Retronauts - 495: The Lemmings Series

Episode Date: November 21, 2022

Join Stuart Gipp and master of remembering Dave Bulmer as they cling to their respective parasols and float down the Lemmings gameography, taking in classics, missteps, and weird choices that pay off.

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the HyperX Podcast Network, brought to you this week by Omaha Stakes. This week in Retronauts, an episode, I know you're going to just dig. Yes. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I know, I know. We're here for it. That's what Retronauts is these days. It's classic Japes from Stu.

That's on the top. And then sort of way underneath, you know, people talking about retro games, I guess. You know. But it's not just me here, as I'm sure you've already surmised. my partner in crime is here and it's Dave Boulman would you like to introduce yourself again

Dave. It's a shame there isn't a word that rhymes with crime but has to do with lemmings, isn't it? Oh God, there isn't one, is there? Oh, lime. Lime, like lemming and lime, like lemon and lime. Okay. We could do something with that. My partner in lemming and lime and it's not great. No, hello, I'm Dave Bulmer and I'm from a podcast

called Sonic the Comic the podcast and there you go, that's what I am. I talk about 90s and games and stuff. It's very good. It's very funny. Can I just ask listeners and David, can you hear this? Listen to this. Oh, whoa, a door opened and loads of little lemmings came out of it.

No, that's my chair. That's how loud this chair is. Listen. This is what I have to work with. That was just your bum. Your bum made that noise. It wasn't my bottom. It was. It didn't make the noise of my bottom. Stop it, David.

You're embarrassing me. Sometimes your bum makes that noise and then goes, let's go, and some little poos come out and start walking around your house. Well, that's as maybe. That's not what happened this time, okay? Remember that time that someone pressed a nuke button in there? That was unpleasant for everyone.

Everybody, yeah. Man, this episode of Retronauts is going to win like some kind of award. I know it is. We're straight in, aren't we? Yeah. Sorry. Yeah, we're straight in and straight down the U-Bend.

That's where they're going. Run into that crocodile. Okay, so yes. Today, as you probably surmised from that barrage of awful toilet humour, we're going to be talking about lemmings. Now, you may be thinking, Stu, idiot. Jeremy Parrish has already talked about lemmings, along with the Retronauts, I want to say, East team.

That is verbatim what I was thinking, including the I want to save it. And also were the developers of Lemmings, but this is not something so not so high and mighty that we interviewed the developer. I've tried to interview developers before and they spray me with Frize and kick it to me and I have to run away

but this is just me and the Bomster yeah, that's you, talking about all of the games in the Lemings series. I'm more I'm sort of extensive but possibly quite light and breezy go around of this rather enormous

and bizarre series. I'll tell you one of the key reasons why this had to be done and needed doing is because we and this, you know, and I'm not throwing any shade here, but we are from Amiga land. Yes. Aren't we? And like,

you know, this is other than your episodes, this is quite an American podcast and, you know, they're from sort of like Nintendo land and stuff. We're from Amiga land. So you've got to get some Brits on if you're going to talk about that. Well, if you're, if the Americans are talking about lemmings, they're probably talking about

like console lemmings or something. Oh, they're probably talking about the SNES version of... I assume there was a SNES version of Lemings by a measure of which it could be called a SNES version of Lemmings, yes. I would not touch that with a barge pole because it needs a mouse. I suppose the SNES had a mouse, didn't it? I think you can use the SNES mouse with it.

It's not actually that bad of a version. We'll get to it, though, because we're going to steamroll in. But first, I want to ask you what your sort of origins and lemmings... Oh, that's... Wait a minute. That's actually good. I think it's actually one of the names of the levels from Lemmings. So I didn't come up with it.

All right. Well, it's good anyway. Thank you. It's better here, though, unless that level is about the origin of the species. Like, you've used it better. I did use it with better context. I agree, yeah. But I still, regardless of how I've structured that, I'd like to know what your history with Lemmings is.

Oh, yeah. Okay. So what my history of Lemmings is. is that I have deep connection to the moment when I was, as a spectrum-owning child, a child who basically, you know, I'd seen BBC micros at the TV at school, I mean, yes. And I was watching the telly one day, and on the telly came the sunshine on a rainy day advert. Do you know the one? Do you know the one I mean?

Bringing a bell. It's the song, Sunshine on a rainy day. Mix my soul. Mix my soul. Zip. Zli. Zipoo. Right. And during this song, there's a boy who's the coolest guy in the world. He's got flippy flop hair and he's got an Amiga joystick that he, he like smacks that joystick left and right. You know, he never just takes it and uses it normally. No, he's whapping it around.

And he is like running his hand through his hair. He's being as cool as he possibly can be whirling around on his spinny chair. And he's playing on the Amiga, like, cartoon. collection or whatever it was called, the Amiga-1200. It's an album for the Amiga-1200. And in it, you've got, you know, Bart Simpson-putting sunglasses on. You've got, from the intro to the Space Mutants, and you've got a little Lemming, his little umbrella, over a ledge.

And I don't know, just something about that. It hooked me in. I don't know how, I can't remember now how I found out what Lemmings was, but I remember when I first played it. And that was when I got it for what must have been Christmas on the spectrum. Because I was still just a spectrum kid. Can I briefly interject, because I have to make this joke before I forget it. It's very important.

Yes. I earlier was also spinning around in my spinny chair, whacking my joystick left and right and running my fingers through my head. Hey, Carol, I'm joking. It's a wanking joke. Oh, it's like you were doing, oh, that's rude. I know, it is a bit rude, isn't it? Because I wasn't my joystick, really what I meant.

It was my knob. That was the joke. Oh, you're dead rude. I know. This is a very blue episode of Retronauts, isn't it? Oh, it is. You might want to You probably just cut that

It was just Cheezed, pure oil Pure oil The thing is That is kind of the energy That this guy is giving off In the advert, you know And he

Odenism Yeah, exactly So I got Lemmings for the Spectrum And whenever I tell people that They go LeMing to the Spectrum That must have been rubbish But no, it was just like playing Lemmings

You know They were good at making games So they made it work How did they do it without the mouse? Yeah, I think what it was. And again, same as with console versions. I wouldn't touch this with a barge pole now. But I think you just had cursor controls.

I think, you know, because I had a joystick. Right, right, right. I would control it with a joystick, which is not great. And it did that thing that all, is that that may be an incorrect statement to make. And I may only be thinking of this one thing. But it did the thing that is where, in order to control a cursor with cursor keys, instead of a mouse, it like starts off going slower and then it speeds up as you move it. And it, I don't think that's a very good idea.

Am I even wrong about that? I haven't played this version since about 1992, so I don't really know. If anyone has played the Spectrum version of Lemmings and knows whether or not the cursor has a sort of slow start, momentum-based physics, please get in touch. Make sure you get in touch. And hurry, you know, before the episode goes out so that we can append it to the end. You won't have heard us asking the question. question, but make sure you do it anyway.

I mean to get fact-checking Santa on this. Yeah. How many lemmings were on the screen in the, in the spectrum version? That's my other question. Can't have been that many lemmings? I suppose not. I think that didn't count them, but like my memory is that it was just lemmings. They had to take out some other things. So you can't dig, you can't bash, build, block, float, explode.

That's right. You can't do. You can't do those. You can only mine. What do you want, a moon on a stick? Of course you can't do those. The guys just walk around and you look at them. That's it.

And they wave sometimes. That would be a fun game. My friend got an Amiga. We probably talked about that on the Amiga episode we've already done. And he had obviously Lemming. Everyone with an Amiga had lemmings. I think that's actually true. I don't think there's a single Amiga owner that doesn't have lemmings.

When the Amiga Mini 5100 Mini launched and didn't have Lemmings, that was ridiculous. That is ridiculous. Ridiculous. Like make it happen for Christ's sake That's really ridiculous I mean presumably you can do Yes you can just put Lemmings on it Yes

But still ridiculous Ridiculous ridiculous And what actually my My sort of origin with that is that He made me a little tape He made a tape of music for me And it had lots of Lemmings music But it mostly had

Oh no more Lemmings music Oh not familiar with that Oh well you are because last time, when we talked about the Amiga, I mentioned it and the editor put some on. But outside of that, I'll reiterate, everybody go and listen to the Oh No More Lemming's soundtrack for the Amiga. It's real good, but we'll get to that later.

I just like the version of 10 green bottles. I think you go is really hard. It's brilliant. When the drums come in, it's just hard as hell. It's like rave music. I absolutely love it. Well, it is. It's very rave.

It's very punk, isn't it? It doesn't trouble itself with things like chords. I remember, I mean, my first lemmings was the DOS version, which in retrospect is just like, what is this? I mean, it was fine. It was essentially feature-complete, but the colours were all wrong, you know? Oh, were they?

I mean, they had it. That's a surprise because I'm to understand that the reason the Lemmings' colors were chosen in the first place was because of the limitations of DOS. Oh, I think, I mean, the lemings looked okay, but there's not the depth of color that you would get in the Amiga version, with lovely deluxe paint-looking... Yeah, it really wasn't...

PCs weren't that good yet, you know? No, they were only good enough for Commander Keane and the Wolfenstein. There was a moment where the Amiga was the only good computer. Yeah, and that moment was from the beginning of the Amiga to today, 2020. Yes, yeah, it's quite a long moment. The moment persists, is all I can say. After eight months of running the retro gaming convention circuit, I am 100% ready to spend some time at home this fall in winter, writing and editing by the fireside. And I'm ready to get back into the swing of home cooking, too.

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Oh, right. Bye then. No, no. It was, no, I mean, oh, no, more lemmings. We need to talk about, we do need to talk about lemmings one a bit, and I feel like we have. But that's, I feel like that that ship has sailed to some extent. those lemmings have gone into their dragon-mouth weird house. Is it possible?

