That reminds me...
Back in November when I found out about DOSBox, my friend also linked me to a download of Lemmings (I had it as a kid but on a floppy disk somewhere at home...). I started playing it, my roommate asked for it, and I got this girl on my floor to start playing it. They played it for a while, but got busy with other things.
And then... a couple weeks after, a group of friends played some Trivial Pursuit game. I forget what one it was, it was a DVD version about pop culture or something.
It came to my team's turn, and we got the category Sports and Games. Normally you get a question/hint and then the actual clue shows up. Usually the question/hint doesn't give you much information. Well, here's what it said. "This game's difficulty levels are Fun, Tricky, Taxing, and Mayhem. What game is it?"
Of course I said Lemmings right away, before they even showed the level "Just dig!" (it starts out fuzzy and the picture becomes more clear over a few seconds). The girl whom I introduced to the game was there too on a different team, so she knew what it was as well, and I didn't look like a crazy person knowing that. It was just so weird how that happened. If another team got that question I would've been mad though
When I went home for Thanksgiving, which is when I started making levels, I got my sister to help test them. She was a little rusty on Lemmings but at least helped get rid of the most obvious backroutes. And then she started playing the normal Lemmings again. She also played through most of the Holiday Lemmings levels over winter break. Now, this wasn't all completely new to her because we had played Lemmings around when it first came out, but there are still people and will always be people interested in Lemmings, unless something can make it obsolete. That something hasn't come along, and judging by the way the game industry is going, it will probably never come along.
Anyway.. the game companies need to realize what makes good games. They are quickly losing it...
The "problem" that Lemmings has is that it's so simple and perfect in its gameplay that there doesn't need to be a new game that is Lemmings-based. Think of Tetris. Even "new" Tetris games do not change much! That's because Tetris is already in its simplest and most perfect form. You can add new pieces and special effects, but that doesn't make it more interesting in the long run, only the first couple of times you see them. I've never played Tribes, but think of that. Sure there are plenty of new cool skills, but can't you already do so much with just the original 8?
Lemmings can often require precision. If you were to make Lemmings in a higher resolution (higher than Cheapo), say, 800x600, can you imagine how difficult it would be to be precise? Of course you could eliminate the pixel precision, but then it's reminiscent Lemmings 3D, and I'm not sure that's a good thing.
A Lemmings FPS? That takes away the entire point of the game, sorry. If Lemmings were to become merely a type of character, the game misses the point. Better to do something like that with Worms, and keep the puzzle aspect with Lemmings...
Whoops, random long rant. :-(
