[Lemmings 2] Fun With Blockers

[kieranmillar]

Fun With Blockers

Over a year ago I ranked the Lemmings 2 skills and put the old classic Blocker dead last because in Lemmings 2 it is super buggy and if used outside of the Classic Tribe, as it causes the game to crash. However, it works totally fine inside the Classic Tribe, where all skills except for the Attractor work with no issues. Given that levels using the Classic Tribe that don't solely use the original skills are few and far between, I decided to play around with the Blocker's interactions with other skills, and made a short level pack demonstrating these.

This pack contains 10 levels for the Classic Tribe. To install, you need to download the attached zip file and then either:

• Backup your Lemmings 2 LEVELS folder and overwrite the files with the contents of the zip, which will permanently replace the levels with these ones.
• Copy your Lemmings 2 game into a new folder and then overwrite the contents of the LEVELS folder of the copy with the contents of the zip file, and point DosBox to the new copy of the game.

As Lemmings can die in this Tribe, I state the number of lemmings you can lose in the title of each level.

These levels are more demonstrative than real levels, as such they are for the most part signficiantly easier than my usual fare, although you may have to figure out the interactions in most cases, but it shouldn't be hard. Level 9 has a lot of fanning of Jetpacks, which is always a pain and, well, sorry about that.

It is important to understand how the Blocker works. The blocker's left hand causes lemmings that touch it to face left, and its right hand causes lemmings that touch it to face right. Note that changing what direction the lemming faces usually causes it to move in that direction, but not in all cases! For all intents and purposes, the blockers hands are not solid, they just force other lemmings to face a certain direction. For example, a lemming flung by an explosion becomes a "tumbler", and the tumbler moves through the air with no care for what direction the lemming is facing. So you can't, for example, blast a lemming with an explosion and hope to bounce it off of a blocker, the blocker would cause the tumbler to face the other way, but the tumbler would just pass straight through the blocker.

It's worth mentioning that the Blocker in Lemmings 2 is notorious for being incredibly easy to perform the crawling glitch with it. I have decided that if a crawling backroute is found in these levels, I simply don't care, and am unlikely to bother fixing it.


Level 8: Loading Cargo

I hope you enjoy this short pack. Fun Fact: This pack was made entirely within 24 hours, including writing this post.

[Simon]

geoo and I will blind-race Fun With Blockers on 2019-02-24, 19:00 UTC. I estimate the race to take 2-3 hours. We'll livestream the race on twitch. Kieran, and everybody else, you're invited to watch:

http://multitwitch.tv/simonnaar/dont_delete_my_account

Coincidentally, Kieran released Lemmings In Space yesterday. We'll see if geoo and I have enough power to blind-complete both Fun With Blockers and Lemmings In Space on the same evening. If not, we'll find another night for Lemmings In Space.

-- Simon

[mobius]

I started playing through it myself; very fun and interesting as usual

I agree with other during the stream; the first level is WAY harder then the next few (haven't solved it yet); I would place it later.

[kieranmillar]

Thanks Simon, geoo and mobius for playing this.

I've made some updates based on feedback. Version 2 is in the opening post. I know Simon found a backroute to Earning Air Miles, but whatever. I could fix it but eh.

v2 changelog:

Spoiler

• Shuffled the early levels around to make a better difficulty curve.
• Level 2 - Brace Yourself - Terrain changes to fix backroute + removed a Sand Pourer.
• New level - Level 3 - Balloonatics - A really lazy level to make up for deleting another.
• Level 7 (now 8) - Loading Cargo - Major terain and skill changes.
• Level 9 - Nowhere to turn - Deleted this trash level.
• Level 10 - The Vault - Widened level slightly + added Runners + added more spares of other skills because why not.

[mobius]

I didn't download  the update yet; just wanted  to say I finally solved Speed Demons and... it was simple!? I don't know why I found it so difficult??

[kieranmillar]

Don't worry, in the QFK2 races it would frequently be the case that levels I deemed as easy would take both Simon and geoo over an hour to solve. I'm not sure if it's just inexperience with L2 across the community due to a lack of other people making levels, or me vastly miscalculating what it means for a level to be straightforward in my mind.