Is it possible that there'll be people listening to this? This is a genuine question, because the answers probably know. Is it possible there will be people listening to this who are fully functional adults who don't know what Lemmings is due to their age being younger than us? Well, the annoying thing is, Lemmings doesn't have a huge profile these days. And the last major Lemmings release was 2006. So you could, in fact, be in the workforce and also not know what Lemmings is. And the thing is, that last major Lemings release was pretty niche itself.

Like, you already sort of had to want to play it and know what it is. Because Lemmings is one of the games. If you put all the games in a list and just eliminated the ones that are an original or unimportant, lemmings is still there. That means it's so perfect in its concept and its execution. The spoiler, there is no way to improve it. Like, every subsequent game, even the ones I like, were sort of chipping away at it and ruining it a bit or a lot.

Because they were trying to change stuff that didn't need changing. Yeah, it's like if you added, you know, three more guys to chess or whatever. Yeah. It's like, I'm sure that. That would be interesting, but they sort it out. It's a good game to begin with. I think we should talk very little about the first game, as I said, because everyone knows it, more or less everyone's played it. If you haven't, it's very easy to do.

There are currently lots of interpreters for the thing, for the game, like Lemini is one of them, or Win Lemmix is another one, just look them up. And they let you play the game in its amiga form rather brilliantly and easily on Windows 10 or one of the systems. Now, O'No, more Lemings, however, now, this is after, the first difficulty is tame, and there's no way you're going to fail at any of those levels. They're even easier than the fun levels. They're almost impossible to lose if you're even remotely okay at Lemmings. But after tame, I think, is crazy, the second difficulty setting.

Are the difficulty settings in O'No different ones? Yeah, they're called tame, crazy, wild, wicked, and havoc, I think. and there were 20 levels per per each difficulty set. Now, the thing I want to get across clearly is I am hot shit at the first Lemmings game. I am super good at it. I can beat all of the levels in that game

fairly effortlessly now. I mean, some of them are still really hard, like, save me. But I know how to solve them. I have played their game so much that I am just the don of Lemmings. I know more Lemmings. Once I get past Tame, I am basically done.

I can't do any of the levels that after that. They are evil, horrible levels. They are, they like take the difficulty from mayhem and just escalate from there. They're so difficult. They require techniques that the game does not teach you that you need to figure out for yourself. Oh, really? Yeah, genuinely. They're just utterly mean.

And in that respect, in that sense, I do respect it quite a lot for being so cruel and hateful. Yes, I mean, it was parallel evolution, the same thought in different brains in different countries. as what gave us the Mario lost levels as Mario 2 in Japan, isn't it? It's like, okay, they've finished that game. They're imagining that you've played all the way through Lemmings and you've got to the top, to the end, and you don't want to start from the beginning again with the next game you play.

You don't want to start with the easy ones. You're there for the hard ones, so they start you with that level. Something missing also from Onomwell Lemings that's in the original Lemmings, something I admire is the fact that, the original lemmings, sometimes you'll come across the same level again in a later difficulty, as in the same layout, exactly, the same obstacles, the same, you know, terrain, exit in the same place.

But the only thing that's changed is your available skills will be severely limited or changed around. And I think the elegance of that is something missing from animal lemings. I know it's weird to say, I think there should be, you know, recycled content, but I don't think I don't consider it recycled. I consider it like revisiting an old friend. Like, oh, it's this guy again, except this time I've got no bashes.

Yeah. Because many, many lemmings levels can be solved using alternative tactics, probably not the intended tactics. But only more lemmings is just more like, if you don't do this exactly right,

you're done. And the time limit also is really tight. Good luck. It's a very cruel, in game and I'm sure Lemmings fans right now are going what a loser you can't even beat like crazy and I truly can't I copped to it it's horrifyingly hard Well I mean so I had both of these when I

When I did get my Amiga not too long after my friend did And that's me on Lemmings one Like I can't play Lemmings I can't do it I can play the first few You know most easy levels And then after that it's like no I'm done So therefore I never really perceived a massive difference Between the first one and oh no

Which listeners was the second Lemmings game they brought out. It was one of those where it was like, you couldn't quite tell if it was a full-blown sequel or an expansion pack until they released a full-blown sequel and called it Lemmings 2. And you're like, oh, I guess that wasn't it then.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, you get it in data disk form and standalone form, I believe. And the art. So that it ran on the original game. Yeah, I believe that's the case. I believe it was a straight-up expansion. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, but also available separately.

And by the way, I have no idea what version I had, because it was pirated. Because it was those days, and that was just what you did. So, yeah, my friend. I deleted that pirated version after 24 hours, otherwise, you know, it's illegal. Well, no, I didn't, but I've been, that's why I did time. You went to jail for wrongs. I went to jail. I was 11, and I went to jail.

You had been sentenced to life, imprisonment for downloading, Lemmings. Oh, you couldn't download in those days. I had to go around my friend's house and get a copy of the disc done. For going round your friend's house and getting a copy of the floppy disk. On Xcopy Pro. Which has been handwritten on it, Lemmings, and there is only one M in Lemmings. No, spelled it correctly. They have done a mistake.

And I even put, oh, no, exclamation mark, more lame. Or someone did. I can't remember if I wrote it. I would never expect you to make any mistakes and something like that. On anything? I've never made a mistake. I mean, you come on here a few times. Well, it depends how you to find mistake

Yeah, that's fair Well, speaking of steak I think we should talk about Lemmings to the tribe That's a very bizarre segue I don't understand how that, yeah, steak You cook up a lemming, have a little lemming steak, maybe. I don't know.

I suppose you could. I've got nothing to do with lemmings too, though. But I do like that you did a misdirection by not saying, speaking of mistake. And you said, speaking of steak, which made it seem plausible that you'd thought of something, even though you had. No, I hadn't at all. It was a comedy, uh, was I led you down the garden bath, so to speak. You did. I'm right down it.

Lemmings are right down it to the very bottom where all the compost is, detritus. Lemmings to the tribes, 1993. Now, while I said that adding elements to this game does sort of too many cooks, you know, too many cooks. Too many cooks. Yeah, oh man, what a video that was. Anyway, this game, I think, is actually brilliant. It took me a very, very long time to appreciate it. It is.

I did not like it as a child much. I thought it was just like, I thought it was just Lemmings, but ruined. I had no such trouble. Lemmings, but overcomplicated. I thought it was Lemings, but, like, beefed up. Oh, now I think it's absolutely excellent And I wish I'd given it more time Because what it offers is

Honestly, it almost Even though the essential gameplay is the same You've got to save the Lemmings Yeah It feels very different Because there's a lot more focus on Lemmings Using controlled skills You know, like with the fan

That you can direct them and stuff Yeah, that was difficult though, wasn't it that fan? Yes, it was, yeah, it was very difficult but lemmings you had loads at least 40 yeah because there was just eight kinds of lemming

in the original one right eight whereas in this it's just like oh yeah we've come up with loads we've just come up with millions of them and people object to that but to me that was that was what was so cool about it

well it lets you there's a practice room where you can try out as many of the skills as you want oh I love the practice you know I would say that I definitely played there's more than one practice room there was like there was a think two

an Egyptian one and a snow one. And I played on those the most out of any part of the game. Because I was just mucking about when I was that age on Amici. You know what I mean? I wasn't trying to finish games. And so you could just set up cycles of lemmings, like, oh, they're all going to walk round the whole level this way and do this and do this. And in the snow one, you would have them all walk over to the, you know, the top of the slope.

And then they could all be skier lemmings and they would ski down it. It was beautiful, right? It's a joy. Yeah. The thing about lemmings. Is that they were, what, seven pixels tall or something? They were just little, little locked men. And yet, they were brilliantly animated in everything that they did.

And I think the real standout way, people talk about how the hair bounced and it did, and they talk about how their arms and feet flopped at, like, clowns' shoes. And they did, even though they're only, like, lines of three pixels each. But the real, I think the real moment where you're like, oh, an animator did this is the moment when they open their little umbrella. So they're falling, you click them, dong, and they open their little umbrella, and there's this brief pause

where their fall is stopped, and they go up a little bit, or at least they stop with the feels like they go up, and then they start to drift down. It's exactly like Disney's Alice in Wonderland when her skirt opens up as she falls down the rabbit hole, and she kind of like, it's probably based on that animation. Yeah, maybe.

And it's absolutely brilliant. Well, Lemmings, too, never drop, that ball. All these brilliant different Lemmings abilities now were all just as well realized. Same little sprite. They didn't change it. They didn't spoil it. They just added more stuff

for them to do. Well, little things like the diggers using spake, like a shovel. Just little things like that. Even like the glue pours, the way the jet packs strap on the jetpack, you know. Yes. It's just extremely well done. What else did they do? Do you know, I'm relying on my memory for this. I didn't refresh my memory for this one.

They pour a bucket of glue. That was a fun one. There was the guys who just get out a stereo and start dancing to the music. Those were good ones. Yeah. And then, yes, there were the fan-based ones such as Super Lem, who would unzip his lemming body. And, like, out of, you know, out of it would come a Superman lemming.

And he would fly around and you would have to, the mouse cursor now became a little spinny fan. Yeah, you could turn it into a little fan, yeah. Did you have to, I think you had to hold the button, the mouse button down to get it to spin. And I might be the case, but there is an icon on the HUD that you can click the turns it into the fan. But it might just be the right mouse button by default. I might be wrong about that. Oh, well, what I mean is that when you had the fan, it wasn't always necessarily spinning. I think you have to hold the button spinning.

Yes, sorry, I did misunderstand you. No, you're right there. I didn't realize that, yes, of course you have to select the fan. Yes, of course you do. I was thinking like, well, when you've got a super lamb, you just get the fan. But no, that would be ridiculous. You couldn't do anything else then. It's right next to the nuke, so good luck with that if you have bad aim.

Oh, dear. But the way it changes the game in another more, well, gameplay-based way is the previous games, the previous game, excuse me, plus I know what that means, the idea is here's a level you have to rescue at least 60% of the lemmings and then you pass. Yeah. In this game, you can rescue as many lemmings as you want, but then on the next level, you're only going to have those lemmings that are still alive. It creates a good of continuity. Now, you can go back to levels you've already beaten and redo them in an attempt to rescue even more lemmings.

