"Christmas?!"
Yeah I thought that would work.
Hey can we just uh, can we just talk?
"Christmas!"
Or something?
Cuz.
I've really mostly just got questions at this point.
Well I appreciate the sit-down, um.
"Christmas!"
Yeah, so this has been a long time coming.
"Christmaaaass."
This has been going on for years, as you know.
"Christmas!"
And I'm still very much confused as to your existence.
Uh, why do you look like me?
Are you okay?
*incoherent babbling and chuckling* Do you need anything to eat?
DO you even eat?
"Christmaassss."
Anyway, I don't even know where I'm going with this.
But uh, I guess this is how things are.
It is December, and that means it's time for Christmas Lazy Game Reviews!
*Candion music plays*
Lemmings!
In the early 1990s it was one of those overnight hits that became almost
too popular for its own good.
DMA Design’s puzzle game is one where a bunch of braindead green-haired rodents are
dropped into a level and it’s up to you to make sure they don’t mindlessly off themselves
in spectacularly stupid fashion.
It was ridiculously cute, but it also came loaded with a dark comedic undercurrent, with
its splatting rodents, nuclear detonation buttons, and maps that delve into
the fiery pits of hell!
So of course it was the ideal candidate for a Christmas makeover, in the form of Holiday
Lemmings, with four increasingly complex Christmassy versions
being released over the years from 1991 to 1994.
But we’re not here to talk about Holiday Lemmings again, because today, it’s time
to talk about Lamers.
Yes, Lamers for MS-DOS PCs, a juvenile reaction to the cuteness and popularity of Lemmings.
It’s a short 10-level game released for free onto bulletin boards in July of 1992,
designed by someone going by the name Scrull alongside a
handful of presumably demoscene folks calling themselves Cocktail.
The twist is that instead of trying to save the lamers, your goal is to kill them before
they make it to the exit.
This is accomplished by using bombs, mines, a machine gun, or a pistol, with each weapon
only working for a limited number of uses, just like the various tools provided in Lemmings.
And man,
not only is it ridiculously easy, but it’s filled with various bugs and is super choppy
to play, suffering frequent slowdowns on a 386 and playing way too fast on a 486.
Probably a good thing then that it can be beaten in five minutes, with not a single
failure happening along the way if you’re even half looking at what you're doing.
It’s just one of the many forgettable ‘90s games that sought attention by reacting to
something popular, basically the digital equivalent of going into a bathroom stall and writing
“Lemmings sux.”
In dry erase marker.
Sure it got the point across for a minute and it's not harming anything, but was it
really worth your time?
Apparently so because it was followed up in December of 1992 with Xmas Lamers, developed
by Scrull once again, this time with a new edgy team calling themselves The Mental Crew.
The lame idea of Xmas Lamers is just as lame as Lamers. That is, kill the lamers before they reach
the exit, this time with snow and santa hats.
But it also seems the devs used the extra months to update the engine a bit with things
like better Sound Blaster support, which they promptly used to rip off
the song “Tim 3” from Lemmings...
*Tim 3 ripoff song plays, shoddily*
That’s not the only thing that’s changed from Lamers though.
Despite the same basic gameplay as its predecessor, Xmas Lamers feels like they started over from
scratch when putting it together.
Not only has it received the expected and appropriate holiday makeover, but the core
gameplay has gotten much more complex and less predictable.
You still use weapons from Lamers that have been reskinned, like snowballs, presents,
ice buckets, and springs to slaughter the lamers before they exit the map.
But this time, you HAVE to take out every last one of them.
Anything short of 100% success is an instant failure.
This means that the second a lamer makes it through to the end, you have zero incentive
to continue playing around with that level to scramble your way to a win state.
Beyond this, the lamers themselves are smaller than they used to be and the mouse cursor
is slightly smaller as well and less precise, meaning it’s a bit harder to enact your punishments.
It’s also much pickier in terms of item usage, with things like snowballs and ice
buckets being particularly tough to hit lamers with.
Furthermore, the level designs themselves are much more devious this time around, with
some of them like level six taking me I don’t even know how many times to complete
due to the overwhelmingly annoying way it's designed.
It wouldn’t be so bad if the lamers were at least somewhat predictable, but of course,
they are not.
Unlike lemmings, lamers don’t seem to follow any particular set of logical rules when walking.
When they drop from the sky, they’ll start walking either left or right in an instant,
and the same goes for when they fall off ledges, meaning that you never know which way a lamer
is going to go until they do it.
This makes planning ahead almost impossible, and seeing as the direction each lamer walks
will change each time you play, it turns into a maddening affair pretty quickly.
Just look at this level!
Each lamer has four different ways to reach the exit, and multiple paths to reach it.
Depending on whether or not they randomly walk left or right when landing from a fall,
you might have lamers reach the exit in a few seconds, or it might take a while for
them to wander the entire rest of the map.
This completely removes the logic puzzle aspect of this kind of game.
Instead it relies on you spamming the weapons to get anywhere, and
the rest is up lucky timing.
Maybe that was the point since, really, the Lamers games are more action than puzzle game.
But Xmas Lamers is designed in such a way that makes me think it was actually trying
to be a puzzle game, and just thought that chaos was the way to make that happen.
Whatever the case may be, Xmas Lamers took me about 35 minutes to complete, even though
it only has ten levels, same exact number as Lamers did.
But while Lamers was so easy you could breeze through it without thinking or even failing
once, Xmas Lamers takes the opposite path of being so unforgiving and randomized that
I had to play half the levels dozens of times to win.
Yet the other half of the levels could be beaten simply by spamming the springs and jack in the box
presents, no effort or skill required.
You can find more consistency in any given election campaign, and that’s just sad.
And then when you beat the game?
Of course nothing special happens, because screw you.
I was at least hoping for a twist of some kind, like at the end of Lamers where they
get fed up with your nonsense and start shooting at you with machine guns.
Nope! Nothing like that. Just this quick message and it's back to the main menu.
This game pisses me off man, mostly because it *almost* provides
a halfway-interesting set of puzzles to solve.
There are a couple levels where the designers got creative with their own puzzle elements
and I’m like “hey, whoa, that’s tricky.”
I like tricky.
But I don’t like obnoxious, stupid, and unpredictably random and infuriating.
Its only saving grace is that it was released for free back in the day, so really, I can
only complain so much and have it mean anything.
Nrgnhgnhnhh
At the same time, ugh, I’m pretty sure I hit a new record for number of curses uttered
in the 35 minutes it took to beat this one.
So hey, if you’re looking for a Christmas game that turns into a swearing sailor in
an instant, they by all means, check out Xmas Lamers.
It’s one big pile of *bleep bleeping bleep!*
And if you enjoyed this Christmassy episode of LGR then stay tuned!
There are two more coming this month, and there are plenty more I've done in the past
during past Christmases!
And as always thank you very much for watching LGR.