Leave him lying in his uniform, dying in the sun...

Grim... · **Posted:** Wed Dec 04, 2013 18:41

EG has an article about the making of Cannon Fodder.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013- ... non-fodder

Quote:

20 years ago - nearly a decade before Medal Of Honor forced players to storm Omaha beach under merciless artillery fire, and a full 15 years before Call Of Duty ended a mission with everyone dying in the radioactive aftermath of a nuclear blast - one game taught a generation that war is, indeed, hell. If you were playing games in 1993 - especially if you were playing them on the Amiga, the concerned parents' 'educational' alternative to the SNES and Megadrive - you probably remember Cannon Fodder's 'Boot Hill' inter-mission screen, where tiny, brave, 16-bit civilians were waved through a door by a recruitment officer, only to (almost) inevitably reappear as gravestones dotting the surrounding landscape. It's hard to forget.

Hearthly · **Joined:** 11th May, 2008 **Posts:** 13386

For some reason I never really rated this game, I think the intro sequence and the music on the hill were the best things about it, and yes it was all very poignant and stuff the way the gravestones popped up when your soldiers died - but the game itself just never clicked for me. The sequel was even worse.

MrChris · **Joined:** 1st Apr, 2008 **Posts:** 30498

I never got why people thought this game was in any way poignant or whatever. The gravestone thing was just mildly funny. I didn't get to that and think "gosh, isn't war horrible. Until those gravestones popped up I'd never really considered the real world ramifications of sending men off to war to shoot at each other with deadly weapons".

zaphod79 · **Joined:** 16th Apr, 2008 **Posts:** 14518

Mr Christmassyfur wrote:

I never got why people thought this game was in any way poignant or whatever. The gravestone thing was just mildly funny. I didn't get to that and think "gosh, isn't war horrible. Until those gravestones popped up I'd never really considered the real world ramifications of sending men off to war to shoot at each other with deadly weapons".

I think some of that was covered better earlier with Wings - however I loved Cannon Fodder as a game and it was responsible for a lot of Amiga mouse abuse in my house :-)

Hearthly · **Joined:** 11th May, 2008 **Posts:** 13386

Mr Christmassyfur wrote:

I never got why people thought this game was in any way poignant or whatever. The gravestone thing was just mildly funny. I didn't get to that and think "gosh, isn't war horrible. Until those gravestones popped up I'd never really considered the real world ramifications of sending men off to war to shoot at each other with deadly weapons".

I don't think anyone's claiming it made people look at the horror of war in a new way, are they?

Curiosity · **Posted:** Thu Dec 05, 2013 10:35

AtrocityExhibition wrote:

Mr Christmassyfur wrote:

I never got why people thought this game was in any way poignant or whatever. The gravestone thing was just mildly funny. I didn't get to that and think "gosh, isn't war horrible. Until those gravestones popped up I'd never really considered the real world ramifications of sending men off to war to shoot at each other with deadly weapons".

I don't think anyone's claiming it made people look at the horror of war in a new way, are they?

Apart from the piece in the OP?

I agree with Mr Chris. I thought the game was ace fun, but didn't ever think anything of the gravestones.

MrChris · **Joined:** 1st Apr, 2008 **Posts:** 30498

AtrocityExhibition wrote:

Mr Christmassyfur wrote:

I never got why people thought this game was in any way poignant or whatever. The gravestone thing was just mildly funny. I didn't get to that and think "gosh, isn't war horrible. Until those gravestones popped up I'd never really considered the real world ramifications of sending men off to war to shoot at each other with deadly weapons".

I don't think anyone's claiming it made people look at the horror of war in a new way, are they?

Please see the quote in the OP. For instance: "one game taught a generation that war is, indeed, hell."

Hearthly · **Joined:** 11th May, 2008 **Posts:** 13386

I read that more as a linguistic flourish rather than a genuine statement, certainly Cannon Fodder's approach was unusual for a videogame, I'd have said, which is what's being acknowledged.

GazChap · **Posted:** Thu Dec 05, 2013 10:43

It was subtle, rather than outright saying it. Being forced to watch the scroller of soldier names (I seem to remember it was only in a "patched" version that they enabled the ability to click past it) while the music plays in the background, had an effect on me. Not so much in the early missions where they were pretty easy, but by the time you got through to the really tough ones and you had to sit through around 100 names...

MrChris · **Joined:** 1st Apr, 2008 **Posts:** 30498

GazChap wrote:

It was subtle, rather than outright saying it. Being forced to watch the scroller of soldier names (I seem to remember it was only in a "patched" version that they enabled the ability to click past it) while the music plays in the background, had an effect on me. Not so much in the early missions where they were pretty easy, but by the time you got through to the really tough ones and you had to sit through around 100 names...