You have more for the next stage, because some of them aren't completable without enough lemmings. To get a gold medal on each tribe, I believe you have to save every lemming in every stage. Or at least meet a certain threshold. That's right. Yes, I forgot. There's a little award ceremony screen. end of the level, isn't it?

But... Dipper da-da-d-d-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. That's how it went. Yeah. So it incentivizes learning how the game works. It doesn't punish the player for losing Lemmings so much, you know? You can still progress, but you all need to go back and do it. I think that's a more elegant way of solving the difficulty issue, so to speak.

And another cool thing about Lemmings, too, is, This was the game that kind of created the Lemmings world, in a sense. They went from being abstract little creatures to being fairy little creatures that lived in this interesting world of magic and sorcery. Yeah, because the idea there was... Oh, it's all just very lovely. The idea, too, was that there was this big circular talisman which had gone and got broken into bits and exploded everywhere,

and you had to go and get them all to reunite the tribe or whatever. And so now you had all these... these different, it was called Lemings to the tribes, because the different sets of levels that you could play were themed in different ways. So you had standard classic ones, but then you had like Scottish ones and Ninja ones and stuff. Yeah, the Shadow Lemings, the ninja ones.

Yeah, sports ones. The Egyptians, which in Lemings three, they all do the Egyptian walk when they're walking, which is amazing. Yeah. Best thing had that game. And they were all different.

and, like, they actually, having, playing the different tribes did change the sprites in various ways. I can't remember what the Egyptian Lemmings looked like. Probably it might have been that. It might have been doing that and I forgot. But, yeah. I'm just going to quietly in the background look at videos of it while we talk. But Lemings, too, because it introduced a continuity to the Lenings to the story, a world, I mean, the game, the original Amiga game, it shipped with a quite lengthy storybook in the box about the story.

Lemmings. Yeah, it did. It came with a, supposed to come with a little book, yeah. Well, I actually had a legal copy of Lemings, too. I don't remember a lengthy book, although now you say it, I do remember a sort of unfoldy thing that had the map on, so maybe that had it. It might just have been in the manual that was particularly bludge and had all this law stuff in it. Yeah, maybe. Oh, maybe I just didn't ever read the manual, because I was like, I know how to play Lemings. You've got to read the manual. If you don't read the manual for Lemings, two and three, you're just completely out of luck in my opinion. But no, Lemmings 2 came out, it was an mega PC, you know, it hit the Mega Drive, it hit the SNAS, genuinely quite good versions as well.

Yeah. In fact, I want to praise the Mega Drive version of Lemings, because while obviously it's not ideal control-wise without the Mega Mouse, which no human being on the planet has ever seen, it has a lot of new levels. There are many, many new levels. There are two whole extra difficulties called Present and Sunsoft, who made the poor. And they're just, and laced throughout the game are loads of new different levels to the ones that were in the original, which is odd, but welcome when you're such a big fan that you've played it so many times. Yeah. And of course, it had the multiplayer of Lemmings, which is actually a huge amount of fun. Nobody has ever, nobody I know as I've actually played it, where you have two teams of Lemmings and you can kind of mess with each other's lemmings by building their place and screwing around with them.

The thing about that is that that was in the original lemmings from the off. Yes, it was, yeah. The problem was that basically nobody had two mouses for their amiga. Two mouses. Because you never have two mouses, do you? Why would you need two mouses? No, the only time anyone ever buys a mouse, then as now, is when the previous mouse was broken. So the only time you would ever happen to have two mice is if, I don't know, you got one in a pack with something.

Maybe if you had two mice. and you had them both plugged in at once you would be like a Lemmings pro playing with both hands at the same time I don't know how it would make any difference he wouldn't have two curses but imagine guard well you could play two player games against yourself

and then you would yeah but then who wins there's no vac to victory if it's a cheat no but you've you've mastered the game though you've got really good that's a good point that's a good point

Um, let me too, yeah, did well all the around, very good game, very well-reviewed game. Great looking, it's a great sounding, just generally excellent. Unfortunately, I personally can't say the same for its follow-up, which was known as All New World of Lemmings or the Lemmings Chronicles, 1994. That is the first time it ever occurred to me not to want to get a Lemmings game, and so I never did. I never played that. Why not? What was it? Like, when I remember looking at it and going, oh, no, no, they got this wrong.

And I think it's because they changed the sprites. They did. They made them bigger, yeah. Bigger and, like, not as well animated and stuff. Yeah, smaller levels, more compact. Now, the thing that bugs me about this game, and this is going to sound a bit weird, on the first of the classic levels, you have a skill, which is Turner,

and it turns you turn around and walk the other way. Okay. And I immediately just thought, like, well, they're not Lemmings, if you can influence the direction they're walking up. Are they? Like, that's not a puzzle. That's just, like, look, we've got a new thing.

And the only reason it's there, and I stand by this, it's there because they didn't want to think up more puzzles without it, if that makes sense. Like, it's very clear, it's a very lame capitulation to sort of, I don't mean laziness, because I never say that about developers. I just mean, I don't know how to describe it. It's half-assed.

It's a half-assed lemmings game. Lemmings is one thing, which is Lemmings completely outside of your influence, apart from these powers, you cannot influence the direction of walk in unless you're a blocker. If you can just turn them around manually, what you're playing is not Lemmings, it's just some other game, like humans or some of the RTSS.

Yeah, I completely agree with me. Lemings 3 had the feel of someone else making it. That's the trouble. And that may be the case or not, I don't know. And it wasn't finished. There were only three tribes in the manual. It says the rest will be added via data disks. Really? Okay. That is the other thing that bugged me. Having expanded lemmings out to these different, many, many tribes, to now suddenly pull it in and go like, no, now there's just three. That actually might serve a purpose. Like that might, that might improve the game in some way they understand. But looking at it from the outside to me, I was like, well, no, then. You've taken stuff away. I don't want that. And yeah, we were back to, it kind of looked like lemmings won, and that we were back to a very limited number of things you can make your lemmings do.

And it just felt like it felt like a step back and it felt like somebody else kind of getting it wrong and the momentum not being there. It was a step back in most ways. And what you say about them scaling down the world like that, it's a shame because with Lemmings 2, there had been a little bit of a marketing blitz because you had, for example, there was a very, very short-lived magazine called Max Overload. Max Overload That featured Two issues long, I think Two issues long It featured comic shits

Based on various video games Almost as a competitor To Sonic the comic Yeah, I think it was, yeah Yeah And one of those was, of course, Lemmings And it was beautifully drawn Yeah

I think, now I'm not 100% on this But I have a very, very inkling That Richard Elsa may have had Some level of involvement Oh, really? Yes, but that might be absolute bollocks. Right. Why have you got that idea, then? I don't know. I just am vaguely remembering this notion of Richard Elson, the famed UK sonic artist, drawing a lemming.

And maybe I might be mistaking that leaming for knuckles or something. I genuinely don't recall. Well, he may have done a cover or something, might he? I can't remember. I don't think he drew the comic, because I've got an image of the comic in my head, and it's very, I don't know who did it, but I'd be more inclined to. to say it was someone like Casanova's or someone. Lots of black ink lines. It was about this sort of professor of lemmology telling you about what they are, wasn't it? Yeah, that's right, yeah, yeah.

And it was not bad, but again, only last two issues. The other strips were like Chuck Rock and like Green Dogg and stuff like that, I think. That's right, yeah. It's the second rate. It's like the Shurjip in Video World magazine. That's a bit of an obscure reference, sorry. Well, it was like, I think it was all games that were available on Sega machines, not Sega games. And so they were picking from what you could call a second tier of game that Sonic the comic hadn't already got dibs on, except of course Lemmings, which is top tier game.

I mean, I think Lemmings could have sustained a fairly lengthy series of comics to be honest. Oh, you can keep, they could keep doing it because they're smurfs. Like, it's, you know, you just have like, you have one guy who's a blocker lemming and one guy who's a climber lemming and you come up with their adventures. You could definitely do that. Yeah, it just keeps climbing stuff. And let's stop climbing stuff. They're climbing stuff for it. It's like, it's in my nature, baby. I've got to climb. DreamWorks presents lemmings. Oh, no. They're all doing the face. Since we're talking about marketing blitz, I mean, I have here on the table in case there would be of any use.

the two Lemming's adventure game books. Oh, I was going to bring those up. I'm looking at them right now as well. Yeah. The Genesis Quest and the Hypnosis Inigma. Yeah. Amazing names, aren't they? Who do they buy again?

Oh, I'll have to reach over and look at them. Nigel Gross and John Sutherland. Oh, Absute Legends, Nigel and John, BMJ, Legends, thank you very much. That's what I call them. My copies of these books have been poured through so extensively. They are tattie beyond recognition, because I loved these.

I loved them, but I guess I didn't do them very often. I just loved the concept of them because they're choosing their own adventure. I just cheated my way through them. I never get a dice. What am I? Some kind of nerdlinger. They're choose your own adventure game books. Yeah.

In which, instead of being like, oh, if you want them to go this way, turn this to this number, it's like, all right, how many blockers have you got left? How many of the, and you're keeping track. You're supposed to be writing on the inside page, but I've got here a piece of paper that I wrote it all down on and drew some little lemmings on. Of course you did. Yeah, and it says like, my list here is like on beach, I've got

six jumpers, I've got six of tractors and ten diggers, and in the space levels I've got like six magnoboot, stompers and things like that. So it's quite, and this is for just one of the books, it's quite involved what you have to keep track on. It's like a game you're playing. It's brilliant stuff.

Yeah, it was like, here's like the thoughty skills from Lemmings too. You need to pick like 10 of them. If you pick the wrong ones, too bad, suck it off. Right. As cool as it is, and it is cool, I would suggest perhaps not the best designed game book in terms of being beatable. But, I mean, what is, really?

