Best Games - Cannon Fodder
Do you know Jools and Jops. Do you know Stoo and RJ. If you do, it’s probably time for you to get some annual bloodwork done.
When I wrote the last one of these about Command and Conquer, I went on about the RTS being a genre defined by a control scheme. The use of the mouse as an input device sparked a few genres, or modified existing ones, like the text adventure morphing into the point and click adventure. There were mouse input games on the Macintosh and Amiga in the mid 80s, but the idea of real time strategy games being born not from anything the computer could do, but from the interface device attached to it, stuck with me.
Cannon Fodder is a game that evolved in parallel with rts games like Dune II and Warcraft. That isn’t exactly surprising since the same people who made it, British Amiga developers Sensible Software released a realtime strategy game, Mega-Lo-Mania, several months before Dune II came out. The mouse came with the Amiga and using it to control little digital minions just seemed the obvious choice. Maybe Lemmings is to blame for that.
Cannon Fodder is real time, and you use the mouse to point and click places you want squads of characters to move on a map, but it is in no way a strategy game. Cannon Fodder is a straight up action game.
You guide a group of soldiers around a map spraying machine gun fire and hurling grenades at anything that moves. Eventually you can even split the group into multiple squads. If some of your squad dies, Jools and Jops for instance, you get reinforced with the seemingly endless line of conscripts standing out front of the rapidly growing cemetery. Cannon Fodder wears its dark satire proudly. The screen between missions carries an Us and Them scoreboard. This is a parody of war.
Even though your men don’t always pathfind very accurately, control still feels breezy and quick. Popping out of cover to fire off a few shots is not only possible, but required. Aiming is required.
The game is ultimately pretty simple and doesn’t have the depth of anything in the RTS genre, but that is no great crime. It’s fun, and that is really what most of us want out of a game, isn’t it?
Cannon Fodder is one of the best games.