It's nice to see a presence here from one of the merchandise manufacturers - hi to all at Paladone!

I don't suppose you're planning on adding a Lemming-shaped stress "ball" to your range, as you've done with some of your other licenses, are you? I can remember how people often used to say that you needed a stress ball handy when playing the original Lemmings game, and it would really bring things full circle for there to actually be a squeezy stress-Lemming.

Hello! Sorry I haven't been here for a while. Unfortunately I've lost interest in video games in general and therefore no longer have anything useful to contribute, but I thought that I'd better drop in so that I could post this, because today I took delivery of the long-awaited official Lemmings plush. I ordered the plush from Gamerabilia earlier in the year, and after numerous delays on the manufacturer's end, he's finally here! It's now possible to order one and have it shipped right away, which is a plus for anyone who chose to wait and see how they turned out.



I decided to name this little guy Walker, after the standard definition shown when mousing over a lemming who has no skills applied to them.

He's up to the usual high quality standards of his manufacturer, Gaya Entertainment, and I have very few quibbles. In fact, the only two I can name, which I'll get out of the way before moving on to the positives, are that the edge of the shirt collar is left unfinished (but it's a non-fraying fabric, so this is just a personal opinion on how it was done, really), and that the neck is a bit floppy due to how large and heavy his head is (and even so, this gives him a cute quizzical expression, anyway). This latter point also means that he can't stand on his own unless there's something to prop him up with.

These plushes are modelled after the PSP/PS Vita Lemmings games, and the details are captured nicely, even down to the unusual hairstyle and the little tufts of hair sticking up at the back. The PSP/PS Vita-style Lemmings also have legs, unlike the earlier non-Sony Lemmings designs, and the plush reflects that. The fabric choices are nice and are appropriate - the clothing and eyes aren't fluffy, and the skin plush has a shorter pile than the hair plush, which is a nice touch. The eye details are embroidered, and this has been done nicely as well.

The packaging is minimal but nice - it's a single cardboard sheet with retro Lemmings graphics all over it, along with the relevant copyright, licensing, and address information on the back. It matches the theme of all of the other current merchandise. The plush is attached to the packaging by means of three plastic tags - one on the back of the head, and one on the front of each foot - which were very easy to remove.

The official Lemmings plush stands at around 8" tall, so he fits right in with the plush lemmings that I used to make (who ranged between 9" and 10" tall), which I'm really happy about! The feet have hard panels in their bottoms which allows the plush to stand as long as there is something to lean him against, as noted above.

Unlike last year's Bubble Bobble plushes from the same manufacturer, they didn't put the sound module in the arse this time. Instead, it's in the lemming's tummy. Squeezing it causes it to play numerous different sounds. Unfortunately, none of these include the iconic "Let's go!" and "Oh no!" from the original Amiga game, as they're all sound effects from the PSP and PS Vita games, but to make up for this, there are no less than eleven of them! The different clips are as follows;

"Let's go!"
"Hey-hey!"
"Hello!"
"Oh no!"
"Bye-bye!"
"Whee!"
"Geronimo!"
"Yippee!"
"Yeah!"
"Hooray!"
"Thankyou!"

This is the order that they're played in if you squeeze the lemming repeatedly.

To round this out, here are a few more pictures;


Walker, shown with Lemming, who my grandmother knitted for me when I was a youngster, and Darwin, the first of my self-made Lemmings plushes.


Front view.


Back view.


Right view.


Left view.

Thanks for reading, everybody - I hope that this information and the photographs are useful.

Those are some fantastic photos, there - looking good!

Have Shapeways made any progress with their full-colour plastic, yet?

Haha, thanks for this.

I had a particularly good laugh at the translations relating to Pokemon, and the various singers, for some reason. Those were delightfully absurd.

Quote from: NaOH on April 15, 2015, 12:29:00 AM
- If things are working okay, do not update your graphics card driver. Just to reiterate: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I regret every time I ever updated my graphics card.

Though I use Linux, I don't do the PC gaming thing, but I just wanted to emphasise how important NaOH's advice here is. Messing with your graphics card drivers unnecessarily is a recipe for trouble. I learned that the hard way quite early on (I've been using Linux for getting on for a decade, now), and knowing that has served me well.

Obviously, if there's some overriding security reason for it (i.e., an exploit's come about and you NEED to update it, trouble be damned), always make sure you have current backups first. But, we all know that part anyway, right?

Aw man, and I missed it!

Quote from: 607 on March 29, 2015, 02:13:44 PM
Does pre-ordering have any benefits?

Only if a person wants to be absolutely guaranteed of getting something upon release, or where there are concerns of there not being enough supply to meet demand - and I don't believe that that will be an issue in this case.

Quote
I think I'd rather wait until someone here gives a review.

I've been waiting and hoping for official plushes for more than twenty years, so you can bet that I'll be providing a review once I receive mine.

The press release about the merchandising programme was unclear on that point, and it really wasn't helped by the included soundbite from the Sony licensing guy, either, since that muddied the waters.