It's just a lot of fun. No kids were playing them properly. It was just another way to experience the life of the lemmings vicariously. Oh, God, yeah. I'm looking at the bit on the inside here, and it's like, so you start off with 50 lemmings, you're going to have to be very careful because that number's going to go down and you're keeping track of that. And then it goes, because there are so many different types, here's a list that might help you make the right choices later on.

And then sure enough, all 40 of the different kinds of lemming are named here. And it's like, most of the names are self-explanatory. You'll soon find out what the others do is you start to read the book. So you're just flailing in the darkness. You're like, oh, I guess I'll have, obviously I'm having super lemm. Maybe I'll have a laser blaster. That sounds good. Shimmier, I don't know.

You just have to guess. It doesn't give you any clue as to what they'll be for. It's extraordinarily difficult in the way that the game itself isn't. But I'm very well, I'm very glad they exist these game books. Hell yeah. Just because of the advancement of the genre of adventure game book generally. Like, that changes things. I wanted to do an episode in the future about adventure game books,

and I'm going to try and get someone in that field to come on. So I look forward to that. That would be cool. Now, all new world of Lemmings can go away. We've talked about that. There really isn't much more to say about it. It's just, it's not a bad game, but it's not Lemmings. You know, it's something else.

And I really want to highlight that they got the sprites wrong. They do not move as well. They don't look good. No, they don't. And that was the thing about right. And this going forward, this is going to be an important point, because Lemmings was just something a computer can do. gamified it was it was like here he was like if it was done worse yeah it might not have been as good

of a game even if basically all the same game elements were there but because they got the right look they got the sprites correct they got the animation of the sprites correct you thought of them as little guys not as little pieces playing pieces on a screen and they never got that again like maybe never in the series again and that i think is a key part of why we've never latched onto a Lemmings sequel beyond Lemmings to the tribes. Yeah.

They never look real. I would have to agree with that, yes. It's just a little, it's like, it's just a little thing. Quality control, it needs to be right. And then you'll latch onto it. And you'll be like, oh, okay, I'm in this world, I'm doing this thing. And if that's not there and they just look like sprites to you,

you're never going to fully be on board. I mean, I agree with that. Some of the spinoffs that we're going to talk about, I like. but none of them are a match for the original lemmings which is a game that

I firmly believe deserves to stand up alongside the likes of Tetris and Pong as a singular idea that's never been bettered in its genre ever There's a reason people still keep playing lemmings that's because it's timeless masterpiece

And the thing is Tetris and Pong When people talk about the history of those games They can point to like Oh before Pong there was like You know super light tennis or whatever. You know, that's not true, but whatever, there are precedents for these games. Nothing for Lemmings.

They came up with this thing out of absolutely nowhere. Yeah. And no one else ever really iterated on it, like... You can't iterate on it because it's flawless. Yes. It's literally flawless. Yeah, we're not doing, that's not a bit we're doing listeners.

It's actually the case. Taking aside some possible issues with, like, individual levels that people may have. Yeah, of course. The games structure and skeleton have no errors. Like the choice of skills is perfect. Yep. Perfect. Everything about the game is just magnificent,

the graphics, magnificent, the music is magnificent. Level design, mostly great. Maybe not perfect, but, you know, that's what makes it good, that it's not perfect. It still feels like it's made by people. The original, this is something I was going to say earlier, but forgot. The original Lemmings. and I don't, and I think it feels like this isn't the case in some of the sequels,

and this is kind of what you were talking about a minute ago. The original Lemmings was, in fact, I know for a fact, this isn't a guess. The levels were designed because they were trying to make levels for each other to be stumped by in the team. Before there was a, you know, before Segnosis were on board and they had a publisher, they were just making this thing. They would be like, all right, I've made one, try this. And they would be making them for each other. So they got very good at making them, and they were like, you know, they would play it. And if someone on the team could finish it quite easily, then they would add an extra obstacle to make that more difficult.

And so each level was someone's creation that they cared about and really wanted to impress the rest of the team with. And that shows. And maybe in some of the future games, it's just like, well, we're going to put obstacles and a way for them to go. And there you go, the end. Agreed. If you're a shrewd shopper, it's about to be your favorite time of the year. HyperX will be running massive sales for the holiday season. Get up to 50% off some of our most popular products.

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Take that to the bank and smoke it. On the Hyperax Podcast Network and no more whoppers.com. However, a game that nobody is playing is 3D Lemmings. Released in 1995. 995 PC, PS1, Saturn.

I would contend, and I mean this, with a rule. I would say passion, but there isn't some intensity of what I'm saying. This might be the worst game ever made. Oh, gosh.

Like, this isn't just a bad Lemings game. It's a betrayal of the Lemings ethos. It's the furthest that a game can get from that kind of perfect simplicity that made Lemmings so enjoyable in the first place. There's a perverse bastardization of what made Lemmings good. Yeah. And I wish it had never been made.

I absolutely despise it. It's so clear. it's one of those games from that era where it's incredibly clear at every moment, at every click, that the only reason this game exists is because everything's got to be 3D now. Yeah, yeah.

And they've tried... You can see the logic behind their decisions and how they made... how they translated it into 3D. But what it adds up to is, well, it shouldn't be. It's... lemmings is not about

how can I put this once you know how to solve a puzzle in lemmings occasionally the execution can also be an issue it's rare those two things intersect in the games they know it's not particularly fair if a very hard puzzle but a very

laborious physical element to solving it they don't do that too often because they know it's not good level design lemmings 3D every stage is a rare hell. I don't even know how to describe it.

Like, even seeing what you're doing as a tool or no. They've given you all these camera options and absolutely none of them are any yet. They're all horrible. That's the thing, yeah, because it's so early in terms of like 3D games, you know, existing games we can vote 3D,

but also a lot of the standards of 3D gaming hadn't really been established yet. So the keyboard and mouse set up, you have to have the mouse in your left hand. and the we don't have to you can you can switch it but by default if the mouse in your left hand left and right mouse buttons are swapped to accommodate that even though people who use a mouse and earth hand you know that that that's really counterintuitive and then you have your right hand on the number pad on your computer keyboard and you can't hold two keys at once so you can't

like turn the camera while moving it you have to like angle it then move it where you want it to be at that angle and go up and down. And you can never look up and down. It's always attached to the horizon. And meanwhile, so the lemmings are, you know, they had to make it 3D. So the lemmings are now walking around in three dimensions and all the levels go all over the place,

which means that the whole basic tenor of what lemmings is, they're going to keep walking and stuff will get in their way and you have to get them past them. Now you have to worry about, well, where are they walking? It's not back and forth. It's all over the place. and so now you're having to put down not just blocker lemmings but like blocker and make them go that way lemmings it's really just a horrible experience from start to finish i uh yeah i i can't stand this

i don't think it is actually one of the worst skins i've made but it might be one of my least favorite just because it's not that it's it's not it's i don't have to even describe what it's what it isn't it isn't anything you know it's just i can't imagine having fun on it I can't imagine anyone ever has had fun playing it. I have watched a video by a man who did have fun, and he made quite a good case for it. By the end, I was like, yeah, okay, okay. But here's something that it can't avoid not being.

You were saying, I don't know how to describe what it isn't. Here's something it isn't. It isn't that perfect thing where the little sprites lock into your soul and you believe them. Because the whole thing always looks like a compromise to, you know, based on the fact that, look, I'll tell you a modern equivalent. Yeah.

The 2D Metroid games, right? Ooh, yes. I love those. I love the 2D Metro games, and I love how you turn into the little ball and bomber wall, and now you can see the little, what sort of block there are and what tool we have to use on the blocks. And I also love the, you know, Metroid dread.

Brilliant. But one of the compromises that it and the remake of Metroid 2 had to make on the 3DS is, those bits where you have like a block with an icon on that tells you what they do they now have to be these like sticks that go off into the distance because it's all got to be 3D and isometric and you've got to see you know you couldn't just bomb a little tiny block out you could it would be fine so you'd be able to roll through I don't know why they did it that way it's it's a bad decision but

in the same way with lemmings 3D now you can't have like so like a digger lemming or sorry a basher lemming who on the original one would start punching the wall and he'd punch a few pixels out of the wall and he'd punch again and a few pixels and he'd punch again and he's making a little tunnel and you're watching him do it at the appropriate speed for his size and weight and the action that he's in lemming's 3D he punches the wall a set number of times cracks appear in it and the entire block disappears because it has to be divided up into three dimensional cubes and nothing can change that he can't they can't move through the cubes they have to just eliminate them in a single

frame. I'm going to probably try and go back in time and make this game not ever get made. That's my harm plan. I can see what they were going for. And I reckon today there'd be a chance that they could make something along these lines and make it work. But like they know not to. They know better than to do that. Lemmings Paintball followed the garbage trash 3D Lemmings for the PC in 1996.

Now, Lemmings Paintball is you'd almost expect an effort. FPS at this point, but it's not. It's an isometric cannon fodder style game where you have a little squatter lembs that you can left click to mid and move where you're pointing, right click to mid and fire way you're pointing straight up cannon fodder.

And you know what? It's a lot of fun. It's pretty good. It's a pretty good little game. Again, here's the major problem. It ain't lemmings. There's nothing about this game that suggests that. It's got absolutely nothing. I mean, I actually sort of do wonder if it was a canon fodder game that then got discontinued.

continued and, you know, they just put a franchise onto it. My assumption is that it was something else once. Yeah, it's got to be. Because that's how I feel about the next game as well, but we'll get to that in a second. Did you play Lemmings paintball or experienced somethings people vicariously? I played the demo. Oh, yes. That's a good demo.

Must have come on a magazine. And yes, I remember just being like, yes to this. Yes to this as a game. But also like, oh, why am I being led to believe this is Lemmings in some way? But it was very cute. It was a lovely little game with little fellas. Not as good as Cannon Fodder, of course. And maybe that's its, well, I was going to say maybe that's its downfall.

