Ed Oscuro
06-16-2003, 03:15 AM
I just got ahold of a nice Philips-branded CD-i 370 "handheld" player; though I'm at least the third owner it's in extremely good shape...almost looks like it's new out of the box. (You likely won't find these, as I hear they were mostly just available via catalog order and used for presentations and so on). Along with this I got eleven different software titles, some of which I'd like to comment on. (If nothing else, skip down to the bottom where I talk about Tetsuo Gay-den. That would be my most inspired of these commentaries).
Sections, or Chapters if you like
Hotel Mario
Link/Zelda
Burn:Cycle (190% more Karma!)
7th Guest
Space Ace
...insert break here
Tetsuo Gaiden
Hotel Mario was the first game I played on the thing. I was disappointed that it wasn't in the style of your average 2D Mario sidescroller, but it does the fixed-screen Mario platformer very well. It's probably the BEST Mario game of this type, actually. My biggest problem with this game is that there's (literally) no depth...or rather, width...to this game. One glance at the screen tells all you need to know. Where's the adventure? Somewhere...on another system. Too bad CD-i SMW never got out of beta.
The Zelda titles. There are three of them, Zelda's Adventure being the most sought after (though if it really looks like the screenshots I've seen, don't bother) and it does have a traditional top-down view. Link: Faces of Evil and Zelda: Wand of Gamelon are the other two, both from 1993 and among the launch titles for the system (I'm pretty sure Wand of Gamelon was first, since its manual has a short catalog of software at the back and Faces of Evil isn't listed.
Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon control the same...it's somewhat similar to Zelda 2 on the NES. Somewhat. Two button control and jumping assigned to your d-pad makes life difficult; without a good joypad (as I am) controlling these games is rather hard. Lots of stuff flying about at you and, well, they're pretty hard. Is this a good or bad thing? Well, that depends on what sort of game player you are. I felt that the background and map graphics from Wand of Gamelon were noticeably superior to those in Link, but not uniformly so. Some places look good, others fare less well. In any case, the backgrounds don't look tile based; they're a continuous picture. The price tag on both games was $14.99; so there's not much to get upset about for that value. Oh, and the voice/movie acting is pretty horrible. Still, Impa looks astonishingly close to the original artwork for Zelda no Densetsu...the characters that fare worst in the CD-i transition, unfortunately, are the title characters. Oops! Still, if you've got a CD-i, you might as well pick them both up. If nothing else, you can marvel at the map screens, get frustrated with the game, and listen to the menu music from Link (it's not that bad, but then again I don't know why they felt their new music was a good thing).
Dumb quote found online: (In reference to the cutscenes)
"they aren't even antialiased..."
Burn:Cycle...I don't like this THAT much, so I'll grouse about it a little. I never have been a fan for early 1990s misadaptations of cyberpunk; this is no exception. Karmic bank? Burn:Cycle certainly wasn't trying to take itself too seriously, seeing as how your English speaking (England-English, with accent) "hero" starts off with an explosive that inexplicably seems of Russian make. I'll lay off the customary scathing indictment of the whole staff about the style of the thing, to some degree anyways. The title screen has the customary looped nonsense chatter with Asian people hawking products (I think) while strange machine noises buzz in the background. I have always been a bit of a sucker for early 1990s CG walkthroughs, though I'd really hate to live there. Puzzles? Easy, up to the point of finding your hovercraft/car thing. That is pretty damned tough to figure out; and the fact that you can sit there and click through various things repeatedly and have to wait for the silly sequences to finish all over doe not help one bit. Promises to be quite wacky; I wonder if Sol Cutter ends up doing anything...stellar. :D (Sorry, bad joke) There's also the matter of the two hour limit because there's a computer virus ON YOUR HEAD. Yes, "on" your head.
Sol Cutter has something on his mind...and it's about to explode!</hype>
The 7th Guest
Heh! Haven't booted it up but the shot on the jewel case back of this glassy looking spectre head sort of stretching out of a box, as only high quality early 1990s FMV ghosts can, towards a rather pixelly looking woman affrighted, has me in stitches. Rather sad that one of the system's best titles wasn't an exclusive, really.
Space Ace! Looks pretty awesome; retro FMV stuff. It's hard to control (I've managed to get...heh, 15 points in a life) but looks to be somewhat promising. Very easy to screw up though. It does make me want to track down Dragon's Lair, if only just to see a bit of the graphics.
Tetsuo Gaiden
*This game gets the award for Worst Space Shooter Ed's Ever Played*
Tetsuo (so I hear) means "Iron Man" while Gaiden is approximately "Side Story." Obviously, somebody knew something or other about Japanese arcade games and thought "well, there's like Darius Gaiden, so we can have...uh...TETSUO, yes, because they're always yelling it in Akira." Tell me, do you know how to say "Gaiden"? Guy-den. Despite the insinuation, I feel certain that people of all types will be equally offended by this game. Let me explain.
