Craaaaaaaaaaazy!
By Ahchay
We haven’t really looked at mobile phones yet, but they’re coming on apace with their colour screens and their Bluetooth and their GPRS and what-not and are now, supposedly, a potential replacement for your GBA.
Well, I decided to bite the bullet and download a copy of Cannon Fodder Mobile for my snazzy new Nokia something or other for the bargain price of £4 or so. At least, it’s a bargain considering that I spent close to sixty quid buying this and it’s sequel for my aging 386 gaming rig ten years or so ago, less so when I could probably download the same game (under emulation) for my Zodiac for nowt.
But, apart from the warm glow of keeping Jon Hare in vodka, is it any good?
Well, first impressions aren’t bad at all. The graphics translate surprisingly well to the mobile screen and the sound of virtual gunfire (and little-guy agony) is rather effective on a packed commuter train (as I now know to my cost). Still, once I found the mute button, I managed to get into the game proper.
Which is where the problems start…
Y’see, it’s one thing having the ability to chuck around Atari ST quality graphics in a package small enough to be ingested, but it’s quite another thing when you’re reliant on a bloody phone keypad and a miniscule joystick to control the bloody thing. Especially when confronted with the additional limitation of having to pause between moving and firing so that the bastard game recognises what you’re doing.
Fiddly.
So, the game descends rapidly into a series of linked puzzles. Now this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Cannon Fodder was always as much of a test for the brain as it was for the reflexes and the slightly slower pace necessitated by the controls does begin to feel natural after a while. After a while you begin to zone in on the game (although, thankfully, the designers don’t appear to have included that level where you have to jump out of a burning jeep in mid-leap) and it starts to flow a teeny little bit.
Which is when you start to realise the real sacrifices that they had to make to get this on to your mobile phone. Where, after you start the second mission for the umpteenth time, are the little touches? Where’s the hill? Where are the names of your soldiers? ‘Lives’? What’s all this about lives? Cannon Fodder, uniquely among games of it’s time, made you care about your soldiers by the simple expedient of naming the little sods.
And it’s this which firmly pushes Cannon Fodder Mobile into ‘soulless retro-gaming cash-in’ territory. Yes, it’s harmless enough, yes it’s sortakinda playable once you get into the rhythm of it, yes it looks and sounds the part, but since when was Cannon Fodder ever supposed to be ‘harmless’ fun? Even the name of the game is political, and taking away that human connection makes this nothing more than the sort of thing you show your mates in the pub for a laugh before whipping out the PSP for a spot of tennis.
October 2005
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