He may have been speaking Scots, not English. For the most part is is very much like English - both having descended from a common language - but has a vast array of its own words. Some are wonderfully expressive. A gray, overcast, drizzly day (and we have a fair few of them) is described as "dreich" and we Scot know exactly what it means.

Of course he may have just had an especially heavy accent!

Sorry to rant a bit but why the hell would a civilization sent out a radio signal from their planet?

Doesn't even need to be a civilisation. There are commercial services available for individuals or organisations to broadcast whatever the hell they feel like into space for whatever reason. IIRC SFX magazine used to broadcast a .pdf of the current issue each month. Reasons don't have to be rational.

There's a difference between being inspired or borrowing ideas and wholesale copying. And I agree that Sony hold the copyrights.

My admitted tangent is that it's a sign of respect, giving a nod of the head or a tip of the hat to the original developers. Because although it's very tempting to "stick it to the Man" as some say, The Man in this case was just a handful of guys. We aren't/weren't just some anonymous faceless corporate drones without feelings. I'm delighted when people remember stuff I've worked twenty years later.

No, there's isn't a black and white viewpoint here. The port to iPhone doesn't materially affect me at all, but I still care about it.

As I posted yesterday, I was part of the team who created Lemmings in the first place. A minor member, to be sure, but I was there. What bothers me most about these efforts to convert games is not so much the use of the original graphics and certainly not the fact that it's been ported, but the respect that we don't seem to get. I didn't see any mention of credit for Mike Dailly, who invented the idea, or Russel Kaye who wrote the PC version from which you took the EGA graphics, or Dave Jones who coded the Amiga original, or Gary Timmons who animated the characters, or Scott Johnson who drew background graphics or... well you get the idea. Intellectual property be damned; did you get in touch with anyone to ask if they were cool with it? (I once had the experience of reading a rip of the Hired Guns manual which I wrote, with a huge list of credits to all the guy's cracker buddies, but not one mention of anyone who'd spent two years of their lives on the game itself.) The sad thing is, if you'd asked, I know they'd have been cool with it. (And if you had, then I apologise)

One of my claims to fame is that I was working for DMA Design when they created the original Lemmings (Dundee, Scotland), released on Valentine's day 1992. I did some conversions of the Amiga graphics to the PC (EGA!) and Atari Lynx. In the victory screen, there's a pic of the developers including myself! Needless to say, a lot of what is written on the net isn't quite correct. Great to see that it's still well thought of and in fact it's even part of a museum exhibit in Dundee (McManus Galleries) (You *really* know you're old when your photo is in a museum!) You can find the history of Lemmings (and DMA) here. http://www.dmadesign.org/ and some of my musings from that time here http://www.stevehammond.org/

... the example message in the video is clearly asking for a cup of *tea* at four.

...call a disaster a "whole joojooflop situation"?