TG (no offense to Johnny Turbo) is very similar to a number of shareware space SHMUPS: blocky little ship at the bottom of the screen must fight off enemies that fly in minimally strategic patterns (i.e. lots of circling about and such). Unfortunately, the buggers fire at you, and from my CD-i screen I can barely see their shots (if at all) and it's not because the screen is bad. It's because they're a single pixel just a slight bit lighter than the background. Note that all the sprites are tiny as far as I've gotten into the game...they seem perhaps 5-10 pixels wide (then again, my screen is an LCD and might not be the full CD-i resolution).
The game has enough gall to include that standby of shareware games: a "classic" and an advanced mode. The difference here is that you can play against a very bad starfield in "classic," and as a result you have even less chance of picking out enemy fire whenever, or you can pick poison, er, the second option and see FMV of asteroids and such flying by in the background. This is probably the strong point of the game. Who knows, it probably gets a little bit interesting later on (though the asteroids remind me of the old Space Ghost Coast to Coast intro, just with less style).
All this could perhaps be sufferable except that if you leave the sound effects on, this fellow who sounds like, egh, a Vin Diesel wannabe drones on whenever you do anything. Scoring, in this game, is simply a matter of "Scoar increees" or even "Scoar decresse," and instead of getting points for knocking out the evil minions of the Bydo Empire, you get points only after destroying a wave. And then you must hear the voice over.
I'd go turn off the sounds, but when you're moving about the main menu there's a constant annoying "plink" or something that plays EVERY time you move the cursor. Agh.
Tetsuo Gaiden is the worst space SHMUP I've ever played. I've seen programs made by college students that were FAR beyond this. This game makes Zero Wing look like the very picture of a healthy shooter; everything made throughout the nearly two decades of space shooters I've seen beats this game. This game would fail as something to do with your menu in a DVD player; indeed, the perpetrators of this injustice should not be allowed to soil this blessed planet any longer. Blast them into the sun, or maybe stuff them into that asteroid (it looked like it was made of cheese) and send them towards the outer rim of the galaxy, where they may spend the rest of their days far away from the rest of us decent shooter-loving (or hell, shooter hating, but that's not the point) folk.
What's the worst point about that game? It was made in 1997. It was made in 1997. My CD-i was manufactured in May 1996, so this game is newer than it. I hope nobody bought the Digital Video cartridge just so they could play Tetsuo Gaiden. I hope nobody actually bought Tetsuo Gaiden, actually.
Sections, or Chapters if you like
Hotel Mario
Link/Zelda
Burn:Cycle (190% more Karma!)
7th Guest
Space Ace
...insert break here
Tetsuo Gaiden
Hotel Mario was the first game I played on the thing. I was disappointed that it wasn't in the style of your average 2D Mario sidescroller, but it does the fixed-screen Mario platformer very well. It's probably the BEST Mario game of this type, actually. My biggest problem with this game is that there's (literally) no depth...or rather, width...to this game. One glance at the screen tells all you need to know. Where's the adventure? Somewhere...on another system. Too bad CD-i SMW never got out of beta.
The Zelda titles. There are three of them, Zelda's Adventure being the most sought after (though if it really looks like the screenshots I've seen, don't bother) and it does have a traditional top-down view. Link: Faces of Evil and Zelda: Wand of Gamelon are the other two, both from 1993 and among the launch titles for the system (I'm pretty sure Wand of Gamelon was first, since its manual has a short catalog of software at the back and Faces of Evil isn't listed.
Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon control the same...it's somewhat similar to Zelda 2 on the NES. Somewhat. Two button control and jumping assigned to your d-pad makes life difficult; without a good joypad (as I am) controlling these games is rather hard. Lots of stuff flying about at you and, well, they're pretty hard. Is this a good or bad thing? Well, that depends on what sort of game player you are. I felt that the background and map graphics from Wand of Gamelon were noticeably superior to those in Link, but not uniformly so. Some places look good, others fare less well. In any case, the backgrounds don't look tile based; they're a continuous picture. The price tag on both games was $14.99; so there's not much to get upset about for that value. Oh, and the voice/movie acting is pretty horrible. Still, Impa looks astonishingly close to the original artwork for Zelda no Densetsu...the characters that fare worst in the CD-i transition, unfortunately, are the title characters. Oops! Still, if you've got a CD-i, you might as well pick them both up. If nothing else, you can marvel at the map screens, get frustrated with the game, and listen to the menu music from Link (it's not that bad, but then again I don't know why they felt their new music was a good thing).
Dumb quote found online: (In reference to the cutscenes)
"they aren't even antialiased..."
