Holiday Lemmings manual (and the hint for Check Your Hints!)

[Clam]

A little curiosity that (AFAIK) hasn't turned up on the forums before: the manual for Holiday Lemmings 1993/94!

http://macintoshgarden.org/sites/macintoshgarden.org/files/manuals/XmasLemmingsManual.pdf


For those who aren't familiar with Holiday Lemmings, there's this level that consists of a row of exits – of which all but one are fake . It's called "Check Your Hints!".



Tedious trial and error, right? Not if you have the manual! True to the title, you can indeed "check your hints" and find this (page 6):

On Level 3 of Blitz, the 7th exit from the right is the REAL exit. Hee hee!

[Simon]

Very nice.

The Mac version has fast-forward. Very modern!

The German translation is rather literal, and in some cases careless: To make a holding pit, it advises you to dig, and then dig with the digger to stop him from digging out of the screen. So that's the secret behind German quality. Nonetheless, the translation seems to be done by a native German speaker, it uses lots of idioms.

-- Simon

[namida]

I was aware that the level referred to a hint in the manual, but hadn't actually seen the hint in question before. Nice fins!

[Ghia]

I didn't have the manual, but simply looked closely to see if one of the exits looked different in any way. And the correct exit does stand out...the candles are slightly different.

[ccexplore]

Good eye!

I had to go back and check.  Turns out the difference was achieved because the game uses two objects (as usual) to create the exit, the top part with the candles and the bottom part that contains the candleholders--and (here's the trick) the two parts actually overlap slightly at where the candleholders are (the yellow).  The fake exits have bottom part overlaid over on top of the top part, covering up small portions of the candles so you see more of the yellow candleholders, while the real one has the top part overlaid over of the bottom part instead, so you see more of the candles.

That being said, I actually wonder whether this was intentional or not.  The overlap of the exit parts seem to happen in all other Xmas levels, so it's not special treatment specifically for that level.  And as we know, the game engine achieves fake objects based on essentially the order they are specified in the level data (first 16 objects are real, after that they're fake), and it's the same order for which the objects are drawn onto the level area.  This means the fake objects have to come after the real ones in order to be fake, and thus have to be drawn after (and therefore overlaid on top of) the real stuff, which would result in the visual difference.

Now, they most certainly could've reorder the top and bottom parts of the real exit in the level data so that the real exit would look the same as the fakes current do; the question we won't know the answer to is: did they not realize this subtle side effect of how they made fake objects work, or did they realize it and intentionally leave the difference in?

[namida]

On Level 3 of Blitz, the 7th exit from the right is the REAL exit. Hee hee!

I didn't spot this part before. I always thought of it as the "7th exit from the left", upon looking at this image, both are correct - the real exit is the one right in the middle, which is a far easier thing to remember (or suspect) than "Xth from the Y side".

[Ghia]

Hee hee!  I didn't even think of that, namida :-)
I understand what ccexplore is saying...but we'll never know if they left it like that intentionally. probably not...or they couldn't be bothered to "fix" it.

[ccexplore]

I've always believed they purposely pick the middle one based on the idea that most people are likely to try either from left-to-right or right-to-left, in either case it would've taken them the longest if the correct exit's smack in the middle.

[Ghia]

If I had needed to think about positions, I would have said "The middle ...nah, too obvious.." Hee hee!