Lemmings

A horrible mongrel with an innovative EyeToy portion...

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RockStar North, in one guise or another, have provided an auspicious number of modern, seminal gaming titles. In their later years, obviously, their great criminal sandbox enfant terrible captured our hearts and Daily Mail headlines, but they already had our allegiance and our pocket money back in the early 80's when they were known as DMA Design. Under this name they gave us absolutely fantastic titles such as Walker (oooh - parallax!), Blood Money (ahhh - R-Type for my Amiga!), and Hired Guns (weee - one screen multiplayer!). But far and away its greatest success was in 1991 with the truly genius Lemmings. The concept for Lemmings apparently came from an intellectual exercise over a long lunch showing how small an animated character could be on screen whilst still being recognisable. It was, of course, only a small next step for the team to then start shoving these tiny green haired hominids into all sorts of grinders, flame pits, oceans, booby traps, nooses and death drops. The rest is gaming gold and fond history for anyone old enough to have been around back then. The sequels were, unfortunately, of significantly lower calibre - with the exception of Lemmings 2: The Tribes - and tended to be uninspired, such as Xmas Lemmings and Lemmings Paintball. Happy days: the gaming was simple, the system demands rock bottom, which was just as well, a last great hurrah of the ethos of the bedroom coder. So why in the name of Merciful Poseidon would anyone resurrect this franchise over 15 years later in this, the dawning of the next-gen age?

Lemmings for the PS2 is a horrible mongrel of an entity, clearly writhing around on a block muttering 'kill me, kill me' from its unsettling mutant orifices. As movies have taught us, trying to forcibly splice together two otherwise perfectly fine creatures and then sticking it in a completely alien environment always ends in tears and severed limbs, and this game no exception. Lemmings, in what I can only hope is an early build, comes with a traditional lemmings game, with the expanded levels of Oh No - More Lemmings, and a few additional special levels for this version which clearly took fifteen minutes to put together. The graphics, dependent on how charitable you are feeling, have either been lovingly preserved from the original, or clumsily shunted straight from the PSP version, which I am unfamiliar with, but I can imagine it suffers from the same problem: such a game absolutely does not work on a console. No one wants to play Gran Turismo on a keyboard or NFL 07 with a mouse, and absolutely no one should want to play Lemmings using thumb sticks. It is predictably clumsy, inaccurate, and makes a decent proportion of each levels challenge being simply the selection of your desired target. Notice how no one has decided to increase the challenge of chess by making you use chopsticks to move around the pieces. On the PSP this may well be forgivable, if you want a jolly little Lemmings fix on the bus home, it's ideal. On the PlayStation 2 it is pretty much inexcusable. Why this didn't get ported to the Nintendo DS instead is quite beyond me.

At the bottom on the main option screen, however, like an afterthought, is a button that grabs the attention - Eye Toy. This, it turns out, is gaming genius. ET is a system that you either love or you hate, largely depending on how much you and your friends have had to drink. If you've never had the pleasure of seeing, and photographing, four grown adults crammed shoulder to shoulder franticly cleaning invisible windows or furiously juggling pretend bombs, turning pink in the face and giggling like nutters, then you, my friend, need to get one of these. Turns out they're not bad exercise even when sober, and the latest versions such as EyeToy Sports are likely to be more fun and certainly cheaper than a gym membership. The question that immediately comes to mind when first getting in grips with EyeToy Lemmings is: 'Why didn't someone think of this before?'

After the standard faffing around of turning the lights up and down and moving the camera up and down by millimetre increments until it's all calibrated, you can launch the ET version. For an example of just how separate and poorly integrated this is with the main version, the game actually has to reboot to launch what is obviously a totally different base system. Then, there you are on screen, with hundreds and hundreds of the little blue smocked, green haired critters raining down on you. It's a wonderful moment for anyone who grew up with the original games to watch them scampering over your shoulders, wandering back and forwards in your cupped hands, flying across the screen at a flick of a finger. The ET is often coded just to detect movement, but in this case has been directed to detect your whole frame, even when stationary. It's a short intuitive leap to see how this can make for an absolutely brilliant version of lemmings. Your little guys need to get across a chasm? Don't just stand there - fling yourself to your knees, put your hands over your head and lace the fingers in an unsettlingly Guantanamo Bay pose and use your arms as a bridge. On screen the Lemmings will trickle out of the traditional trapdoor, mosey over the terrain, and continue to walk over your detected arms to the other side of the gap and safety. There are disappointingly few of these levels, only thirty or so in all, but they are all hilarious and challenging.

There are two modes of interaction using the EyeToy. As the player looms in the background, behind the scenery and towering over their little charges like a benevolent titan, they will either have free interaction with their lemmings, or will be behind a smoky screen. This screen will mean only interaction with items and landscape features, such as push-able boulders, blow-able boats, winch-able catapults and so on. Queue much frantic waving of arms to blow the boat full of lemmings to safety, swatting falling rocks out of the air, and doggy paddle style thrashing to trebuchet your critters over obstacles. Scrolling the screen left and right, as well as to pause and increasing and decreasing deployment speed is controlled by a menu bar at the top of the screen, surprisingly responsive to the player's gestures. It is the free interaction elements that are the heart of the gameplay, with the player striking curious poses that he or she likely hasn't attempted since the age of four, when teacher asked you all to pretend to be a tree. Ramps, bridges, blocks etc all have to be created by the player extending themselves into very odd shapes indeed, letting the on-screen lemmings scuttle up your arms and over your head. One's head and upper body prove to be a major impediment to the player, and the more dedicated amongst you may consider having them removed before play. Making a bridge with your arms like a cradle doesn't work, because in its 2D interpretation your torso counts as a block, which means your either going to have to get on your knees, bend over like you're worshiping Osiris, or bend sideways like a reed in the breeze. This is part of why this works so well on EyeToy - the variety of solutions to most levels is only limited to how inventive you are with striking your poses. My personal favourite, the 'Box Technique', involves putting your thumbs together tip to tip and extending you index fingers straight up, thus making a box with which to catch all your lemmings in a small space and deposit them where you want. Rusty Nutz, the sub-developers of this version, saw me coming, unfortunately. Your charges are fragile, and sudden moves will squish them, so agonisingly slow movement is required to successfully perform this. Additionally nearly all the levels require you to scroll to see it all, and scrolling makes the player immaterial - so supposing you are able to box your lemmings, moving incredibly slowly on knees that feel like they're on fire, you will still need to put them someplace safe before being able to scroll.

Rusty Nutz really haven't developed anything new here, and the layout of their motion activated menu options is annoying, making the user accidentally skitter backwards and forwards between screens in frustration. However, whatever the implementation lacks, the concept of physically interactive Lemmings is brilliant, immediately accessible and almost as addictive as the original game itself. This EyeToy option really should have much, much more attention paid to it, and its graphics updated in the way Worms has been, and it would have made a genuinely excellent game in and of itself. The unwelcome inclusion of a clumsy ported version is simply a waste of technology and defiantly a waste of your money. Seeing as significantly later games made by the then DMA Design, such as Full Metal Country are actually available to download free from RockStar North's web page, it's amazing anyone would dare ask money for this.

Lemmings for the PS2 is an ungodly creation, with the greats of yesteryear and the potentially great of the present hideously nailed together in a mewling mess. I hope this title reflects a practice run for implementation in the next-gen visual recognition games on 360 and promised on the PS3.

Oh no! Nuke 'em.

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By Duncan Lawson