Usually, you wage war in order to take over the world. DMA Design did it the other way round. In the early 1990s, their crowd-control mega-hit Lemmings was an irresistible love bomb that won hearts and minds by appealing to the benevolent dictator in us all. Despite its cutesy appeal, Lemmings wasn't a game free of violence - far from it. You could always order your entire green-and-blue army to self-destruct, the little critters exploding in sequence like microwave popcorn. But the main thrust was saving lives through engineering, creating a secure route for your daffy charges and allowing them to shuffle to safety. DMA Design conquered gaming without firing a single shot.
For their follow-up Walker, released for the Amiga in 1993, the developer chose a very different path. Two decades on, it almost looks like a Titanfall demake - a side-scrolling 2D shooter where you control a beautifully animated bipedal mech, perforating waves of enemies with the brace of heavy machine guns slung under your cockpit. The walker's bright blue head, which convincingly tips and swivels to track your targeting cursor, seems slightly incongruous when placed against the game's drab backdrop of shattered warzones, but it means you're always entirely sure where you are on-screen, even when struggling to pick out teeny foes in the murk.
Walker piles on so many quirks and restrictions that collectively they begin to resemble innovation. You control your mech using a combination of mouse (to target and shoot) and keyboard (to stomp your war machine forward). Forward, in this case, is moving left: Walker rejects side-scrolling scripture by making you advance from the right of the screen. This shouldn't have any tangible impact at all, but it goes against so many deeply embedded gaming instincts that, at first, it seems genuinely alien and unsettling, like watching the hands on a clock move backwards. It makes Walker memorable, an eccentric southpaw.
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