At the very least, these plushes are more specifically in the PS Vita style, which I never found to be quite as bad as the PSP/PS3 look (right off, you can tell by the way that they don't look like weird bird-people ).

Anyway, I can only assume that they were referring only to specific licensees when they made those claims about the classic designs... You can see the key-art that GB Eye's got on the first page of this thread, for example. It's a faux-retro thing; I like it, I admit, but I would much rather have had that design on a t-shirt...

No word yet on what style is being used by any of the other licensees (we have yet to see the results of the clothing and stationery licenses, for example), or even on other items by the two who've actually got stuff ready to go (both GB Eye and Gaya Entertainment have stuff out, and hold the licenses for several different categories). I'd certainly love to see some stuff done in the true retro look, but I'm going to guess that we'll be seeing a lot more of the artwork that GB Eye put on that poster.

I did post about this in the upcoming official merchandise topic, but I know that plushes are a popular product category for a series like Lemmings due to "nameless hordes appeal", and the plushes are in their own right a decades-long much-requested item quite apart from all of the other Lemmings merchandise, so I figure that a heads-up thread of its own is warranted.

Anyway, as of March 28th 2015, the official Lemmings plushes by Gaya Entertainment (which contain a sound module with Lemmings speech thereon) are now available for pre-order from this page at UK-but-ships-worldwide online store, Gamerabilia (I'm not associated with them - I'm just a happy repeat customer, and I pre-ordered mine this morning ). For those who haven't seen them, images of the official plushes can be seen below;







I hope everyone who wants an official Lemmings plush is able to get one!

Little info-burst, guys: The official plushes are now up for pre-order.

UK outfit Gamerabilia is carrying them for £17.99 excluding shipping, and they do ship worldwide. I have no affiliation with them, I'm just a very happy multi-repeat customer! Also, I don't know of anyone else who's taking pre-orders for them right now.

Ouch, that's not cool at all, IchoTolot. I hope that the procedures to fix the problem go well, and you're back to full health as quickly as possible!

Best of luck.

Ok, I've been really lax on dealing with this thread lately, but I just heard some big news - the official plushes have finally been revealed! This is the main official merchandise that I've been waiting for, not just in the five or six months since the announcement, but also ever since I got into Lemmings way way back in 1993. It's been a damn, damn long wait.

Amazingly enough, they aren't retro-styled, which was somewhat unexpected given that the press release was very focussed on the whole retro thing. They are based on the later Sony-era artwork - that is, they have the tweaked, cuter look established with Lemmings Touch, rather than the slightly odd bird-people look of the PSP artwork. Also, they have a sound module built-in, which apparently has the classic "Oh No!" sound, though I wouldn't too be surprised if this turns out to be the PSP/Vita equivalent, to be honest.

Images below, borrowed from Gamerabilia, who will be selling these for £17.99.







I would have to say that they are very much up to Gaya Entertainment's usual high standards, and going on their track record to date, the final product is likely to be as good as or better than the prototype.

Having made so many plush lemmings myself, and having stopped because the official ones were announced, I'm really looking forward to the release of these, as you might imagine.

Quote from: NaOH on February 24, 2015, 11:44:42 PM

Quote from: ccexplore on February 24, 2015, 11:29:43 PM
Also, I wonder whether there might be some people who are simply more used to just typing out :) for the commonly used smileys because that's how they'd have to do it in other mediums like IRC. 

Those people are also used to their smileys being seen as written. :)

I don't do the whole IRC thing, but that's how I write my smileys here...

Are we now not having the commonly-accepted standard way of writing them auto-convert to the graphical ones anymore, or am I misunderstanding?

Typically, "XD" is meant to denote laughter. Having :XD: be a dead-looking emote here has always confused me (I always just use :D instead, for the intended meaning).

Quote from: NaOH on February 18, 2015, 06:21:48 PM
Come to think of it, it reminds me of Prob Lem's old avatar.

Surely my current one? I only have this one and the Christmas one.

Anyway, I really like Simon's proposed "shocked" variant, even though I also like the existing one as well. The other proposed one with slightly narrower eyes doesn't really look as shocked to me, because it reminds me of Dizzy's idle expression in Fantastic Dizzy for the Mega Drive and Amiga.

Quote from: ccexplore on February 18, 2015, 10:33:37 PM
Do an image search on Google and you might realize that in many instances of Lemmings box art, they do tend to exaggerate the eyes while de-emphasizing (even omitting) the nose and mouth.

And then there's the other issue - two of the Lemmings art-styles clash, which also makes a possible difference here. In older artwork (circa Lemmings/ONML to Lomax or so), when shown at all, the lemmings' mouths are clearly set fairly far back under their snouts (i.e., they seem to have quite shallow jaws). This is different to the Sony-era art, where their mouths are instead placed virtually at the tip of their snouts (i.e., where you might think a nose would go). The former doesn't really show from a front-view like our smileys employ (you'd need a three-quarters view for that, or for them to tip their heads back a little to show emotion ), and the latter looks anything from incredibly strange to borderline scary depending on what emotion is being displayed. Just some random input from my lore/art-style-watching self.