What are you playing now?

[Semi-Happy Partygoer]

Interesting. I mean, obviously you know more than me. I haven't played through Kyrandia yet but the beginning came off a bit tongue-in-cheek to me. The opening cutscene was serious and somber and then Brandon's reactions to everything and the chippy music was like a huge contrast (maybe that was just the voice acting). Someday I'll play through them.

Yeah, Brandon's seeming inability to grasp the seriousness of the situation (early on, at least) seemed intentional to keep things lighter. The voice acting did accentuate that. I tend to prefer the floppy disk version.

[Tawmis]

I've recently been dabbling with Heaven's Dawn, a seemingly rare point-and-click from 1995. Developed by a Taiwanese company, then released in English in Australia. It features most standard P&C conventions, though not done nearly as well as Sierra's work. Visually, the game is an obvious Kyrandia knockoff- same style interface and icons, similar color palette and music, even the main character's sprite is drawn as the exact same angle as Brandon. The programming is also clunky - the opening cinematic is 3D rendered, and even on the slowest DOSBox settings it absolutely flies by like a tape on fast forward, but then the game runs slower than dirt. It needs at least 30,000 cycles to prevent lag during animation-heavy screens. Still, for all the flaws, it has a certain charm about it, and it's fun to experience a "new" P&C from that era that I haven't seen before.

It's funny that you call it a Kyrandia knock off - when the first Kyrandia was called a King's Quest knock off (so much so that they ended up putting disclaimer stickers on the boxes)! I am now, officially curious to play said Heaven's Dawn sometime...

Here it is:

[BBP]

Can't believe it's been this long since I first fired up Lemmings Revolution... I didn't even mention I was playing it here!

Lemmings Revolution had a problematic construction: Psygnosis pulled the plug on all video game production after Dakkar failed: then the programmer found another publisher.
Long story short: I first played it on Vista. It was highly problematic, even in compatibility mode. Videos wouldn't play, music wouldn't play, menu wouldn't appear until I'd booted it for the second time, plenty crashes... One nasty error was one level couldn't be played, but that was caught and a patch was released. Unfortunately the patch did something else: causing the maximum fall height to fail - in 50% of cases a Lemming would die at the maximum allowed fall height, which meant two levels couldn't be finished. I could still play it, sort of...

Back then I asked a Lemmings forum for help, but there wasn't much to be gained...

...nine years later, somebody has programmed a patch that resolves quite a few of the issues!

I've never seen Lemmings Revolution like this! Yay!


... Unfortunately, one of the game's design flaws is the top button on the menu is "start a new game" rather than "continue your old game", it's ridiculously easy to throw away your savegame. Guess what I just did...
[/i]

[Tawmis]

... Unfortunately, one of the game's design flaws is the top button on the menu is "start a new game" rather than "continue your old game", it's ridiculously easy to throw away your savegame. Guess what I just did...

You could write a batch file that creates a backup of your save game, then launches the game itself (in case that happens again).

[BBP]

That is out of my league as programmer (basically I am at the Hello World level) but luckily the save game file is out in the open, called SaveGame.dat, and every once in a while I copy it to My Documents.

[JasefWisener]

I've got to do as close to a speedrun as possible for me (which isn't on pace of a speedrun at all) of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask next month for a charity event, so all of my gaming time has been put toward that for a few weeks now.

[Tawmis]

That is out of my league as programmer (basically I am at the Hello World level) but luckily the save game file is out in the open, called SaveGame.dat, and every once in a while I copy it to My Documents.

If you post where the file is located (like C:\Users\BBP\Lemmings) and the name of the save game, I can post the text for the .BAT file and you can just make it on your machine.

[BBP]

Hey! Good idea!

SavedGame.dat

C:\Lemmings Revolution

[Tawmis]

Hey! Good idea!

SavedGame.dat

C:\Lemmings Revolution

Gah! Sorry - I also need the .EXE location & name for the game.

[BBP]

"C:\Lemmings Revolution\Lemmings Revolution.exe"

[Tawmis]

Dang it! I forgot to grab where you want it copied... so I am just going to say C:\DATA (but you can make it whatever)

Okay - so it would be something like this:
===================================
CD\
C:\
xcopy /s /y C:\Lemmings Revolution\SavedGame.dat C:\DATA
C:\Lemmings Revolution\Lemmings Revolution.exe

===================================

Let me test it - but ideally, what this would do is copy the save game to C:\DATA (or whatever directory you want), and automatically overwrite the existing file in that location.
And then launch the game.

Do you play Lemmings through DOSBox? Because if you are, this would require some tweaking.

[BBP]

No, Lemmings Revolution is a 2000 Windows game.

Much like original Lemmings except levels wrap around a cilinder (making it essentially a 2D game), it has the original 8 skills, plus some extra puzzle elements with switches that move walls, teleports, speed up gizmos, and gravity reversal. You can zoom in and the selected lemming is highlighted, so you can be more precise - and there's a fast-forward button, making it a lot more tolerable than original Lemmings. Also because the level system is branched, so there are more levels available at one time.

Here's possibly the hardest level of the game because of the precision timing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msmUgqCr3Ik

[Tawmis]

Ah, in that case - this should work. You'd just copy the text into a notepad and save it as a .BAT file

And launch it and see if it works.

[BBP]

This happened:

[Collector]

Since the path includes spaces enclose it with quotes, i.e.

Code: Select all

CD\
C:\
xcopy /s /y "C:\Lemmings Revolution\SavedGame.dat" C:\DATA
"C:\Lemmings Revolution\Lemmings Revolution.exe"