Cannonade

When you launch Cannonade, you're greeted with the purest form of a click-shooter in its most basic mode. No bells, no whistles on the desktop — just a canvas filling up with bullets and your frustration. This little DOS program from 1993 isn't going to make anyone famous.

You are artillery. Your cannon rotates, you adjust elevation, change shot power, and try to hit targets moving across the screen. The physics work roughly — the bullet flies, falls, you hit or you miss. Each new wave brings more enemies in more places, and your wrist starts feeling like an old typewriter with every single click. The controls are so simple they're almost insulting — there's no skill curve to keep you climbing.

What Cannonade offers is pure repetition. Click, aim, shoot, watch it miss. Try again. Click some more. And again. The graphics are flat, monotonous — a blue cannon, white bullets, dark background. Sound? Gunfire sounds like finger snaps. No style, no effects to keep you engaged. Just that damned need to reach the next wave.

Back in the nineties, it was adequate reflex training when you had five minutes between playing Something Fierce and waiting for a demo to download over your modem. Today, even the nostalgic crowd won't touch it — you play it without passion, without any goal beyond "move forward." The ballistics physics are its only redeeming quality.

If you want to feel like a shooter from the nineties and you love simple, dull shooters with no story, you can dig it up in the archives. But you'll find it because it's been forgotten, not because it's good. Playing it in a browser is a matter of archival duty, not entertainment.