Burn:Cycle...I don't like this THAT much, so I'll grouse about it a little. I never have been a fan for early 1990s misadaptations of cyberpunk; this is no exception. Karmic bank? Burn:Cycle certainly wasn't trying to take itself too seriously, seeing as how your English speaking (England-English, with accent) "hero" starts off with an explosive that inexplicably seems of Russian make. I'll lay off the customary scathing indictment of the whole staff about the style of the thing, to some degree anyways. The title screen has the customary looped nonsense chatter with Asian people hawking products (I think) while strange machine noises buzz in the background. I have always been a bit of a sucker for early 1990s CG walkthroughs, though I'd really hate to live there. Puzzles? Easy, up to the point of finding your hovercraft/car thing. That is pretty damned tough to figure out; and the fact that you can sit there and click through various things repeatedly and have to wait for the silly sequences to finish all over doe not help one bit. Promises to be quite wacky; I wonder if Sol Cutter ends up doing anything...stellar. :D (Sorry, bad joke) There's also the matter of the two hour limit because there's a computer virus ON YOUR HEAD. Yes, "on" your head.
Sol Cutter has something on his mind...and it's about to explode!</hype>
The 7th Guest
Heh! Haven't booted it up but the shot on the jewel case back of this glassy looking spectre head sort of stretching out of a box, as only high quality early 1990s FMV ghosts can, towards a rather pixelly looking woman affrighted, has me in stitches. Rather sad that one of the system's best titles wasn't an exclusive, really.
Space Ace! Looks pretty awesome; retro FMV stuff. It's hard to control (I've managed to get...heh, 15 points in a life) but looks to be somewhat promising. Very easy to screw up though. It does make me want to track down Dragon's Lair, if only just to see a bit of the graphics.
Tetsuo Gaiden
*This game gets the award for Worst Space Shooter Ed's Ever Played*
Tetsuo (so I hear) means "Iron Man" while Gaiden is approximately "Side Story." Obviously, somebody knew something or other about Japanese arcade games and thought "well, there's like Darius Gaiden, so we can have...uh...TETSUO, yes, because they're always yelling it in Akira." Tell me, do you know how to say "Gaiden"? Guy-den. Despite the insinuation, I feel certain that people of all types will be equally offended by this game. Let me explain.
TG (no offense to Johnny Turbo) is very similar to a number of shareware space SHMUPS: blocky little ship at the bottom of the screen must fight off enemies that fly in minimally strategic patterns (i.e. lots of circling about and such). Unfortunately, the buggers fire at you, and from my CD-i screen I can barely see their shots (if at all) and it's not because the screen is bad. It's because they're a single pixel just a slight bit lighter than the background. Note that all the sprites are tiny as far as I've gotten into the game...they seem perhaps 5-10 pixels wide (then again, my screen is an LCD and might not be the full CD-i resolution).
The game has enough gall to include that standby of shareware games: a "classic" and an advanced mode. The difference here is that you can play against a very bad starfield in "classic," and as a result you have even less chance of picking out enemy fire whenever, or you can pick poison, er, the second option and see FMV of asteroids and such flying by in the background. This is probably the strong point of the game. Who knows, it probably gets a little bit interesting later on (though the asteroids remind me of the old Space Ghost Coast to Coast intro, just with less style).
All this could perhaps be sufferable except that if you leave the sound effects on, this fellow who sounds like, egh, a Vin Diesel wannabe drones on whenever you do anything. Scoring, in this game, is simply a matter of "Scoar increees" or even "Scoar decresse," and instead of getting points for knocking out the evil minions of the Bydo Empire, you get points only after destroying a wave. And then you must hear the voice over.
I'd go turn off the sounds, but when you're moving about the main menu there's a constant annoying "plink" or something that plays EVERY time you move the cursor. Agh.
Tetsuo Gaiden is the worst space SHMUP I've ever played. I've seen programs made by college students that were FAR beyond this. This game makes Zero Wing look like the very picture of a healthy shooter; everything made throughout the nearly two decades of space shooters I've seen beats this game. This game would fail as something to do with your menu in a DVD player; indeed, the perpetrators of this injustice should not be allowed to soil this blessed planet any longer. Blast them into the sun, or maybe stuff them into that asteroid (it looked like it was made of cheese) and send them towards the outer rim of the galaxy, where they may spend the rest of their days far away from the rest of us decent shooter-loving (or hell, shooter hating, but that's not the point) folk.
What's the worst point about that game? It was made in 1997. It was made in 1997. My CD-i was manufactured in May 1996, so this game is newer than it. I hope nobody bought the Digital Video cartridge just so they could play Tetsuo Gaiden. I hope nobody actually bought Tetsuo Gaiden, actually.