Lemmings 2 Gold Medal Trick

[exit]

I'm sure a lot of you have already discovered this trick(or maybe not. I don't know. But if you don't know it's in the spoiler.). I would like to know what you think of it. Do you think it's an acceptable way to get gold, or do you think that it's a cheat? And do you think a Lemmings 2 level designer should attempt to make it so that the trick isn't executable? How do you think would be the best way to do so?

I'm just wondering what other people think about tricks like this.

Spoiler

You lose all but the required amount of lemmings you absolutely need to beat the tribe on the first level. Then you solve the other levels with just those lemmings. Once you've gotten gold on the second through last levels, go back and get gold on the first level. Note that you can do the "lose all but the required amount" on any level, but the first is the easiest normally. Feel free to try this yourself!

[Leo]

That trick doesn't work. Just gold medal is not sufficient, you also must save enough lemmings of the tribe. I don't remember how much exactly you need to save (it's not the same number for the each tribe), but you can't loose much of them (if any, of the some tribes).
If you don't meet both criteria game isn't finished and you can't get ending animation.

[exit]

I was aware of that before, and now that I think of it, I have no idea why I put the second spoiler there . I guess I wasn't thinking clearly because I was in a rush at the time. I'll edit that out.

Anyways, I'm looking at this from a custom level perspective, where your goal is not to save the tribe IMO but rather to get gold on the level or levels.
Sorry for the confusion.

[ccexplore]

Yeah, IIRC the gold criteria is based on how many you lose, rather than how many you save.  I guess it makes a difference when you are down to like 1 or very few lemmings, such that it's possible to solve the level in a way not otherwise possible when you have to save more (eg. no need for crowd control).  I don't know how many levels are like that though in L2.  I expect at least in some levels, you end up with the same gold solution starting off with just 1 or all 60.

Given that the player can't beat the game in this manner (ie. Leo's point), I guess it's not that big a deal in the end.  One can also reasonably argue that since each medal reflects your performance strictly within the one level, it is technically accurate that you have a good performance starting with 1 and losing 0, and the fact that you started with 1 is irrelevant as it only reflects poor performance of a previous level.

For custom L2 levels I believe the typical convention has been to assume each level starts off with 60 lemmings.  Actually in the brief time (years ago) when some people here actually created custom levels for L2, I believe they were always standalone individual levels, and never a sequence of 10 for an entire tribe.