But, okay, so what it was, it was, Canon Fodder in a 3D isometric way. Because Canon Fodder was very, very free. This felt a little bit more like compass directiony. And you were, you know, finding levers that make platforms go up and down. There was a puzzle element to get your lemmings to the end while also, like, shooting. There was a few too many things to do. It wasn't focused, really.

Yeah, it wasn't, no. But it was good. The Redcoat Lemmings are the villains. The Red Coat Lemmings, they call it believe. Are they? Yeah. They're the evil lemmings. They're just the opposite team, weren't they?

Yeah, just bad lemmings. I don't really know why, if what you're doing is getting to the end of the level via switches and puzzles, you wonder why what's needed then is shooting. And that's why, you know, it's Lemming's paintball because otherwise they'd be shooting each other dead and we can't have that. Yeah, it'd be lemmings slaughter. Imagine this. Imagine if instead of paintball, they'd come with, the lemmings bend over and fire poos at each other.

That would be incredible. Wouldn't that be wonderful? We'd still be talking about that today. Well, we are talking about it today. What am I'm about? Yeah. Other people would still be talking about it today. Utterly purel experience.

It would be good, though. They could call it Leving's poo bum or something. Oh, lemming. Right. I'm trying to tamper down the extent to which I actually need. to laugh at how funny that that name was that's really funny

and I shouldn't be reacting like that because I'm an adult not not for the next not for this 90 minutes you're not yeah it's funny in it yeah because it makes you think

about booboombs isn't it I can't even tell if that's why it's just it's the words themselves on a base level those words together was almost one word knows no space it's P-O-O-P-E-Hong. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, God, no. There's no space. It's one word.

Maybe I should... I like the idea of, like, there being a character name, that is also a pinning. But anyway, I digress. Let me put it to you that the character, his second name would be Poo-Bum. His first name, his first name would be Willie. Oh, I can't. Willie Poo-Bum. That's the funniest name anyone's ever come up with. Wait, if he was called Willie F-P-Bum and the F-T-Fart. Oh, I don't know. That's not as pure now. feel like we're lemmings three. You're right. You're right. I'm over, I've over, I've, I've, too many, it's a hat on a hat. It's a hat on a hat.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Get rid of it. It's simply Willie Poo-Bomb. You heard it here first Retronauts listeners. You tuned in wanting to hear about Lemmings, but instead you're having to hear two man children trying to come up with a name Willie Poupon. I've come up with the funniest name anyone's ever thought of, yeah. Oh, God Almighty. I'm really sorry to Jeremy Parrish. I promise I am actually good at doing this.

That means people though, you know, good game, but not as good as the other game that was released in 96. a big year for Lemmings this was. Yeah. The adventures of Lomax or on PC simply, simply just Lomax. Now, this is a little gem, in my opinion. I really like this game. It's a platformer, a sidetralling platformer with the most astonishingly beautiful visuals.

Yeah. Done by this sprite artisan, artisan, artisan, Hank and Niebuhrug. I don't know how to pronounce that name. Hank Naiburg, Niebuhr, I'm sorry if it's wrong. He also worked on things like Contra 4, Battle Axe, and The Misadventures of Flink, which this game, I am convinced, was once a sequel to because it is almost identical. It has so, there's quite a few shared assets or redrawn assets. That makes so much sense and more sense than it being anything to do with Lemmings. Yeah.

Now, the premise here is that a villain brilliantly to named Evil Ed, not Poo-Bum, sadly. has kidnapped or taken away or they turned all the lemmings into evil lemmings. You've got these kind of gross sneering lemmings jumping around and when you destroy them when you use a spin attack

or throw your hat at them because that's what you do in this game. They turn into regular lemmings, they go, yippee! And they run off and it's great. Right, right, right. So the idea is... But it's just a platformer, isn't it?

Like, it's not a platform where you're climbing and blocking and things. No, but you do get some lemmings abilities in the game. Like, you get, you get digger so you can dig through walls and things

Right See I only found out about this entire game You know In the last few years Watching retrospective YouTube videos about things Yeah

But the thing about this though While it isn't Lemmings This I'm going to just say it straight up Outside of Lemmings and Lemings 2 this is the one This is the best Lemmings In my opinion

And it has nothing to do with Lemmings It's completely undercooked from Lemmings But It's just look It looks great. It has real... Do you know what it looks like? It looks like if Amiga platform has lasted another generation.

Yeah, that's a really good way of putting it, yeah. If Amiga's 10 years on, basically, yeah. Yeah. Was that how long it was? Was it 10 years on? I'm not sure. Oh, you just mean... The thing is, I was just saying random numbers.

Right, yeah, yeah, based on how... I wasn't even listening to what you were saying. I just said a random number. No, God. It was complete coincidence. We don't come here to listen to what each other's saying. Yeah, this game is one of those old... games that has retained its capacity to impress solely because it is 2D. Old 3D games as fun

as they can be are not showpieces. But this game, no matter when you play it, is going to look great because of how stylized it is. And this is on PlayStation, isn't it? PlayStation 1 or PC, yes. And the thing is, it looks, oh, maybe this, maybe I'd have to look at it to check, but to me, this looks better than like Rayman 1. Which is the only sort of thing Doing this kind of thing at this sort of time Rayman 1 is a nice looking game But this game looks better definitely

It's less content rich It's easier which is probably a good thing The only problem with Lomax Is I'm not going to pretend It's not a little bit generic as a platform But it's made up for by the visuals Now people will say Gameplay is king, visuals don't matter

Those people are completely full of diarrhea Because obviously they do matter They're the most important thing about any game what you can see, how you interact with what you can see, you know? You've got to have that polish on it. The graphics don't have to be amazingly beautiful. They have to be perfect for the game you're playing.

For the game you're playing, like Lemmings won. Yeah, Lemings won't win any awards, but it doesn't really... It doesn't really look pretty, Lemings won. It's just correct. Yes, exactly. That's exactly it. I've talked about this before

because I'm a massive winger. But that's one of my most disliked things games say about graphics don't matter as long as the gameplay is good enough. Horshit. You're totally wrong. They always matter. Show me a game where the gameplay is great and the graphics aren't. There aren't any. Well, okay.

But if there was one, like that one that really big nerds like where it's like dwarfs making little places to live in. But there's no graphics at all. You will never convince me. that the same gameplay, but with really great graphics that fit the game really well, wouldn't be better. Yeah, of course it would. Yeah, yeah. Even things like NetHack, you would just play some other Mystery Dungeon game now with actual, like, visuals that aren't just like the letter P. You know, the first time I played NetHack, I pressed K and it found out you could kick.

And I said, kick what direction? I kicked east twice, and I died because I kicked a wall twice. And I got a gravestener and said, here lies. Stu died by kicking a wall. That's not what happens when you kick a wall twice. Not in real life, it's not. No, you'd have to kick a wall loads of times to die. He'd have to keep it so many times to die.

Yeah, you'd have to wear your whole body down to the brain and then kick it with your brain. And then when you destroyed that, then you might die. But not before. What if you got a mouse to hit you on the head of a big mallet? You might die then, yeah. You got all cracks all down, you're like a vase. And then you walked over and kicked the wall.

and then you would just shatter. Well, before that, you would open your mouth in a big wide grin and your teeth would one by one crack and shatter first. Yeah, but no, they would, before that happened, they would swing and they would be piano keys. Yeah, or like make a harmonica noise, one or the other. Yeah. I was watching some Tom and Jerry the other day,

and there was a bit where Jerry made friends with this little canary bird thing. It's flying back into its cage, and Tom just pops up and it flies directly into his mouth. That's hilarious, okay? And the way Jerry reacts is to run up to Tom, pull his mouth open. And he's doing a rictus grin. Yeah. And then he just pulls a hammer out of nowhere and smashes all his teeth.

And the sound it makes when he hits them is like a gunshot noise. And it's one of the funniest things I've seen in absolutely ages. I cannot even express you how funny that violence is to me. It's so, it comes out of nowhere. It's completely buck wild violence. I mean, you know, that relates back to lemmings again because lemmings are surprisingly violent, and that's funny. Yes.

Like, when your lemmings get like, I know this is a bit, okay, you know what, I'm going to give it a little disclaimer here because the imagery is obviously pretty loaded. But when your lemming gets snared up and lynched, it's quite funny because it's a lemming, you know? Is your lemming? When does that happen? Aren't there gallows, traps that are just gallows? Oh, I bet there are. I'm sure there are.

Yeah, there's all sorts of bespoke traps in different. levels that I may not necessarily have got to. There are man traps that, you know, like bear traps that snap together. And when they snap together, the Lemmings little head just pops off. I do remember one, which I think is in Lemings two, where a big thing in the ceiling, like a big piston thing, would slam down. And when it went up again, there would be a certain amount of goop sticking the two halves together. That was actually from the first game as well.

That was disgusting. I'm still upset by it. but yeah um but loamax uh if you can get hold of it which you can because everyone can because it's 2022 just gone the internet um there is no legal way to buy this game so i i urge you to play it however you can it's brilliant honestly you'll love it you'll fall in love with the visuals and you'll want to play through it uh you might get a bit frustrated with the difficulty but it's very doable so stick with it if you're into it it's a lovely game you need to get as far as well too so you can see the absolutely gorgeous dark forest levels

they look incredible. It look even better than the first few levels somehow. I think my favorite Lemmings he touched about this game is the fact that the exit from each level is the trapdoor from Lemmings. But now I think about it, that's incorrect, isn't it?

Because you don't leave through the trapdoor. Though he does enter through the trapdoor and go, let's go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it does make sense in the way that he leaves through the trapdoor. But he should leave. I think it makes sense because, yeah, like you go out through, the trap doors. come, they must go somewhere.

You could go up a trapdoor if you could get up there, but they go in through little houses instead, which presumably also lead to the trapdoor dimension. Well, you know what I have to say to that. What? Don't you open that trapdoor? You're twat, if you dare.

