Previous Next

The mark of a really good idea is that as soon as someone suggests it, it seems so obvious, so right. The motion sensitive controls on the wii, the mixing of chocolate and milk, and of course caffeinated bacon (patent pending) are all examples of great ideas. It simply takes some visionary, some great leader of men to step up and say "now wouldn't it be great if..." Well, ladies and gentlemen, I have found such a visionary and his name is Mathew Carr.

You see Mathew likes his DS. He likes his DS a whole lot, especially the fantastic touch screen controls. He likes Lemmings a whole lot too, except that all the recent versions have been on machines where you have to use a joypad, which is a very difficult control method for a game that involves clicking on things far apart on the screen very rapidly at times. So now he's combined the two to make Lemmings, but on the DS. In a testament to the fact that his creativity can only stretch so far, he's called it Lemmings DS.

You might wonder why it's taken this long for Lemmings to appear on the DS and why it's not already a commercial title. The sad truth is that Lemmings will probably never see an official DS release as Sony currently own the copyright (the game was originally published by Psygnosis, who were bought by Sony during the 90s). It's not likely that Sony are ever going to let one of their better franchises appear on a Nintendo machine - even if the hardware is far more suited to the game than any of their own consoles.

It doesn't matter though because Lemmings DS actually has more content than the PSP version released last year. Not only does it contain every single level from the original Lemmings game, it also has all the levels from Oh no! More Lemmings. As they say in the tele-shopping presentations though, "Wait, there's more..." - it also has all the levels from Christmas Lemmings 1991, 1992, 1993 and 1994. We're talking a shade less than three hundred levels of Lemmings goodness here for free, nearly double the number you can play on the PSP.

Lemmings DS is modelled on the original Amiga version and as such, it's not as gorgeously mock 3D as the PSP version but it is clear, detailed and looks exactly as you'll remember the classic 16-Bit Lemmings. The action takes place on the bottom screen in order to take advantage of the touch screen functionality. The top screen is used to display all the info on the level as well as a very handy little map showing which area it is you're currently looking at and the location of all your lemmings.

Lemmings was always known for its sound and it's survived the journey very much intact - it just wouldn't be Lemmings without the 'Let's go!' and 'Oh no!' samples. Even better is the music which sounds glorious through the DS' speakers and is every bit as iconic as it ever was. One change is that rather than being linked to the level, the music now plays in a seemingly random order as a play-list in order to stop you listening to the same track for 3 hours if you get stuck on a level. This is a deliberate decision by the author and one that I personally think works rather well.

The game-play is largely identical to the original but with one subtle difference (common with the PSP version). Unlike the Amiga version (which removed all control when you paused), in this remake you can use the paused time to reassign jobs to any of your Lemmings. There are upsides and downsides to this change, the most obvious downside being that it takes away from the frantic time-limited nature of the classic Lemmings game. On the upside though, the controls, probably through no fault of the author, just occasionally fail to register touches perfectly and it does mean you can guarantee that your lemming will respond. The temptation would be to continually use this method though and that should be avoided.

As an added bonus, there is also a PC based level editor available; allowing you to compile your own levels or convert some from other games (if you can find one Mathew hasn't got to yet). The level editor itself is a powerful, if clunky beast and can seemingly genuinely create anything in the game. It does however struggle badly in Vista, forcing home basic theme and then crashing on close for me.

Lemmings DS takes a criminally small amount of space on your flash card, even with all the levels and this is a truly brilliant conversion of a classic game. There's no reason, no excuse and simply no justification for not sticking this on your flash card right this second.

(Note that currently there are no emulators available that will run Lemmings DS, so to play it you'll need the real hardware. See Matt's web site for a list of supported devices.)