Remember Lemmings? GliderPRO? Tetris?

In the search for fun, challenging, non-nasty computer games for Joshua to play, I thought today of Lemmings.According to Lemmings Universe, "Lemmings is a puzzle game in which the goal is to guide a certain number of Lemmings to the exit on each level. The Lemmings enter the level through one or more hatches somewhere on the level. They can be assigned skill that are used to help them get to the exit."

Originally an Amiga game, a version of Lemmings was given to me free with my first Apple Mac, when I bought it straight out of Uni. Unfortunately, I don't have the CDs for it now. But I found an online version here. This javascript version (it plays in a web browser window) only has 10 levels in each of the four ratings (Fun, Tricky, Taxing and Mayhem), rather than the original 30 for each, so the jump in skill level between level 10 in Fun to level 1 in Tricky (etc) could be a challenge. But Joshua managed, with my help, to get through the 10 levels of Fun, and I enjoyed it even more than he did, I'm sure.

Another favourite of mine from the free games that came with my Apple Mac was a paper plane game called GliderPRO where I had to fly the paper plane through a complex series of rooms in buildings, never letting the plane fall to the ground.You can download it for free from the author John Calhoun, here. That game was an enjoyable challenge for me through my first year of working as a teacher and beyond. And it didn't involve teaching maths to teenagers, which was not such an enjoyable challenge of those times. I think Joshua will enjoy this one as well, but he may have to fight me for the computer to get at it!

Now I'm off to play an online version - unfortunately not a clone for the original Tetris:How well I remember the hours spent playing Tetris on the uni computers when I should have been writing code for my programming classes!