CustLemm Level List Game

[Shvegait]

Timb03 - Level 3: THE DOMINATIVE IS THE INEVITABLE
    
80 Lems  
93% to save  
RR: 20
Time: 8 minutes
Skills: 5 climb, 1 block, 7 build, 6 mine, 5 dig

Good: The terrain looks pretty cool. It's possible to save 100%.

Bad: The title appears to be intimidating, but the level is very easy! The correct route is blatantly obvious.

[ccexplore]

Wow, the neat scenaries in Tim's levels really gives Hubbart's levels a run for the money!  B)

[JM]

Tim's levels have neat scenaries and I love level 3 of timb03.dat He has made such good levels that are fun to play.

[Shvegait]

Wow, the neat scenaries in Tim's levels really gives Hubbart's levels a run for the money!  B)

Timballisto's scenery is excellent, I agree. However, the one thing that impresses me more about Hubert and Bart's levels is that you are involved in their scenery. Timballisto's scenery design is off to either side of the level (similar to the design of many of the original Lemmings levels), and you rarely interact much with it. But in all or almost all of Hubbart's levels, your lemmings walk through the scenery and interact with it. Having made that work without diminishing the challenge of the levels is what impresses me. (OK, I admit, many of their levels are fairly easy, but not all of them.)

[Proxima]

I hope people will say nice things about the scenery in my new levels when I release them too I've been trying very hard to do it well. I know that I have some levels (like Twenty Second Teaser) where the scenery is unused, but to get round that I sometimes do copies of the level that involve taking a different route.

[JM]

Are they for Custlemm?

[Proxima]

No. Sorry.

[JM]

I take they are for Cheapo then  

[MC Marshy]

Timballisto's levels have good design but my favourite pack is pack 2 because I love the level But it's down there. So who's up for reviewing the 4th level?

[JM]

I'll look at Level 4



timb03 - Level 4: Right left ace spades & side ace

2 Lemmings
Save: 50%
Release Rate: 1
Time: 3 minutes
skills: 1 climber, 1 bomber, 6 builders, 1 basher

Good: Has good design,challenging,uses a small portion of actual terrain

Bad: Level can be annoying

[Shvegait]

Why is using a small portion of actual terrain a good thing, JM? I thought that level was easy, actually... Oh. Timballisto, could you explain the title for that level (4)?



Before I start the review/rant, I just wanted to ask Timballisto not to take any of this personally, because it isn't.

Timb03 - Level 5: The Selhajek Arbenition.
    
80 Lems  
77% to save  
RR: 1
Time: 7 minutes
Skills: 4 climb, 4 bomb, 1 build, 1 mine

Good: Nothing.

Bad: Where to begin...

This level falls into a category that I don't have a name for yet, but here are the criteria the level must meet:

1) The solution must be extremely obvious. There is to be no flexibility as far as things that you can try to do.

2) The implementation of the solution must be annoying to pull off because of the precision needed.

3) The level must include unnecessary and/or unclear obstacles to achieving your goal. Examples include steel areas represented on normal terrain, non-steel areas represented on steel terrain, fake exits, hidden traps, fake traps, or requiring one lemming in a tight clump of lemmings to use a tool in a certain direction without giving a way to guarantee that all lemmings are facing the same way. Exception: The title or terrain or something about the level hints that something is not as you normally expect it, and this is at least somewhat clear.

4) The level must include repetition, and being imprecise once will require you to start over. Bonus, and a real teller: You must scream profanities at your monitor when this situation arises


Now, if a level has one of these, OK. I'd be hypocritical to say otherwise, as I break some of these myself (but only occasionally, I hope ). Plus, there are some cool tricks that inevitably require precision. But when a level meets all four of these criteria, it is in my opinion a VERY BAD level.

This level meets all of these critera:
1) Your first move MUST use up the builder. You have ABSOLUTELY no other logical option other than making the very first lemming a builder to close off the right gap, then walk to the left, and fall to his death. Why even give the builder in the first place? Fill in the gap, cut out the builder, raise the save% required to 78% (this is how many I saved btw, so you'd be able to get 80% really), and call it a day. Then your only option is to climb and bomb. There is NOTHING else you can possibly do, especially as it is clear where you need to put the miner.

