
Lemmings 2: The Tribes - doppp
https://www.filfre.net/2020/03/lemmings-2-the-tribes/
======
CamouflagedKiwi
What a great game... spent many hours on this back in the day.

> The ultimate Lemmings 2 achievement, needless to say, is to collect gold
> stars across the board.

Turns out this isn't quite true... I (and many others) achieved that long ago,
but a few years back I found someone had gone through the whole game without
losing a lemming on any level, which is pretty astounding; in many levels that
seems completely impossible. Never underestimate what dedicated gamers will
achieve...

~~~
dmurray
I didn't play Lemmings 2, only Lemmings, but it seems completely impossible
there and very constraining on the design space, if you want to make sure
that's always possible (you can never have a level that requires a blocker or
a bomber, which are two of your 8 abilities). I see from the article they
added a lot more abilities in the sequel.

However, the article suggests getting gold stars across the board is mostly
equivalent to not losing a lemming

> To wind up with gold at the end, you usually need to have kept every single
> one of the little fellows alive through all ten levels.

~~~
egypturnash
What, you never dug under a blocker to release her from her duties? As soon as
they fall they turn back into normal lemmings.

~~~
dmurray
Oh yeah. Just rules out bombers, then, unless there's some other trick I don't
know about.

~~~
egypturnash
I think that pretty much every level with bombers available could be solved
without one, if you were sufficiently versed in the edge cases of how the game
worked. I could be wrong, it’s been decades.

~~~
gdm85
No, sorry :) there are levels which absolutely require the sacrifice (regular
levels and the special ones too)

~~~
capableweb
Your statement directly conflicts with the initial comment that said "but a
few years back I found someone had gone through the whole game without losing
a lemming on any level"

Who's right? Who got the sources to back themselves up?

~~~
josefx
I think they are talking about Lemmings while the initial comment was about
Lemmings 2?

~~~
capableweb
Ah, that might be, it's unclear to me. Thanks for trying to clarify!

------
Razengan
The pixel perfect terrain deformation of Lemmings and Worms will always be
impressive, and something that 3D can’t do as well as 2D (yet?)

I wonder why there haven’t been any modern sequels or mobile ports of
Lemmings..

~~~
aasasd
There was this crazy game ‘Vangers’ that, apart from the most-otherworldly
feel I've ever encountered, had terrain in voxel graphics and permanently
destructible — and I don't mean shitty Minecraft voxels:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9R7QJ5Sh1o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9R7QJ5Sh1o)

That was '98\. Still wondering why I haven't seen anything like that anymore.
I vaguely recall one dude working on a super-detailed engine, down to
individual blades of grass and such, but not sure how's the damage model there
(that's possibly related to this, but probably not:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4)).
There's also the ‘Teardown’ game:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc_QC25RM44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc_QC25RM44),
and a search for ‘voxel graphics’ on YouTube suggests a few others in this
vein. Still not quite the same.

As for mobile Lemmings, the Play store tried to sell them to me just
yesterday.

~~~
MereInterest
Interesting. Judging from the video, I can't tell, but does it use a height
map, or true voxels? I don't see any instances of hollow spaces or overhangs,
which could be done with voxels but not with a height map. A height map would
give good performance and destructibility, without using a huge amount of
memory. The top-down view would let you hide that from the players, such as
for bridges.

~~~
aasasd
There are under-surface nooks and overpasses, also destructible (in fact, most
of the nooks are accessed in just that way).

Notably, the terrain is _optionally_ permanently destructible, but you could
switch it to temporary if the machine didn't have too much ram (by the
standards of '98). In practice, having a sizeable fraction of the world(s)
destroyed, as a side effect of normal business, did hamper the vibe, so having
the damage be temporary was just saner.

------
aasasd
I know this may sound cynical, and I know it's a whole different kind of work
for the authors, but I could use a YouTube channel with these stories. This
kind of content is quite perfect for losing myself in it while meditatively
chomping on spaghetti, strand by strand.

I mean, I regularly watch channels like ‘Technology Connections’ and others
that dissect some ultra-nerdy topic for twenty minutes.

