Lemmings

Before I start this review I just want to mention that lemmings are not actually suicidal. They are furry little rodents who suffer from large population booms and then rapid decline.

Lemmings are possibly the cutest video game characters in video game history. Therefore we have a very good reason to save them from themselves. You see, video lemmings don't tend to look where they are going. Someone has asked you to lead them to their home safely. Unfortunately, the only tool you have is the lemmings themselves. You can give them orders, but after a while they will simply ignore what you say. Ok, admittedly I made all that up but that pretty much sums up Lemmings. You turn them into different kinds of Lemmings in order, for instance, to dig or stand in place and prevent other Lemmings from passing. These are all selected from a drop-down list (which goes up) on the bottom of the screen. It's all very simple and is fit well into that huge Game Gear screen. The missions are varied and sometimes quite difficult. The only issue that I have with the game design is that if you ever need to use bombers (who blow up) or traffic police lemmings (who I have mentioned before) it is impossible to finish with 100% saved. The level design frequently uses these characters so it's just something we have to live with.

There are a few technical issues with this game. Firstly, there is no battery. I assume that Nintendo held the rights to battery back up so it is understandable, but it's really annoying to waste your precious battery on entering a password. Another problem is that there is no way to finish a level early. If you use traffic cops, or someone gets stuck, you can't finish with the Lemmings that you saved. You can use bombers to blow up people, but only if you have some left. There is also no way to restart in this situation if you didn't save enough Lemmings. These are inexcusable problems, since the pause function doesn't even bring up a menu of any sort.

This is a highly addictive game with a few problems regarding to the flow of the game. Before I go, I would like to point out that the music is very derivative of Tetris, which is a good thing. And don't forget that Lemmings are terribly cute!