execution difficulty removal. You can play in DOS with F-key skill selection and pause all the time. This is neither the nowadays popular playstyle nor is it pause-free. Golems doesn't offer single-frame rewind; Golems offers only a faster rewind where you must time the assignment afterward.* kaywhyn plays Lix without the tweaker, but with everything else.

*: Golems has individual frame rewind: Pause first, then tap rewind.

-- Simon