Lemmings
Lemmings also arrived on the Philips CD-i, bringing with it one of the smartest game ideas of its time. A procession of small creatures pours out of an opening at the edge of the screen and keeps walking straight ahead until they hit a wall or fall into a pit. The player cannot command them directly, only assign a role to individuals: digger, bridge-builder, climber, floater, blocker, or the one who sacrifices itself in an explosion. Out of a handful of roles and a limited number of uses for each, a surprisingly deep puzzle game emerges, in which the goal is to get a set proportion of the procession safely to the exit. Every level has its own trap, its own materials, and its own solution, which often looks obvious only after several failures.
The CD-i version benefits from the medium above all through sound: the music is recorded, and the well-known folk melodies ring out fuller than on older home computers. The visuals stay faithful to the original — tiny figures on colorful backgrounds — where, thanks to the television screen, one occasionally has to squint. The most delicate spot is the controls, because the game was designed for a mouse, and precisely clicking on one specific figure in the middle of the crowd is noticeably harder with a controller. Anyone who gets used to it, though, gets the complete experience, including levels that test one's patience.
The original ranks among the most influential games ever made: it defined an entire genre of puzzle games built around indirect crowd control, and its echoes still appear today. At the time it received enthusiastic reviews across every platform and became one of the titles bundled with the hardware. Today it works just as well as it did then, because its rules are simple, legible, and uncompromising. It is to the CD-i version's credit that it was not a shortchanged port but an honest rendition of a game that deserves attention even decades later. For CD-i owners it also represented a rare chance to play a classic their friends knew from the Amiga or from consoles, giving the platform's catalog a name it seldom got to carry.
Game 9 of 13 for Philips CD-i
The same title elsewhere (8)
The Amiga is Lemmings' home platform and offers the reference version, with the full level count and smoothest mouse control. The DOS PC version stays very close, keeping mouse control equally precise, with EGA or VGA graphics only slightly adjusted. On the Commodore 64, developers had to split the game across multiple disks due to limited memory and reduce scrolling smoothness, yet preserved most levels. Portable versions for Game Boy and SEGA Game Gear suffer from small screen resolution — in hectic scenes with a hundred lemmings on screen it's hard to keep track, and D-pad control never quite matches mouse precision. On SEGA Mega Drive and Super Nintendo you play with a gamepad cursor, slower than a mouse, but both are colorful and include most original puzzles.
