Ah, Lemmings, the game where you must direct cute but oblivious critters, who would otherwise go straight to their death, towards safety by giving them orders (dig, climb, build, etc.). This program is an honest but ultimately incomplete attempt at porting the game to the TI-89.
I don't mean that anything is obviously missing: all orders (make climber, make floater, build bridge, dig down, dig diagonally, dig to the side, make stopper, explode) are there and behave as you'd expect, and the game has levels that can be completed. So, yes, you can play a reasonable facsimile of Lemmings, in fact I even prefer targeting using the arrow keys to mouse targeting, and I appreciate the screen-saving trick of having the commands be in a drawer that occupies very little screen real estate while you are not choosing a command. The graphics are very acceptable for a TI-89 game and are not a problem at all.
However, some oddities make you feel like you're not playing the "real" Lemmings: for instance, you can make stopper lemmings explode to liberate the others, however in some cases this will result in enough of the ground going away that the other lemmings are going to fall to their deaths! Why weren't the lemmings put on thick ground on that level? Worse, in some cases there is enough ground but the explosion results in lemmings walking in the crisscross below the ground and end up being blocked on a one-pixel remains of the crisscross which is next to impossible to dig through! Aargh! Well, anyway, sometimes you have zero explosion available, so you find another way to avoid the stopper⦠but if you try building a bridge above the stopper, you end up having 2-3 lemmings stuck *inside* the stopper (something I have not seen in any other Lemmings port) which can very well make you fail the level; OK, let us say we dig below the stopper instead⦠except, there is no way to make the digger lemming stop digging (even though this is possible in any other Lemmings game with a bridge) in order to make it go straight to the side, so the lemmings end up falling to their deaths.
Other similar weird and unusual behaviors exist, with building bridges in particular, which end up making you repeatedly curse the game. You can encounter some other bugs, for instance if you have enough lemmings rescued but still have some lemmings in the field (e.g. a stopper you can't explode), you *must* nuke the remaining lemmings with the "clear" key, as otherwise if you just let the timer elapse you will be considered to have failed the level even though enough lemmings have made it!
Also, the game is pretty short, with only 8 levels. Still, if you are in the mood for some Lemmings, this program could do the trick.
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(reviewed on a TI-89 HW1 AMS 1.00 with DoorsOS 0.98)
