Lemmings & Oh No! More Lemmings!

Lemmings and Oh No! More Lemmings! were released for the PC a few years ago. These two titles have now been put on one bargain-priced PSX disc for you to enjoy. Let's take a look. This version of Lemmings looks and sounds much like the version released for the SNES. The graphics consist of ultra-simplistic arenas and tiny, green-haired Lemmings.

If you're not familiar with the Lemmings concept, it's very simple. Each puzzle consists of an arena (an environment of some sort), a trap-door that the Lemmings are released from, and an exit. You have 8 different skills or abilities that you can assign to individual Lemmings to aid you in safely guiding as many of the mindless creatures to the exit as possible (you must rescue a minimum number, different for each level, within the specified time limit in order to be successful). The skills you can assign are climbing, floating with an umbrella (like a parachute), blocking (generally to prevent fellow Lemmings from marching off of cliffs), exploding, digging sideways, digging down at an angle, digging straight down, and building stairways/bridges.

What can make the puzzles tricky is that you have limited numbers of each skill, or on some levels certain skills may be unavailable. The first few levels are very easy and all of the skills are readily available. But once the difficulty starts rising, you may find that an obvious solution won't work because a certain skill isn't available. The underlying simplicity of the gameplay encounters difficulties in one area that I've found. If you have a large group of Lemmings milling about in a confined space, it can often be frustratingly difficult to assign a task to an individual. The command must often be issued repeatedly until it is recognized, the then you are left to hope that the individual is pointing in the right direction. Psygnosis should have incorporated a way to pinpoint an individual in a crowd, then this problem wouldn't exist.

I like Lemmings, and I think most gamers with even just a casual interest in puzzle games will enjoy it. Having said that, this isn't the kind of game that makes you set aside your current obsession (for me, NFSIII) to play it. Rather, it is a great change-of-pace, lazy afternoon diversion that is best sampled in small doses. I never found myself getting lost in the puzzles for hours on end. But that's OK, and it doesn't diminish the fact that for a good price you get a lot of gameplay from this disc.