2) Timed bombers. Not a major offender in and of itself, but it doesn't help

3) Steel areas over non-steel looking terrain. Of course, after my first try of the level failed, I just looked at the level in LemEdit to see where you decided to put the steel. Side note: this steel does not even add challenge to the level! You would still have to do #4 (below) if there were steel or not. Furthermore, even knowing where the steel is doesn't make the solution easier to execute.

4) 4 bombers, all timed. This level is not forgiving in the least.

If you think I'm singling you out, rest assured that I'm not. Conway's "Back and Forth" is a bigger offender of this list, and he's heard some of my rant before... But since these two levels pissed me off for whatever reason, I decided to see what they have in common, and came up with this list.

(continued on next post)

[Shvegait]

(continued from previous post)

Other comments:
What the heck is an arbenition? If you have no definition for it, I'll try spreading it as some slang term, but always with profanities involved. (That !@#$%!@ arbenition!)
For "good", I was thinking about putting terrain design, but I'd argue that it's actually the worst terrain design in the set (your dirt and other terrains are much more interesting), and the interesting-looking parts of the level are not used at all.
I don't think it's even possible to keep the level running for 7 minutes (the time limit). It's nothing important of course, just seems odd.

By the way, maybe you didn't consider this, but it's possible to destroy some of the "steel" by bombing a faller (because the steel areas are not under the fallers, they are only on the walls). In practice, this actually slows you down, and I don't think you can save 77% using this method, so don't worry about it, but I thought I should point it out. For a little while I thought that was what you must have to do, but only because I didn't want to count pixels to make sure they added up to 63 or less for a safe fall (in Custlem2); it is close though...

Comments on Lemmings in general:
One reason that I believe Lemmings is such a superior puzzle game is that you can be shown every piece of information that you could possibly need (the level terrain, tools, etc.), and figure out the solution just from that. There is no discovery *necessary* in order to solve a level. Of course, you learn tricks and such as you play through levels, see if certain timings work out, and all that good stuff. But you can put all obfuscation that you need to hide your solution in the terrain itself. The best levels are always those that show you all the information, look like they must be impossible (or, in some cases, simple), and cause some puzzling looks as nothing seems to work. There is a consistency throughout Lemmings that the player starts to rely on, and when that is broken, it is a violation of what you thought you knew. OK, so there's steel there even though it looks like normal terrain. Now, do I want to keep playing the level and guessing to find out where all the steel is, and to exactly where it extends? No, I want to spend my time thinking about how to take the tools I have and combine them to form a solution. I don't want to be spending an hour trying to time bombers and trying to remember exactly where that steel area ends. I'd much rather need to use my brain to think about a problem than use it to focus on precision. And I don't think that's just me!

OK. I'm done now

[ccexplore]

Why is using a small portion of actual terrain a good thing, JM? I thought that level was easy, actually...

On the flip side, why should using a larger portion of actual terrain necessarily be better?  

Cliche as it is, I'd say that it's not the size that matters.  What a pain it would be if every level has to be "large", or if you have to leave the blank space blank on "small" levels!    (Especially since unlike Cheapo, in CustLemm the game does let you scroll to the "unused" portions of the level.)

[Shvegait]

Well, I didn't mean to imply that it was a bad thing at all. It just seemed odd to mention as a good (or bad) thing, I guess. I don't know. You said yourself that size doesn't matter, so why mention it?

I was still in rant mode at that point so my tolerance for anything slightly strange was pretty low.

[ccexplore]

What the heck is an arbenition?

All right, this part of your rant is getting a little, hmm, what's the word?  Anyway, I can't tell you what it is either , but please be prepared to edit your post if Tim actually has something to say about the title.  

I didn't want to count pixels

<An aside to the general public unrelated to the level>:  if you use Windows XP and DOSBox, after capturing screenshots from DOSBox, you can open it up in MS Paint and zoom in.  Well, that's not much, but here's a nice feature, at least in the XP verion of Paint:  if you have the status bar turned on (it's in the "View" menu), when you draw lines or rectangles, the right side of the status bar will tell you what the horizontal and vertical distances are as you're dragging the mouse with the left button down.  A somewhat crude but effective form of sketching, in fact arguably better than Cheapo's since you can see exactly how many pixels without counting.  You can also cut and paste build bricks, but that's for another day.  I've done these sort of sketchings more than a few times, including for Wicked 6 and for Lemeri's "Spilled Pea Soup".