Saving El Presidente

The Blue Guys are the bad guys. The guy at the right, camouflaged in the trees is Major CJ, and that poor dude in brown in the middle of the Blue Guys is El Presidente.

Heehee. El Presidente.

Does anybody remember the game "Cannon Fodder"? Or am I the only primary school boy who played it when I was much much younger? I remember my brother and I used to play it during our school holidays because my dad introduced us into geekdom early. What he did was like kindergarten for the computer age; he deviously entered our names into the Primary School of Geeks by bringing us to Sim Lim Square and buying us loads of shareware games.

The thing about these games was that they worked on DOS, and you don't just click here and click there, you type in something like /install...or something. I can't remember if Cannon Fodder was for DOS or Windows, and I can't remember how I installed it, but I did and I played it. Anyway, at one point in our holidays, we even learnt some really upper-level DOS stuff (which like most of the knowledge I get from lectures...has been returned to their lecturers), which was probably my dad's aim. Most of the time, we failed to install the games. And when we did, we couldn't figure out the keys.

I remember always falling off cliffs. And I remember all the characters I controlled, Jools, Stoo, Ubik and the others were so dear to my heart that it hurt when any of them died. But it was great fun! You could shoot the enemies and see them fly (to their deaths), and you could shoot them and see them writhe in paroxysms of death, and you could also run a tank or skidoo or jeep over them to kill them, or you could...

So many ways of dying and so many ways of killing. No wonder Cannon Fodder was so much fun.

Heehee. El Presidente.