CD-I have any good games?

[erehwon]

I picked up a Philips CD-I from a garage sale with some games $5. It works but you have to manually pull out the tray to put disks in. Unfortunately, the games it came with are mostly educational. I was wondering if there were any games worth keeping it for?

[JSoup]

Dragon's Lair and Myst aren't horrible, but you'll find more capable ports elsewhere.
Sadly, the things that shine the brightest on the CD-I are the exceptionally bad ones, such as the Unholy Triforce (Link: The Faces of Evil, Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon and Zelda's Adventure) and Hotel Mario.

[Hawksmoor]

I picked up a Philips CD-I from a garage sale with some games $5. It works but you have to manually pull out the tray to put disks in. Unfortunately, the games it came with are mostly educational. I was wondering if there were any games worth keeping it for?

http://forum.digitpress.com/forum/sh...ips-CD-i-Games

[goldenband]

I don't have any personal experience with the system, but I've enjoyed HalfBlindGamer's CD-i reviews:

http://www.youtube.com/user/HalfBlindGamer

He doesn't sugarcoat or act like the CD-i is a hidden gem, but his reviews make the system look pretty plausible -- not great, but plausible -- and have made me want to get one at some point. The CD-i supposedly has the best FMV quality of all the pre-PlayStation consoles, and several reviewers claim that multiplatform FMV games often look best on the CD-i, so if you like FMV games, there's that.

I've played several of the CD-i games named in the "Top 25" thread on other systems. I liked Kingdom: The Far Reaches and Kingdom II: Shadoan, which I played on 3DO and Macintosh respectively. I don't think there's any other console port of Kingdom II.

[T2KFreeker]

BURN!cycle

That will be all.

[Jorpho]

The Apprentice is the big one that keeps coming up, but it's hardly worth keeping the system around for that.

[Tanooki]

I owned one of them back in the day and I know of some fun stuff, well was then can't say for now though.

Mutant Rampage Bodyslam (final fight like brawler)
Dragon's Lair 1 and 2, also Space Ace -- great conversions
Lords of the Rising Sun -- excellent shogun/samurai/ninja assassin/siege game
Link Faces of Evil -- Yeah I know it's reviled, I actually finished it, just skip the hideous animated sequences
Hotel Mario -- Think Elevator Action meets Super Mario World/Mario Bros
Tetris is there, self explanatory, and pre-hold block
Voyeur -- Spy on a home, figure out a mystery
Litil Divil -- Odd game, action based and yet not look it up, it was ok
Escape from Cyber City -- Dragon's Lair type twitch game, hard, uses anime sequences of Galaxy Express 999
Chaos Control -- Rail shooter, blast targets with a crosshair

I know the conversion of Mad Dog Mcgree and The 7th Guest is on there and it's fine, also heard Zelda's Adventure (top down zelda action game) is decent.

[erehwon]

Okay. It sounds like there isn't much that would interest me. I guess the only question is if I want to try and fix the drive problem before I sell it. I'm not sure if I want to take the effort opening it up.

[tom]

CDi wasn't a gaming console, it did a good job for playing games.

[Gameguy]

At least they successfully got the system designed for their target market. Apparently nobody.

[Jorpho]

They probably fared better than the Tandy VIS, but then I reckon Philips made a much better marketing attempt.

Is that an issue of Retro Gamer?

[Tanooki]

I'm not sure what you'll read below was more employee butthurt, reality, or likely a strong mix of both.

As I said I had one of these and a pile of a dozen games for it back in the day. Around that time I was getting EGM magazine along with Nintendo Power. I remember EGM had for a time sucked up to this thing how great it was and went on about it monthly in stories covering games and really highlighting the few strong points. Anyway after awhile things started to go bad, and I saw it pulled from Montgomery Ward and a few other spots, only Sears still had it. I found a phone number on a phamphlet at the store there and called them when I got home. I flatly asked the guy on the phone what's up with all the bad press and why the system can't be found anywhere and this is what I got told. The phone rep didn't sound very happy and said that basically the video game print media sand bagged them at EGM. It appears and I have no idea if this was normal tactics of the then gaming media giant, but they gave a list of demands to Philips to get continued positive coverage which was that each reviewer would get a system, a game, a controller, and spare controllers and accessories to test everything out. As it wasn't really a gaming system, just did it too, Philips told them no, they'd get the system they had, the remote it came with, controller (Gravis knockoff), any other accessories as needed and A copy of the game since their stuff wasn't multiplayer. EGM got pissed when they were denied and after that point once the cycle to public hit with the magazine every piece they did was negative. Negative stories how it was an underpowered poor console, that it had nothing to offer, the games rated from mediocre to garbage, and all the ratings were worse than other publications that covered it and eventually they just dropped it entirely. It appears that media got back to various buyers(retail) and they cancelled and pulled future orders and developers bailed on them too from the US side of things so they basically got blackballed. Over in Europe it lived on fine for a few more years and got some decent games, movies and other media on it but it died out eventually everywhere. I know EGM was full of crap, they loved to play games and screw companies with their shady coverage so I know this isn't beyond them in behavior but I can't help to think while it's true, it was not one sided.

[Arkanoid_Katamari]

I never played one, don't own one, but I slept with a girl once who raved about the CD-I she had as a kid, when I told her I was into retro games. Strange, shes the only one I've ever met whose even heard of a CD-I. From what I've heard, Space Ace is supposedly good on CD-I.

[Rickstilwell1]

I like Mutant Rampage: Bodyslam which is similar to Final Fight and Streets of Rage, except very long. I also enjoy the port of Tetris even though you can't slow the blocks down once you start a speedy drop.

[Tanooki]

The stuff I listed was basically the games I had plus a few extras. I did have Space Ace and it's right on the nose with the arcade, fantastic conversion.

[Bojay1997]

CDi wasn't a gaming console, it did a good job for playing games.

While someone from Phillips may have said that to the person quoted in the article, Phillips spent a significant amount of money developing games for the CD-i and certainly made it a big part of the marketing push. They released game pads for the system and took out ads in major US gaming magazines. I recall being at a local department store in San Diego where Phillips had a massive display set up for a few years and the entire display was covered with game titles and the demo discs they had on all the machines were game titles. The local CompUSA had a similar display and they were bundling one of the Zelda CD-i games with the 450 unit for a while. As such, it's not really accurate to say it wasn't a gaming console.

[Tanooki]

I lived at the time in northern san diego county and I remember both those stores and those displays. Philips pushed it as an all in one thing up front, but when the edutainment was clearly awful and vcd wasn't going anywhere against the grumblings of the new DVD market and the overly established VHS they went and relied on games.

[celerystalker]

It kind of depends on how strange your taste is. Games like Inca and Kether are more like some of the experimental PC games that were coming out at the time and don't have easy comparisons. Lords of the Rising Sun is more or less a feudal Japan take on Defender of the Crown if you like that one. I really loved Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon and Link: Faces of Evil. Their gameplay is better than the internet would have you believe, and for me they really took me back to the Valiant Comics Zelda series. If you have fond memories of that time with the Zelda cartoon on Fridays and the Nintendo Cereal System, they are worth playing. For most of its library, though, think early '90s PC gaming instead of console games.

[erehwon]

Thanks for all the info. I ended up selling it. I just wasn't going to play it.

[Rickstilwell1]

Hey at least other people got to do a bit of learning from each other on the topic.