> There was a kind of pixel preciseness with the original lemmings that contributed a lot to this being great, but that somehow seems to have got lost in newer versions.

The same thing happened to many games, not the least of which being Worms, where pretty much all of the modern versions are at most mediocre.

Worms Armageddon is one the best games I've ever played. I always see a new version and get excited but the new ones always have about half the weapons as Armageddon.

It also have one of the best game theme songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D4Yr3ebNoQ

And let us not forget The Fiddler.

You really haven't lived until you've died by a holy banana donkey armageddon nuke. (Actually, it made some balance fixes cool, like making certain guns more precise/accurate, or to make some more interesting/tactical.)

Because of The Fiddler, I never could understand why there wouldn't merely be oodles more weapons with each new game. Seemed like a no brainer. Oh well.

[0]http://worms2d.info/The_Fiddler

I played this a lot (on Atari ST - one mouse / one joystick - the mouser definitely had an advantage).

The most amazing thing about it was how you could successfully set traps for your opponent even though they were looking at the same screen but a few inches to the left or right.

Nothing better than them working so hard on getting over some obstacle only to scroll back to the beginning and see most of their lemmings disappearing into a big hole in the ground.

> Two player lemmings was crazy

Yeah it was great on the Amiga! Not sure if it worked well on other machines where you could not connect more than a mouse, though !

I remember it was possible to play Settlers 2 in two-player split screen with two mice in DOS, and it seems possible to recreate in Dosbox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfpx0siF5TU

If I remember correctly, the trick here was to not start the mouse driver (mouse.com), but let Settlers' internal mouse driver have control :)

I have no idea about two player Lemmings in DOS. I have never played it, at least.

that's pretty wild - the game shipped it's own custom mouse driver?

Well, define "driver"... This was DOS, so you had to listen to interrupts to catch mouse events. It was more or less standard though, if my memory serves me correctly.

On an Atari ST we were playing with a mouse and a joystick. Still a great experience!

unfair advantage for the mouse guy ? :)

I remember it as one of the best two player games ever, so I guess, given enough time we could master anything :)

I played lemmings on my HP48SX... it worked fine :)

> Two player lemmings was crazy

You should give Lix [1] a try, it's like Lemmings but with up-to-8-player networked multiplayer, and it's open source (CC0). You can probably find some people to play with in #lix on irc.quakenet.org if you're patient.

[1] http://asdfasdf.ethz.ch/~simon/about.php

>> There was a kind of pixel preciseness with the original lemmings

I always wondered what kind of challenges that imposed on the sprite-based consoles of the day like the NES and especially something like the Gameboy.

How it worked was that each lemming was actually treated for collision purposes as if it was a single dot, and that was tested against some kind of bitmap for where there was solid ground.

(I think! I remember, with a friend, implementing our own version of this, and that's definitely how our version worked.)

So this is less realistic than other ways of implementing lemming behaviours, and easier to implement than some kind of more 'correct' collision approach, but gave the gameplay a very nice precise feel.