100 names of pixels. It was dull is what it was.

Hearthly · **Joined:** 11th May, 2008 **Posts:** 13386

Different people in responding differently to something capable of triggering an emotional response SHOCKER!

The ending of E.T. was shit too, because E.T. didn't really exist and it was just a make-believe film and Eliot was pretending to be upset about it all.

MrChris · **Joined:** 1st Apr, 2008 **Posts:** 30498

AtrocityExhibition wrote:

Different people in responding differently to something capable of triggering an emotional response SHOCKER!

That's chuffing hilarious coming from you.

Quote:

The ending of E.T. was shit too, because E.T. didn't really exist and it was just a make-believe film and Eliot was pretending to be upset about it all.

Kern · **Posted:** Thu Dec 05, 2013 11:02

It was the first game where I got emotionally attached to the characters. Watching a soldier you've trained up from recruit to staff sergeant or whatever die was surprisingly painful.

Curiosity · **Posted:** Thu Dec 05, 2013 11:06

X-Com did it better

GazChap · **Posted:** Thu Dec 05, 2013 11:09

Curiositree wrote:

X-Com did it better

This is true. And the "Memorial" section in the new X-COM can be heartbreaking.

zaphod79 · **Joined:** 16th Apr, 2008 **Posts:** 14518

Curiositree wrote:

X-Com did it better

But *after* - the first Xcom came out a year after CF - Wings was 3 years before and had your progression through the war via cutscenes (or at least still images where you got some of the story and background about what was happening)

Hearthly · **Joined:** 11th May, 2008 **Posts:** 13386

Mr Christmassyfur wrote:

That's chuffing hilarious coming from you.

?

Quote:

The ending of E.T. was shit too, because E.T. didn't really exist and it was just a make-believe film and Eliot was pretending to be upset about it all.

:roll:

Well I don't understand what your point is. They're just pixels? Just a list of names? It's boring? It's pretend war?

Obviously it didn't work for you but for me (and a few other folks it seems) it was pretty painful watching your best and/or favourite soldiers finally meet their demise and reappear as a gravestone whilst the sombre music played and the line of troops moved forward.

MrChris · **Joined:** 1st Apr, 2008 **Posts:** 30498

Kern wrote:

It was the first game where I got emotionally attached to the characters. Watching a soldier you've trained up from recruit to staff sergeant or whatever die was surprisingly painful.

It wasn't an emotional attachment for me so much as "I've invested this much time training this bugger up and now I've got to start again, GAAAH". You get the same with the likes of XCom, as Curio has pointed out.

The idea that Cannon Fodder was in some way ground breaking for making people focus on the fact that people die in war is utter nonsense.

flis · **Joined:** 26th May, 2008 **Posts:** 3333

Kern wrote:

It was the first game where I got emotionally attached to the characters. Watching a soldier you've trained up from recruit to staff sergeant or whatever die was surprisingly painful.

Very much

if Stoo died, I'd start again. So I'd keep him separate and send in the others... I started off being like that with all 4 of the starting troops, if one died I'd restart but I wasn't getting very far that way! I only remember Jools, Stoo and RJ now.

I only played the Mega drive version, and only got into it in 1998 because I broke my ankle the Easter it snowed so was pretty much housebound for a week then, all I did was play Cannon Fodder and watch Dawson's Creek.

Kern · **Posted:** Thu Dec 05, 2013 11:44

Mr Christmassyfur wrote:

The idea that Cannon Fodder was in some way ground breaking for making people focus on the fact that people die in war is utter nonsense.

Quite. It's like saying that nobody was aware that literature could capture the horrors of war until Ambrose Bierce came along, or that poets could write about it until World War One. What's important about 'Cannon Fodder' is how it brought the cost of war to the fore as part of the game, and in a moving way. Other games might have done this before and after, and even done it better, but I certainly think 'CF' was one of the most effective.

myp · **Posted:** Thu Dec 05, 2013 11:50

Also most of us were quite young and hadn't really taken into account the effect of war before.

Satsuma · **Joined:** 20th Apr, 2008 **Posts:** 14416

flis wrote:

I only played the Mega drive version, and only got into it in 1998 because I broke my ankle the Easter it snowed so was pretty much housebound for a week then, all I did was play Cannon Fodder and watch Dawson's Creek.

This sounds like 1998 heaven to me.

TheVision · **Posted:** Thu Dec 05, 2013 12:01

Santanalian wrote:

flis wrote:

I only played the Mega drive version, and only got into it in 1998 because I broke my ankle the Easter it snowed so was pretty much housebound for a week then, all I did was play Cannon Fodder and watch Dawson's Creek.

This sounds like 1998 heaven to me.