~~~
3fe9a03ccd14ca5
You may enjoy the “War Stories” series by ArsTechnica. It follows a developer
of an early game and what it took to create it.

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKBPwuu3eCYkScmqpD9xE...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKBPwuu3eCYkScmqpD9xE7UZsszweVO0n)

------
FlorianRappl
Had an Amiga 500 with (among other games) Lemmings... Great times even though,
honestly, for me as a 5 year old the levels / understanding of the game was a
bit too much.

~~~
3fe9a03ccd14ca5
In the same boat. I have fond memories of spending many hours _watching_ my
older brother play these games.

To this day I consider myself a professional video game watcher.

~~~
Symbiote
I remember watching my parents play. I would have been 5 or 6, and I think I
could do a good number of levels.

Once or twice, I remember waking in the night and going downstairs to find one
or both parents playing the game in the middle of the night.

------
acheron
Wow, I had no idea that the Lemmings developers went on to become the Grand
Theft Auto devs. That now becomes the craziest connection I’ve learned about
in this blog series. (Previously it was that a weird French shareware game
called “Popcorn” was made by the same guy that later did Alone in the Dark.)

------
kohtatsu
When I was like 10 years old I did a commercial and bought a PSP with the
money.

One day my grandma offered to buy me a game, so I picked Lemmings off the
shelf. She was very concerned whether it would be age appropriate, but I
reassured her that the E for Everyone ERSB rating meant it was totally fine,
and my mom would have no problems.

Turned out the ERSB mislabeled that game. I mostly avoided the gore after
getting bored of it though. The level creator was a lot of fun, and I'm sure
the gameplay in general lent itself to my brain being wired for programming.

~~~
rob74
I totally understand that you got bored of it on the PSP - I was a great fan
of the original Amiga game, then years later I tried the SNES version, and
found it much less enjoyable to play without a mouse...

~~~
kohtatsu
I meant of the gore. There were a lot of uh, creative devices for killing
lemmings.

Never got bored of the game :)

------
juliangamble
The concept video of Lemmings for Augmented Reality is lots of fun:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vluX8rrWlNY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vluX8rrWlNY)

[https://futurism.com/videos/this-classic-90s-game-is-
making-...](https://futurism.com/videos/this-classic-90s-game-is-making-its-
way-to-vr)

------
_trampeltier
I think it was one of the first PC game I ever bought. But I never could play
all levels because I had trouble with the copy protection :-(

------
grugagag
Does anyone remember Supaplex?

------
foreigner
I loved this game as a kid and wish I could get a version for my Android
phone. The current Lemmings available for Android is awful.

~~~
Reason077
Yeah, Lemmings seems like a prime candidate for a modern remake for
mobile/touch screens. I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet!

~~~
rob74
The original Lemmings games really work best with a mouse, which allows pixel-
perfect clicking. But I've played some Android games over the years that
reminded me of Lemmings, the first two that come to mind are World of Goo and
Spirits...

------
marcosscriven
Brings back memories! Thanks for sharing the game.

------
kristianp
I'm pretty sure the original lemmings had 30 levels, at least on pc. The
author is multiplying the 4 difficulty levels, to get 120, which I don't agree
with. I had a housemate who got through all the levels of Mayhem difficulty. I
couldn't do one at that difficulty.

Here's his article on the original: [https://www.filfre.net/2017/10/games-on-
the-mersey-part-5-th...](https://www.filfre.net/2017/10/games-on-the-mersey-
part-5-the-lemmings-effect/)

~~~
pavlov
The levels are different at each difficulty. You can see them here:
[https://lemmings.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Lemmings_Difficult...](https://lemmings.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Lemmings_Difficulties)

"Mayhem 1" is nothing like "Fun 1", for example.

~~~
gpderetta
Some harder levels were variant of easier levels (often with small changes),
but yes, most levels were original.

What a great game.

~~~
rob74
The small changes being that instead of saving 80% of the Lemmings you had to
save 100%. Or some skills which you had the first time around were missing.
But yeah, the original Lemmings fit on 2 Amiga floppy disks (1,76 MB), and
they also had to fit in four "Easter Egg" levels with exclusive graphics and
music, so they had to do some optimizations...

