My cousin had one. The games were wired.
Hey don’t hassle the CD-i, it was trying to do something no one had done and probably shoudn’t have.
but it shipped, didn’t it! Looking at you pippin.
but it shipped, didn’t it! Looking at you pippin.
We had these in school one year. Of course, it being school means that all of the games available were educational. The school actually let parents rent them for like a month at a time, which is something my parents did. Too bad we couldn’t keep it.
deleted by creator
Interesting, was this a next-gen competitor for the likes of 3DO?
It was a strange time.
There were so many competitors all of a sudden. CD-i, 3DO, Jaguar. Even Commodore had the CD32. Nobody had one, it was all Mega Drives and SNES.
Nobody could seem to decide if CDs were the future or 3D. I guess Sony’s success came out of nowhere but also because they hedged their bets and made the only machine that could really do both. Games like Final Fantasy VII that really made use of both were a pipe dream for other platforms.
Plus they realised that because CDs were cheap to make, budget re-releases could be a thing again. Seeing dozens of great games at £20 a go certainly swayed me from the competition.
I have one. It no longer reads media :(
I remember playing a demo unit of a CD-i at Rich’s while my mom shopped (this was back when department stores still had electronics departments). Whatever game they had available on it was so boring that it was only slightly better than following her around looking at clothes. I also remember, at other times in the same place, playing Sonic on Genesis and messing around with MS Paint on a Windows 3.1 PC. Of the three experiences, the CD-i experience was by far the least fun.
I remember being in a vacation park with my parents. All the bungalows had a CDi player, and you could rent games at the reception. I also remember thinking that all those CDi games were glorified DVD menus…
That’s feels like an accurate description.
To be fair, the graphics were a step up from the 8bit (or 16bit?) games I was playing at the time.
I also remember thinking that all those CDi games were glorified DVD menus…
DVD menus had built in games with more gameplay than CD-i games lol
Lol. That’s true! There are DVD menu games with higher approval ratings than some CD-I games.
Wtf? I’ve never even heard of this thing. Might have to look into emulators, for curiosity sake.
You’re better off watching videos. The games are all notoriously bad.
An emulator also isn’t going to give you the experience of dropped inputs that the CDI was known for.
You probably don’t, there is not a single good game on there!
So yeah, Philips was granted usage of Mario, Luigi, Bowser, Peach, Link, Zelda, Impa, and Ganon. One Mario game and two Zelda games were made, and they were so bad they were funny, to the point they were basically the backbone of Internet culture when several people made silly nonsensical remixes of the cutscenes.
Those games were in fact so important to many people’s lives that a spiritual successor, Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore, was a success and even had a limited edition that came with the infamous CD-i “spoon” controller. What an amazing way to play a platformer…
There is also one more Zelda game that is forgotten by just about everyone. As the others were so bad they were funny, this one was so bad it was just bad. Try watching this without getting bored (impossible) https://youtu.be/IqFZ1iVmhIo
Honestly that Zelda game is my favorite for how absolutely ugly it is. I can’t make heads or tails of what’s going on in it.
What were those devs thinking? No textboxes so deaf people can’t play, there’s one dungeon whose boss cannot be defeated with the weapon found in it (the weapon does NO DAMAGE lmao) and the ending is so bad the whole thing is just BAD
Edit: I keep coming past this thread and I just realized I forgot to include that pausing or unpausing the game takes not one, not two, but THREE SECONDS. And scrolling the screen takes five seconds.
Did you… want to?
There are some gaps in a collection that serve as a show of sanity, not shame.
My friend had one–it had really cool graphics for the time but the gameplay on everything was kinda shit. He only had a few games so maybe there were ones that didn’t suck but I can’t imagine there was much that could compete with even the average level of game for PS1 or N64.
Around 2003 my mom found a funky CD player and gave it to me for my HiFi setup. It took forever to boot up, and it was heavy as shit, but it played CD’S! I never heard of CDi, but I had a feeling it the weird CD player was meant to do something more.
Anyways it took too much space and weighed as much as a cinder block so I threw it outside in my dads scrap pile.
Long story short my friend and I got bored one day and beat it with hammers. It wasn’t until the video game nerd covered it back in 07 that I realized what I had done lmao. Still wish I had it now that I collect vintage video games.
One of my favorite fun facts about video game consoles is that both the PlayStation and CD-i exist largely due to Nintendo being an ass to Sony and Phillips while looking for a CD-ROM add-on for the SNES to compete with the Sega CD. After getting the run around, both companies basically said ‘fine fuck it we are making our own consoles with blackjack and hookers…’
Which goes go show, Nintendo have always been assholes and it’s nothing new. Even when they shoot themselves in the foot doing so, they’ll never miss an opportunity.
Sony would have got the licensing rights to every game and would have got a very large cut of the every game sold on the Super Disc format. Some lawyer looked over the contract after they signed it and that’s why Nintendo backed out. Its not like it was all on Nintendo, it does seem like a very Sony thing to think they have full control over their formats.
I knew someone in school that had a CD-i and I was excited to try out the Zelda game… I made a terrible mistake as did the people that made it. It’s probably still a cool collector’s item, but man it was bad.
zod, CD-i is what all true programmers strive for!
