PH33R MY BLURRY CREEPINESS!

The final stage of Adventures of Lomax is a complete pain. It's short, but you have to go through several extremely difficult jumps. There's been times I came in with 15 lives, then burned them all doing this crap. But with time and patience, Lomax comes face to face with Evil Ed... okay, maybe not face to face. Ed is off in the background on a flying rock, doing that rocking thing he does on the World Map. In the entire game, Evil Ed has four total animation frames. Three in the rocking, and a fourth where he kind of tenses up when you bean him with a boulder. A bunch of rocks start falling, and all you really need to do is stay in line with him, rapidly press the Jump button, punt rocks and him, and hope something hits him. After three whaps in the face, his floating rock shatters and Ed falls into the abyss of his world.

I bet your soul tastes like pork chops.

Or does he? Instead of falling to his death, Ed transforms into an enormous lemming dragon and looms over the battlefield. When I first saw this, I almost laid an egg. Yet indimidating as he is, he's not that difficult. I guess the programmers thought "Well, maybe were were too hard on the player when we made them go through all those jumps in the stage. Let's make the boss a joke. A sort of present for those who managed to get here." The little Ed had four animation frames. The dragon Ed has half that many. There's him just staring at you, and there's this teeth-baring look he puts on when a rock is hurled in his face, or as he shakes the arena in his third phase. His arms are better animated than that, and it's obvious they're not attached to his body in any way.

Ed drops rocks and bombs, or at least those evil things to the left and right of him do. Two obedient servants of their great master, possibly sold him their souls for power and/or immortality, one grouchier than the other, creepy haircuts, long flowing gowns. Or at least I thought they were evil lemmings helpers until I noticed something - they're hand puppets...

HAND PUPPETS

Now what says "evil sorceror" better than donning a pair of hand puppets instead of getting some REAL evil helpers? But I must give credit where it's due, as at first Ed had me fooled into thinking he had couple of right-hand slaves. But if you look at the bottom left and right of the arena, through the holes in the arena, you'll see Ed's arms moving in sync with the "evil lemming helpers", and when he brings them down to grab a rock/bomb or he has them fairly high you might catch a glimpse of Ed's hand going up their gown (yeah, I know that sentence sounded wrong, but I couldn't find any other way of saying it. You wanna write this?)

I don't know what he's doing, and I don't want to think about it.

After punting five rocks in Ed's face, he slowly falls of the screen. A pair of hands come up and grab the arena, and Ed's transformation effect occurs (Um, why?). He's lost the hand puppets, and now resorts to shaking the arena to cause a rockslide. There's bombs included in the rocks, but the first time I beat Ed I didn't see any bombs until I had already slung the last rock into his face. Every other time, though, there's been times where all I got WERE bombs. Another five boulders in the face, and Ed falls of the screen, arms flailing.

Haha! Screw you!

Here's me, all excited about what the ending could be. I had heard a few songs on the disc that made me think there was going to be some lovely picture of the peaceful Lemmingland, or a ceremony to congratulate Lomax. After the Dragon Ed sank off the screen with his arms flailing, I was expecting him to come flying back up in lemming form, land at Lomax's feet, and start groveling. But what do I get?

For anybody who wonders why I hate this guy so much...

Lorock randomly pops out of nowhere like he does when you touch his hat in a normal stage, congraulates Lomax, and the credits roll. I'm not kidding. This is your ending. You can move Lomax left and right, but pushing any buttons causes it to fade out to the credits. And it's still playing the Evil Ed showdown music when this happens. Cool a song as it is, it blows away what little feeling of success is there. Ah well, it could have been worse (not much, though). Like one of those infamous black screens with "You win! Thanks for playing!"

And an extra special thanks to the Picasso of game plots who created this masterpiece of an ending.

They didn't even get the credits right. Lemmings games always have something goofy in the credits, whether it's weird stuff thrown into the actual credits (Anyone else remember the duck comment in Lemmings 2?) or silly lemming antics. Instead, we get a demo of the fourth desert stage (I've completed the game many times, and this is always the demo you get. It's not random), and only one joke in all of it, as shown in the above screen. Now, some of the stuff Lomax does is kind of funny, but it's nothing I never did myself in the game.

If I ever run into the guy who made this the ending, I'm gonna cram a pair of cleats up his rear end.