Last Week's Games: Kingdom Hearts, Cluckles and Cannon Fodder

Had a whale of a time on this bit...

I started this week playing a game I hadn’t played for a while: Kingdom Hearts. Regular readers will know I was playing this a lot about a month ago, but it fell by the wayside as I became increasingly keener to beat Regicide. I figured it was time to come back to it before I forgot about playing it entirely, though, so I put it on, did some faffing about in Traverse Town and the Hundred Acre Wood, and eventually played and beat the Monstro level. I’d forgotten about this maze-like platforming section, and had a decent time getting through it and beating the boss. There’s a certain sense of achievement in analysing their attack patterns! 

I'll say it again because it never gets old:
It's a chicken. With a sword.

After playing that, I felt like playing something quick, so I returned to Cluckle’s Adventure. I’ve covered it before in previous blogs but just to remind you, it’s a 2D platform game starring a chicken with a sword. It’s a great pick-up-and-play game, with the one slight caveat that I prefer to use a controller when playing games like this, since I don’t want to exhaust my keys with rapid presses that you very often need for games like this! I’m trying to collect all the stars in the game, which you do by rescuing all the chicks in the level. This bogged me down for a while but when I was playing last Monday I discovered which part of the scenery telegraphs a secret area. Once I’d discovered that, getting through the levels was a lot more straightforward, and I stand a reasonable chance of beating the whole game in the not too distant future!

Then later on in the week I had a go with a game I hadn’t played in a while: Cannon Fodder. I bought this game back in 2015 off GOG and haven’t played it often since then but I thought I’d give it another go. It’s a mouse-driven top-down shooter with some light strategy elements, originally released in 1993. The graphics are showing their age now, and I normally need a couple of goes to get it to run on my laptop, but it’s still good fun after all these years. You take a small squad (1-6 soldiers) out on a mission to kill all their enemies, or blow up all their buildings. All of your soldiers have machine guns, and you can pick up grenades and rockets along the way. It sounds simple, but the game is very challenging and the gung-ho tactic of sending your lads in guns a-blazing doesn’t really work. You have the option to split your squad up, which you need to do because if the enemy hits your squad with an explosive, most if not all of your squad will die. You then have to make decisions about how many grenades and rockets you’re handing to the squads you’re splitting, because if all the members of the team die, their weapons go with them. This leads to some very interesting pieces of decision-making, and is the core of the challenge of the game.

You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.
Literally. That's how the buildings count as destroyed.

Cannon Fodder was also available on the Sega Mega Drive and I borrowed it off a friend at one point when I was still at school. I’d never owned it prior to when I bought it in 2015 though; if I remember rightly, the game was not easy to come by. The use of some of the imagery in the game (the poppy in particular) was considered offensive by some, and it wasn’t available for very long. It’s odd to think of that now, where the last console generation was flooded with modern military shooters, but back in the 90s it hadn’t really been done before. There had been military games, of course, but in nearly all of them your player character was some kind of 80s action hero and there was usually a lives system; Cannon Fodder was the first game that I remember to use characters that were basic, common soldiers who died permanently when they got shot. Maybe at the time that was just a little too much for some people – especially those who would argue about the detrimental effect that video games have on kids!