Me too.. Apart from breaking my ankle and watching Dawsons Creek.

flis · **Joined:** 26th May, 2008 **Posts:** 3333

I didn't really think about the whole war thing while playing it, I did get attached to the names but that was possibly just a favouritism/rank thing at that stage.

I don't think any game characters had as much as an effect on me as Soap, Gaz and Captain Price. The xbox kicked up quite a lot of dust while I was playing MW2 and MW3... I remember there being some genuinely shocking 'he can't be dead!' moments, even though I 'died' during the course of the campaign and it was a war game.

Playing Ghosts, the level of destruction rendered on civilians did make me think: fuck, I hope shit like this could never actually happen, it's so pointless and tragic. It could be age and a more developed ability to empathise but I never felt like that playing Desert Strike and that was very much based on a conflict that was having real effects on actual people, even while I played it.

Grim... · **Posted:** Fri Dec 06, 2013 14:19

Mr Christmassyfur wrote:

Please see the quote in the OP. For instance: "one game taught a generation that war is, indeed, hell."

I read that as "Cannon Fodder is a difficult game".

MrD · **Joined:** 30th Mar, 2008 **Posts:** 2139

I thought the HOME : AWAY caption at the top of the screen was more effective/moving/powerful/those-words-from-English-lessons because it was a straightforward bit of dark WWI-ish humour.

I always wondered who the guys were fighting and why. Were they forced to? Did they do it voluntarily? Did any of them turn back when they saw that they'd be queueing up around a hill pretty packed with indispensible men? Did any of them wonder they'd probably get a lot more done if they sent more than four guys at a time?

Pod · **Joined:** 30th Mar, 2008 **Posts:** 2568

SIDE TOPIC:

I don't think it's possible to remake Cannon Fodder. Any Cannon Fodder remake that comes out today and uses the old control scheme will be blasted as being crap, because everyone expects a twin stick shooter in a game presented like that. And any remake that tries to use a twin-stick shooter setup (or wasd+mouse) will find itself lacking the adrenaline-pumping essence of the original and end up being crap. Catch 22.

Using a twin-stick setup the game will become "easier". Being able to walk in one direction whilst shooting in the other, with EASE? Heracy! In the original you had a single mouse cursor which you had to flick to one side of the screen, click to move, then flick back to the other to shoot the baddies. Rinse and Repeat. Doing so was extremely difficult and required a lot of frantic clicking. If that goes away, a lot of the difficult and pace of the game vanishes. (I don't know how the mega drive versions handled such problems?). So to make it more difficult they'd have to "adapt" the gameplay a bit to be something more geometry-wars-ish, and then you've basically got geometry wars with soldiers.

TheVision · **Posted:** Tue Dec 10, 2013 12:18

I played this the other night on an emulator.

It's brilliant... Still.

That is all.

MrD · **Joined:** 30th Mar, 2008 **Posts:** 2139

Pod wrote:

SIDE TOPIC:

I don't think it's possible to remake Cannon Fodder. Any Cannon Fodder remake that comes out today and uses the old control scheme will be blasted as being crap, because everyone expects a twin stick shooter in a game presented like that. And any remake that tries to use a twin-stick shooter setup (or wasd+mouse) will find itself lacking the adrenaline-pumping essence of the original and end up being crap. Catch 22. :(

Using a twin-stick setup the game will become "easier". Being able to walk in one direction whilst shooting in the other, with EASE? Heracy! In the original you had a single mouse cursor which you had to flick to one side of the screen, click to move, then flick back to the other to shoot the baddies. Rinse and Repeat. Doing so was extremely difficult and required a lot of frantic clicking. If that goes away, a lot of the difficult and pace of the game vanishes. (I don't know how the mega drive versions handled such problems?). So to make it more difficult they'd have to "adapt" the gameplay a bit to be something more geometry-wars-ish, and then you've basically got geometry wars with soldiers.

What about Hotline Miami controls?

Hotline Miami is Cannon Fodder with one dude.

RuySan · **Joined:** 30th Mar, 2008 **Posts:** 3542

I tried the game because of this topic and it still does nothing to me. I never found it much fun, no pun intended. I remember my uncle being completely addicted to this, and every time i tried i got bored.

It's a good point that people are mentioning Wings as being a game that explored the drama and horrors of war much better. Also, Lost Patrol was a very poignant in that sense.

I just have to play Lost Patrol again, damn beautiful game.

Grim... · **Posted:** Wed Dec 11, 2013 1:28

Where did you get a working version?

RuySan · **Joined:** 30th Mar, 2008 **Posts:** 3542

Grim... wrote:

Where did you get a working version?

Of Lost Patrol?

here

http://www.whdownload.com/

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