Cannon Fodder GENESIS

Cannon Fodder is Sensible Software’s 1993 Amiga original, ported to Genesis by Virgin Interactive in January 1995. You command a small squad of soldiers through top-down action-strategy missions, using each recruit’s expendable rifle, grenades, or vehicles to clear enemy positions across jungle, snow, and desert battlefields.

Its tone is famously darker than its bright, cartoonish sprites suggest — soldiers lost in earlier missions are permanently commemorated as small crosses on the game’s home-screen hill, and its plight-of-the-common-soldier framing, reinforced by a theme song reworking “War (What Is It Good For?),” drew both praise and controversy for wrapping anti-war satire inside an otherwise breezy arcade-strategy package.