If you dare. That's the best. That is awesome. It's such a good noise. It's almost as good as the Burrump from their Popeye and sun. sorry I was just obscure reference to a thing that you tweeted once I apologize to the listeners it was a burrump wasn't it I was wondering I was wondering where like under what circumstances

I had said that to you whether it was on a previous retronaut no it was on Twitter you were talking about Popeye and son's ending and you said that it was just a very good barump and it stuck with me because it is a good barump I can't it is it's the a barump is where it goes in the background of if there's one in the shake a tail feather there's one in the shake a tail feather there's one one in various things. And it's got to be one. The one in Popeye and Son is just one.

Yeah. It's almost buried in the mix as well as if they're ashamed of it. Yeah, and they shouldn't be. And it's a fantastic barrage. If you're a shrewd shopper, it's about to be your favorite time of the year. HyperX will be running massive sales for the holiday season. Get up to 50% off some of our most popular products like the ultra-comfy cloud two headset. The tough, responsive alloy origins mechanical keyboard and the fan favorite quadcast USB microphone.

Sales will be going on at all major e-tailors, but be sure to head to hyperX.com and sign up for the newsletter to get the scoop on the biggest deals. Happy holidays from HyperX. Hello, my name's Jonathan Dunn, host of the O3C podcast every week. I'm joined by my two best gaming buddies, Chris and Minty, and we talk about the games we're playing, the games we love, and how they rank alongside our sacrosanct top 100 favorite video games of all-time lists. Deep dives into gaming mechanics, history and law,

all topped off with latching of a reverent bribe, British wit, Witterings, and Worcesterings, and wisdom. Details on the show and more. Head to 03C.coms and tune in every Monday on the HyperX podcast network. Anyway, next,

there was a quite sort of a dry period. No lemmings for four years. That's really. No, well, that's the thing. There shouldn't have been,

really. No. Maybe Windows 95 Lemmings came out in this time, which was a very interesting version of Lemmings. They ported lemings to Windows natively. I think you just, yes, and I know more lemmings.

So not only because you now save your progress, you know, each level it would save, you could speed up, you click a fast forward button, which was in Lemmings 2, I believe, but it was now looking, I'm looking at footage of that, and it's a bit gross to look at. It's not good to look at, no. Well, the game itself looks fine, but the bit at the bottom where all the different icons are is like, you know, Windows 95 UI, and so is the level. select it's all just like standard Windows 95 UI's

the thing I like about when Lemmings 95 which is a silly thing to like is it has visual sound effects so you can play it with the sound off if you want to if you're doing something else for example which means that for example when the miner is running out

or the builder is running out of slats it will say like okay I've got to be really careful here because this is potentially offensive. Now, what it doesn't say is tink, tink, tink. What it says is a very ill-advised slur. Oh.

With the same three letters ending ink, but different first two letters. Oh. It's a quite old-fashioned racist slur. And they didn't mean it to be like that. They meant it to be like a that word in the, a chink in the armor, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But the way that the screen says that word three times, and isolation is very ill-advised, in my opinion. I just wanted to get that out, because that happens. And, you know, you don't want to be surprised by it. You don't want to suddenly pop up on the screen. They should have gone with, is there anything problematic about T-I-N-K? T-I-N-K or Klingk, maybe. Clink? That's the thing.

It is a clink, isn't it that noise? Yeah. I mean, I think when they brought that feature forward to other versions, they did actually change it to Kling or Tink because they were like, what the hell were we thinking? Yeah. Anyway, that's, yeah, Lemmys 95, was, just more of a stopgap, and it was given away with things like re-releases of 3D Lemmings and

Lemmings Paintball and stuff. If you bought Lemmings Paintball, you got Lemmings 95 pretty much free with it, which is really cool. But the next game was Lemmings Revolution, which I remember seeing in game as a kid and thinking, oh my God, there's been a Rememings Revolution. Like, this must be the greatest game in the world. Now, it was a long time before I actually got to play Lemmings Revolution. I think I found a copy in a charity shop or something. And I was like, Finally, I can experience this complete overhaul of one of the best games ever made. And the gimmick of Lemmings Revolution is that each level is set in a tower that's a little bit like if you've played Nebulous on the Commodore 64, also known as Castellian on the NES, or think of butterbuilding in Kirby's Adventure, a rotating stage. It's like that, basically, you're going and around a structure that loops around on itself, so every level loops around on itself.

You can never walk off the edge so much. I mean, there are drops, but you can always circumvent them, you know. And to their credit, it is just lemmings again. They haven't jazzed it up with any new powers that I can recall. The only thing they've changed is the structure where you'll do a level, then it will fan out into two levels. You can choose them, fan out into two more, and it's like a hierarchical sort of structure,

so you can get to the end without doing every level, which is also a kind of a cool idea. The problem is the level designs aren't good enough. And the visuals are in 3D, which means they're more imprecise. Yeah. See, on paper it's a far more elegant way of translating Lemmings into 3D than Lemming's 3D was because it's just a 2D lemmings level.

It's just carved into a 3D turny roundy thing. Like, a bit like those bits in Mario Odyssey where you're in 2D. Yes, yes, like those, yes, good cool. It should work. It just doesn't seem to be made as well. No, it's a real shame because this could have been all right. Lemings Revolution It also has a bug

where one of the later levels just does not load just crashes the game I think there's probably a community fix for it but it's quite funny that the game shipped with such an egregious oversight

I think love it to me it's obvious crunch pressure that's what that's what happened there very bad Lemings Revolution yeah

interesting game much like most of the games we've described today it's annoying that you can't just buy it like we'll get to that, but isn't it insane that you can't buy Lemmings anymore? Is that? Really?

There is no way, on any digital service or physical copy outside of secondhand versions, that you can just buy the game Lemings. What? There is no way to do it. One of those is the claimed games of all time. What?

For good reason, one of the best games of all time, and Sony seems to just be sitting on it. It would be so simple to just bung it on Gog or Steam or whatever. There you go. You could put that game on Steam tomorrow for £20 with no changes, and I promise you I would pay that money. I would absolutely pay that $20, would you? Yeah.

$20,000. Yeah, I'd pay $20. If it came with O'No and Lemmings 2. Oh, yeah, if it came with O'No, yeah. I mean, if it came with Lemings 2, even better. But even if it didn't, that's 20 quid. That's theirs, mate. That's theirs.

No questions asked. A pony, mate. I think a pony is 20 quid. But more... Oh, no, a pony is a small horse-like animal. Sorry. Yeah, it's a little bit like a horse. Made a mistake.

Okay, I don't think most people would pay 20 quid. But I think most people would pay about a fiver. I'd like to play Lemmings. Please, Cougu re-relicit. I would like to play it. Which is, what is that song? Because all other songs in the game of other existing songs. No, not all of them.

There's some of them are. Because when they were developing it, the game, the music that they made for it was, like, I think they made the Batman theme and the Adam's family theme and stuff. and then sygnosis. By the way, in my research for this, I know for a fact that despite the fact that we all called it signosis, it is really pronounced signosis. Cynosis.

But here's the thing. In all the stuff I watch today, like people who worked at Cygnosis, the people who made Lemmings, they all called it signosis, same as the rest of us. Yeah, yeah. It's actually pronounced siniosis. Which is like a condition of the inner,

skull. Yeah, it's a condition where you make loads of Amiga games and they're all right. Out of your head cavities and you make games in your right, when you've got siniosis you produce a lot of Fleming. Oh, very nice yeah. Copyright

copyrights do who's trying to find a way to put Fleming did. You found a way to do it, yeah. It was tunes that were copyrights so they gave it to a bloke who made music and he went, oh, and he only had a very short amount of time. So he started copying things that he was sure

were out of copyright, like you know, everyone's a fruit and nutcase. No, that's not what it really is. What's that really? You know, it is everyone's a fruit and nugget. Is it Dice of the Sugar Plum Fairy? No, that's which he also could have used it.

That's quite similar though. That's the sort of thing he was drawing from. The sort of thing that was in Fantasia, that kind of thing. but then there were a handful of original tunes which when they come up on YouTube and earlier than YouTube when they were files you could just download from someone's website they were called like Tim 1 and Tim 2

so I guess a guy called Tim made the original ones so there's the one my favorite which is like do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do that was a good that's the one on the spectrum that's why it's my favourite and if you look up by the way I think the spectrum has the most I've said this before on this podcast, I think, has the most beautiful version of that tune.

Oh, hang on. It's the only tune in the game. What? It's the fucking nutcracker. There you go. It's the obvious thing in the world. What? Why is that?

Oh, because that's why it's a fruit and nut case, because it's to do with nuts. Yeah. That's why they used it in the, in the, but listen, everyone, it was a Cabri's fruit and nut chocolate advert. From 1976. Yeah.

What? Really? That's when it started, yeah. Well, it was playing when I was a kid. They're not allowed to, yeah, I remember it too is they're not allowed to do it anymore because it's rude to employ

that someone is mentally ill because they don't like a chocolate bar. No, it was if they do like a chocolate bar. Everyone's a food. Everyone's a food and nutcase. Here are some ingredients for this chocolate. Dippa-d-d-d-d-flop-d-d-do-do. I don't like that.

Sorry. Hey, here's a piece of information I didn't know about the spectrum. You were asking earlier about how does the spectrum version work? And I'm looking at it now and it's basically just all in silhouette and that's how they make it work.

That's clever. It's like a puppet show. Yeah, because it does work and all the animation appears to be in place. But unsatisfied with that one, beautiful piece of music. And by the way, you could go on YouTube, you can look up, you know, ZX, Spectrum, Lemings, OST,

and you can listen to the music. But what you'll hear is the music quite fast. In the actual game, presumably because of all the processing power, it was much slower than that. And it was really laid back, and it was just beautiful.

find yourself a walk-through video and listen to it there. It's very nice. But I've just found out some people unsatisfied with that and who are like good at, you know, demo scene stuff because people are really good at making Spectrum stuff now. Yeah, they've re-made the Spectrum game Lemmings and now it's got all the music in it,

or at least loads more of it, and it's all, you know, zizzed up a bit and it runs faster and stuff. So there's actually a... Absolute legends. Beefed up. A 20-20 edition of the game. So you can look for that and...

