Master System Special Levels - Sega One and its...

12 Dec 2015
7

Master System Special Levels - Sega One and its revisit

Yesterday’s level was the last Mayhem level in the Sega Genesis version of Lemmings, but there’s another Sega system that Lemmings found its way onto. Courtesy of Probe Software, Lemmings also got a surprisingly decent port for Sega’s humble 8-bit computer, the Master System, as well as a port to its handheld sister, the Game Gear.

Compared to other 8-bit conversions, the Master System version is quite faithful. The NES version (yes, that exists, courtesy of Sunsoft) had to cut a ton of levels, but the Master System version has a full 120! However, some of them are unique to this platform, so before we move on to the “Present” difficulty, we’ll be going through those.

So, what’s first on the list?

Now, the first thing I should point out here is that, compared to the 100 lemming maximum in most ports of Lemmings, the Master System port can only handle 20 at a time, even with heavy sprite flickering. This means levels whose challenge primarily relied on a high number of lemmings, such as “Save Me”, are, for the most part, absent.

The first MS-exclusive level is SEGA themed! Yes, the MS port has a unique, SEGA/Bath themed tileset. It’s pretty cute.

As is typical for a Fun level, there’s not much to it, except…

It looks a bit, um… let’s say “hastily implemented”, but there is a unique trap here. That faucet drops a drop of water so deadly it makes lemmings disappear just by being under neath them. Sinister!

Another thing is, even with the 20 lemming limit, when about 15 or more are out, the game starts slowing down, especially if a lemming is doing something like building.

As you can see in the .gif above, once the lemming count lowers, the game speeds up a little. For a system with just a fraction of the power of the Amiga, MS Lemmings is still pretty impressive and surprisingly feature complete, but it’s still hard to recommend this specific port over any other port.

And, as with most ports on lower end hardware, there’s no “confetti” when the lemmings explode. It’s cute how they shrug first in this version though. “Nothin’ left to do, might as well explode.”

It’s nice to get a simple level like this after finishing up the last bit of Mayhem. And speaking of Mayhem, not even the Master System port is free of level revisits.

Level 9 of this version’s Mayhem difficulty is a revisit of this level.

It’s mostly just a matter of streamlining the process you used to complete the level the first time. And also paying tribute to EGA color palettes.

Mainly, building two stairs at the same time.

I’ll be doing the Sega themed levels and their level revisit versions in the same post each time.

So, on the audio side of things: surprisingly, this port of Lemmings actually has the digitized speech–not even the MS-DOS version can boast that. And for an 8-bit system, it sounds surprisingly clear. In addition, this port has some unique music tracks! As someone who finds the simple, beepy nature of the Master System’s audio chip endearing, I am a huge fan. As with the previous cases, all of the music has been uploaded to Youtube by user Mystic Falcon.