You know, editor, if you're able to maybe put some of the music from it on, that might be nice. I don't know. Speaking of the Nutcracker on, I would like to crack whoever made this next game in the nuts. Hey, let me, that's not fair. It was Team 17. and they're a sound lads. Oh, I know the one. Salt, all the earth, mate.

Salt the earth. Standing job. That's a standing job. Good bunch of that. Yeah, great bunch of lads. Six more years, dry spell, no lemmings. And then finally, Lemmings appears on the PSP in 2006. Oh, more.

No Lemmings. Oh, more, no, lemings. 2006 PSP, essentially a port or remake of the original game, had all the levels from the original, all 120 levels, and a bunch of extra. one's huge problem it's in 2.5d so it's impossible because you can't do anything with any degree of precision oh dear you as we talked about before lemmings needs pixel precision yeah unless as they modified the later levels which i don't know so i didn't get that far because they didn't enjoy it lemmings is a certain way when you make it 3d when you add all sorts of backgrounds and

Dutch that aren't necessary and have the same level design, what you're creating is bad. Like, it is integral to understand. The limitations of lemmings graphically aren't limitations. They are decisions. Yes. Because the thing is, the Amiga was capable of way more than was displayed in Lenin. You could have had like a Zool AGA style constantly moving fruit background or something. In fact, did you know that some of the contemporary reviews of Lemmings,

complained that it looked like an 8-bit game and not a modern game. Yeah, there's a reason for that. It frequently was an 8-bit game. It was released on the Nez. It was released on the Sega Mars system. Amazing port on the mast system, by the way. Oh, really? Yeah, very impressive port, great colours, great.

I mean, the whole game was there. It was very, very impressive. Okay. But Lemmings on PSP, God bless him. Good effort. They clearly cared about what they were doing. They clearly put a lot of effort into it. But unfortunately, making a new remake of Lemmings

is essentially a complete waste of time. Well, they did it in the sort of, you know, new Super Mario Brothers era where what people were doing at that time was going. Yes. And God, the worst one being the remake of Super Frog, this just looks gross. It is hideous looking. That was Team 17 as well.

Yeah. Well, where people would take an old game and, yeah, port it over and go like, ah, but now we can do high-res graphics. And they would do that. And it just, yeah, but you know who's the, Do you know who the lead developer was on Super Frog HD? Is it going to be someone I really like? Willie Poo-Bum.

Oh, of course it was. That's just the sort of thing Willie Poo-Bum gets up to. And that means that now we can't cut that out. Because it's been called back, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was my plan all along. Another nefarious Willy-Pub-Bum scheme. The saddest tithiest thing about Willie Poo-Bomb

is I can see this becoming a running gag throughout. episodes that we're both on, but anyway, and through our whole lives. And through our entire lives. I think we've created a new thing, a new meme here. The, that what they did for that version of Lemmings is they came up with a new design for the Lemmings that they could do cut scenes with and stuff like that. And the thing is, the thing is, they look lovely, right? I'm not having to go at the design. There's just, there's a couple of problems. They look very much of the time that, that they were made, which is that, like, I don't know if they were polygonal, I assume they were, but they didn't have like that floppy hairedness.

They didn't have that flop to them that the classic lemmings did. The original lemmings walked like clowns and they had floppy, flippy, floppy hair. And all of that was established before anybody knew they were not meant to be human men. In this one, they just walk like kind of in formation, quite like looking like quite serious almost. And it's not, yeah, it's not as good. then it kind of codifies the design a bit too much to make them too solid to...

It looks like they developed them to make an animated series, which they then never made. A Lemmings animated series would have been fantastic, I think. Yeah, it would have been great. They could have beaten the minions to the punch, couldn't they? Yeah, they could have, yeah, yeah.

They can make a new lemings game where the Lemings is just the minions. If that's what it takes to get a new lemings, then I'll take it, mate. Yeah. I like the minions. I don't know what everyone's problem with the minions is. I think they're funny.

I think it's, I haven't seen their films, and I'm a bit annoyed by them, but I've realised I haven't seen their films, except it's because it's because we see minions in adverts and stuff. They're like the simplest guy. I don't watch adverts. I didn't see them outside of watching, when I choose to look at the minions.

No, I don't anymore, really. That's out of my daily minion look, you know. Yes, of course. I mean, the thing that is we can't criticize the minions, because, like, yeah, they're very low brown. they sit around and they like look at a bit like the back part of their dungaroo springs open you see their ass and one of them goes yeah bottom that's basically what we've been doing for like 90 minutes yeah it is to be fair and it's then there's 90 minutes that we

come towards the end of our voyage to the lemmings series because you know what the lemming series basically ended after this well there's a fairly recent mobile game which who cares dave well a mobile game a transaction multi-mobile Macro-transaction lemmings, like, oh, if you run out of blockers, well, then buy 10 lemming dicks and with $40 and buy some more blockers, right? Yeah, that's nicer than lemming dicks, which is what I said. But no, no, no, no. It's worth mentioning that the bloke who led that game, he had the right idea at first, and he was going like, well, what, I'm going to revive the fact that

the lemmings were very, very simple looking. He wanted them to be flippy, floppy, he wanted them to be little. And no, you couldn't do them pixelated. Now, well, you could, but it would be a gimmick. So he instead needed to make them like a really striking silhouette and things like that. Like he had the right design idea. The problem is, as they were making it, they came across the exact problem that you said, which is that once you're in a mobile game and you're using your thumb, you can't do pixel precision anymore. So, okay, how do we counter that? And I don't know what a good idea would be, but the idea they came up with, which does not strike me as a good idea,

haven't played the game, maybe it's brilliant, is that you're not really clicking Lemmings anymore. What you're doing is you're getting, before the Lemmings get to certain points in the level, you're hurrying to put down little markers that will make them become a blocker here and a builder there. So you're drawing all over the level,

stuff you want them to do when they get there. And that's not Lemmings. No, it's not Lemmings, but I have to say it doesn't sound like a horrible idea. No, it's probably quite a good game and an interesting iteration on Lemmings. I would want it to be called like, I don't know, Lemmings something.

I would want it to differentiate itself rather than just be like, Lemmings where between each level you can watch an ad for free and watching the ad gets you like an extra climber. Oh my God. You say that, but I'm pretty sure that's true. Before we end the podcast,

I know you want to launch toward the end, but I do have something that I want to like bring to the episode. Oh, I'm excited. It's kind of to go at the end, but before we finish. Let's do it now, then. Now's the time. So last year sometime, a pal sent me a copy of Lemmings 3, and I don't know why.

Just as a present. I think they found it in a shop. They found out, here's some pop culture to Triters. I know who like this. Well, yeah, because I'd been talking about Lemmings, obviously. So I, but I don't have the means to play it because, you know, it's like an old copy. It's, um, it's three and a half inch floppies. It's for, it's for IBM PC.

So, you know, I love the fact that, that I have this present of Lemmings 3 and it is genuinely something missing from my collection, but I haven't opened it to actually, you know, to look at because I know what's in there, a couple of floppies and, and that's that. But then you told me before this that the manual's worth hooking at. So I cracked it open. And Stu, I need to tell you what's in here. It's not what I expected. I'm excited.

First of all, the first thing that met my eyes was my heart jumped and sang when I saw the interior of the box was the synosis, like, cardboard inner packaging that I remember so well from Lemmings 2 and that had been sitting around in like the room the Amiga was in in our house since we first got the Amiga because Lemings 2 is one of the first things we got for it. That box had been getting squashed and it's got all my old Lemmings discs in. So it's lovely to see a quite good, you know, not pristine, but, you know, fairly new-looking version of this box. That nostalgia aside, I open it up. It's full of stuff. Whoa. I don't think this is just Lemmings 3 in here. So what have we got?

We've got loads of floppies, all right? So there's the Lemmings Chronicles. Three discs worth of Lemmings Chronicles. What we've got, one floppy here of just Lemmings, what? They've included Lemmings. Holiday Lemmings from 1994. Oh my God, this is a Lemmings bonanza. I think I had that pirated. It was like, I think it was a spin-off of, oh no more lemmings, but it was probably a spin-off.

It was all Christmas Lowell's, yeah. No, it was, oh-no. That's what I thought. I don't know why I thought that. Maybe the music, that's got some like Christmas Lemings music on, I bet. I've got here a registration card, like what kind of games do you like? You can write in. Oh, this is an American one. It's to send off to Cygnosis North America, which is in Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, but the USA version of Cambridge. Was in Massachusetts Avenue. Yeah.

I've got here the Lemmings Chronicles Manual. There's that. I've got here the Lemmings manual, and it says on it, the Complete Lemmings Manual. So I guess this is a version of Lemmings called The Complete Lemmings. Is that the really beautiful one with the faded pinks and blues? The boo-you-you. Well, that, yes.

Everything you just said describes it. Oh, I'm so jealous. So that's lovely there. And I've got the Lemmings Chronicles manual here, which I'll have a look. Oh, gosh, that's nice as well. It's like full color, full of lore and story and stuff. Oh, there's a load of lore and story. There's pages and pages of law and story.

And jokes. Don't forget jokes. Is there? One of my favorite, I knew I was going to like it when at the beginning in the instructions it tells you just shove the disc into your disc drive. Oh, I love that. Shove. Oh, do you remember when there used to be a sense of humor about computers and games and stuff? Oh, how I remember.

And those days are long gone. Everyone's very serious now. Because someone will shove the disc and then they'll break it and then they'll sue them. And finally does... Look out, here comes a remake of The Last of Us again. A remake of The Last of Us remake in which Joel's grief is even more high definition. There's one last thing in this box. Oh, God, what is it?

Oh, wow. What is in this box is a little cardboard box. Oh, my God. Just about the size of a CD, but it's not for a CD. It's for floppy discs. It is a boxed copy of Holiday Lemmings. My word. 1994 Holiday Lemmings, MS DOS, full standalone game, says the ice skating lemming with a Christmas

hat on the cover. 32 all new holiday levels plus 32 bonus levels from 1993. I've got a manual for holiday lemmings. This is outstanding. Heck! All that's missing is Lemmings too. I mean, yeah, and I've got that.

Well, that's nothing less than the Lemmings bonanza, as I said. That's exactly what it is. It's a Lemmings jamboree. That's exactly what it is. And also, worthy of mention, the Lemmings one manual or Lemmings complete manual or whatever it is, has a post-it note stuck to it, a quite long post-it note

with some codes written on that the person who played it wrote on. And they've titled this list of codes as four codes. And they've put at the top of it, Hail, H-A-I-L. Does that mean anything to you? Hail, Satan. It's odd, isn't it? And then in the Christmas Lemmings box,

there is a whole load of codes on a little square of paper that is letter-headed Ten-Saw brand Bower and Black, trademark of the Bechton Dickinson and company used under license. A little bit of the past there. You know, this is good because once I bought a big box copy of Simon the Sorcerer from an RISPCA shop, and inside the box, aside from Simon the Sorcerer, which I was delighted to receive,

there was another box in the box, like a cardboard protective almost thing around the entire outer layer, which I then, for some reason, I must have had some kind of vision or something. I thought, I've got to lift this. I've got to see anything under this. Of course. That's what I was.

Underneath it was a load of clippings from newspapers that were either page three topless models or just sexy ladies in general. And I realized someone had accidentally donated their stash, their scud. Oh, that's so sweet, isn't it? I know. There was something very sweet about it. And I thought about that and laughed as I was,

washing my hands, and I couldn't bring myself to dispose of it. No. No, that's a piece of history. You can't. I've still got the... Someone has entrusted you with that, have you? I've still got that box full of wank fodder. Oh, that's heartwarming, I think.

I know. It warms something, I'll tell you. Yeah. Because if the person who's lost that, at least maybe they'll listen to this and they'll know that it's out there. They'll be listening. They'll be like, my gross. It's still alive. Oh, it's still there.

And they could think of it as like, you know, it flew the coop. It left the nest. That's the word. That's the phrase. Left the nest and it's doing all right on its own. The interesting part is I also bought some other games and they also had some scud in them. So the same person had evidently spread it out amongst different boxes. Different Amiga games.

A big box PC, I believe they were. Okay. Very strange behavior in my opinion. Oh, no. One day they'll have gone, where did I use to keep? Keep the... Oh, no. Oh, no.

It'll be like the time that I bought... Do you know the game, drawn to life? No. There's a DS game called Drawn to Life where you could draw loads of stuff in the game yourself with a stylus. Like, you could design the hero and you could draw his gun and stuff.

Oh, yeah! And I drew the hero as a big willy, a massive erect penis, and he walked his balls while his feet, like walked on his balls, like... Yeah, of course. You know, really detailed, those of veins and that, you know, big glands. And the gun in that game is like it shoots white splodges.

Yeah, yeah. And I'm like, they knew. Yeah. They knew what was happening. They knew what was happening. But they developed it. That was what it originally was. And the whole idea of like, are you, technically you can draw anything you want.

But will there be a copy of that game in existence that was ever played? that that was not what was drawn. Well, the problem for me is it's like with the guy giving away the distash, when I was done with the game, I traded it in, and I realized that I'd forgotten to erase my character from it. So what I like to think is that some small child will buy that game. That's the thing, isn't it? It's a really good job.

The person whose fodder that was can rest assured that the right person purchased it. Because it could have been, what if a nun had bought it? Oh, that would have been awful for them. Yeah, they would have been cursed. Imagine a nun, going back to the nunnery, going like, oh, I can't wait to play Simon the Sorcerer. Yeah, because they love that. They love Chris Berry up at the nunnery. Yeah. And so it could have gone south, but it didn't. It went to the right home. I think it went south more than a few times, actually, mate. Okay, I think that's about enough for this pure old childish episode.

Probably the most pure old Reginald's episode ever made, actually. I don't know. We've done a couple of others. But no, this is definitely the most childish one. No, do you remember that one about pooing yourself so hard that you shoot up into orbit of the planet? Yeah, that was quite funny, actually. I don't know. I think I'm still standing by this. one as being the most puerile episode that we have done and anyone has ever done of anything. But I'm glad that we did it and I'd like to say, I hope you enjoyed this extremely silly journey through the Lemmings series.

Now, bear in mind, if you'd like to play any of the games that we have listed in this episode, you can't. You're out of luck. Sorry. So, David, where can our delightful listeners witness your works and behaviours? Leavings, yeah. Yeah. Well, I've already mentioned Sonic the Comic, the podcast. That's out every two weeks. And it is about the old Sonic comics we used to have here in the UK. Very good.

Like, Sonic has been fully recond now. Like, everything everybody knows about Sonic is totally different to how it was in the 90s. And our comic was actually about how he was in the games and like what that was like. And there was other, they did comics of other stuff. Like we mentioned earlier, they do things like Kid Chameleon and Golden Axe and stuff. So if you're interested in the idea of that, like a Sega Games. comic and how they tackled those stories. Come and listen to us. We cover it all. And there's loads of them. We're up to like 90 episodes

by now. Yeah, it's amazing how far you've come through it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're really keeping the thing going. And there's a nice community around it and everything. That is Sonic, the comic, the podcast. You can find it at s-c-tp. Zone or just, you know, you're not going to go there. You're going to look it up in your pod thing. It's a tremendous podcast. I mean... Yeah, Stu's been on it.

I have been on it in case she needed some further incentive. Yep, that was a good episode. I was on it, and it was quite funny. Yeah, we talked about jelly invaders. It was good. Yep. And also, you can find me on Twitter at Demon Tomato Dave.

I'm also Demon Tomato Dave on YouTube. I've got a couple of quite good videos on YouTube. But they're very old, because I've been concentrating on making this podcast for last few years. There you go. That's basically who I am. Oh, that's good. That's all a lot of good stuff really now, isn't it? I only make good stuff.

It is true. I feel like I should at this point. consider plugging my book that's coming out. Oh, yeah, you should. What are you talking about? I'll keep it brief. I do have a book coming out through the press run label of limited run games. That's the thing.

It's relevant as well to the topic of the podcast. It's called All Games Are Good, and it's about how you can find joy in extremely silly or derisory things in video games. When you turn to the last page, does it say, except Lemmings 3D? It does, yeah. It's embossed into the back cover. But no, it's a collection of games writing that I've done. Lots of brand new stuff in there as well,

and everything that is previously printed is revised heavily by both me and very intelligent editors were much better than me noticing what I've written in the same things. I'm going to have to get that. Stu does good games writing. If you've only heard him and haven't read him, you should go and read him. Thanks. If you like your games writing with a little bit of silliness

and weird obsessiveness about things that nobody else cares about. Like they used to when you could shove a disc in. Yeah, exactly. Then, yeah, all games are good coming out. I think next year probably reasonably early next year. I don't know exactly when yet. You can also listen to me on, well, Retronauts and the Dillcast, where me Gobbler and my friend Gris are reviewing every single Dilbert strip ever,

while slowly going insane from the pain that it's causing us. but Retronauts, that's what you're listening to right now and, you know, you could be getting even more retronauts if you're one of those people who only listens to it for free or as I like to refer to them, beloved listeners. I thought better of that joke halfway through it. I was like, no, you know what? That's not fair. But for $5 a month, you can join the Retronaut's Patreon,

just $5 a month. Yeah, it's nothing. And you know what? This is how much stuff you get. You get two full-length Patreon-exclusive episodes every single month. Episodes that are not going to be made available anywhere else, ever. And also, you get early access to the weekly Monday episodes that will be available everywhere. But you get to the listeners to them first.

So you can be like, I was the first one to hear about Poo-Bomb. Yeah. I'm special. A few days later, when people at school are going like, oh, did you hear about Willie Poo-Bomb? You'd be like, yeah, I don't care about it. anymore. But I heard about that.

Yeah, I'm over Woody People. That's pathetic. It's not even funny anymore. I'm into Dr. Fartsmore now. Yeah. That wasn't as good as Buddy People, actually. Well, the sequel never is. Yeah, that's a shame.

Oh, by the way, oh, sorry to big Lemmings fans who've been tearing their hair out throughout the entire episode. I just want to say that I know it's called 3D Lemmings. Oh. And we call it Lemmings 3D, just because that was the way everything was said. Yeah, we call it Lemmings. as a direct, deliberate disc. We won't even say it's name.

And yes, as well as that, you'll get Discord benefits, so you can come on the Discord and you can listen to me whittering because that's what I tend to do on there. Oh, yes, and also you'll get Diamond Fights excellent this week in retro columns, which are both in written form and in speaking form as almost an extra mini podcast. They're very, very well-written and entertaining. I believe Diamond has a book coming out as well.

but that will no doubt be very, very good. Thanks very much for listening to Retronauts. This has been episode number. I completely forget which episode number it is as per usual. So I bluff and talk while I look it up. So it seems like I've actually remembered it. 495. That's a lot of episodes, baby.

That's loads of episodes. So well over 100. Well over 100. I mean, I can't even count that. Yeah. What happens when you get to 500? God knows. Nobody knows.

Nobody's. ever made that 500. No, you shouldn't do it because that's like the highest that podcasts can go and then it switches over and all the computers crash. Retronauts, the longest running podcast of all time. Might be. Thanks for listening and, well, it is when we're on it, isn't it? Yay. Willy-pooh bum, willie-pooh bum, willie-pooh-bub-bum, willy-pooh-boy. That's a good way to put that in this up.

Willie, Willie-pooh-bub-bub. Dave, please behave, please. Bye listening. Bye! Thank you.