Philips CD-i

For emulators, see CD-i emulators, and for system information, see Philips CD-i.

"CD for your TV."

The Philips CD-i is a failed system, best remembered for its peculiar connections to far more successful ones.

Here's how the story goes: Nintendo wanted to make a CD-ROM drive for the SNES to face Sega's upcoming Mega-CD. They had a deal with Sony, realized it was a bad deal, and jumped ship to Philips (which kinda makes sense, as Sony and Philips had invented the CD together). Sony was pissed and decided to make their own console with blackjack and hookers, and so the PlayStation was born. Meanwhile, Nintendo got cold feet again, the new deal went nowhere as well, so Philips also decided to do their own thing, and that was the CD-i.

The less-know part of this story, however, is that Philips actually had been working on the CD-i long before the SNES existed. And it was not even supposed to be a console, but an "interactive multimedia CD player" for educational titles, digital encyclopedias, museum tour kiosks, this sort of boring "rich old man" crap (that's why the original controller was more like a TV remote than a gamepad). The brief almost-partnership with Nintendo just convinced Philips to sell it as a game console, and it also explains how they got the rights to produce some unique Zelda and Mario games. The fact is, the CD-i was simply not designed for games, and this shows on its modest game library.

Similarly to the 3DO, Philips also licensed the CD-i standard to other hardware manufacturers.

Note: Several CD-i games require the MPEG Digital Video Card (DVC) add-on, which hasn't been successfully emulated, yet.

Note 2: Collectors should be aware that if their CD-i can no longer keep the time or save progress, that means the the timekeeper battery is probably dead and needs replacing. This is a simple watch battery that you can buy anywhere. but the battery itself is embedded and encased in a ceramic chip, making what should be a simple fix an extremely difficult repair job. If you have a steady hand with a rotary tool, you could sort this out yourself. If you don't then there is a repair shop in Greece that can repair this (link), but if neither of these are an option for you, then get used to owning a plastic brick that used to play crap games.

The list

Cover	Title	Genre	Description	Screenshot
	Burn:Cycle	Adventure	A trippy, futuristic point and click adventure with digitized actors and pre-rendered environments. Even if you dislike the game, the production values were pretty high for the time. There's also a Windows port floating around.
	Hotel Mario	Platformer	One of the games that came out from the partnership with Nintendo, this one is actually good, despite the flak from Nintendo Fanboys who jump on the hate bandwagon. This one is a simple platformer in the vein of the classic Mario Bros for arcades, your objective is to close all doors on each stage (don't bother asking why) to proceed to the next, while stomping on Goombas and other Mario baddies.
	Link: The Faces of Evil Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon	RPG/Action	These two games have gotten quite a bad reputation due to the proliferation of YouTube Poop, and very divisive opinions. While the Zelda fanboys absolutely hate them (even though the vast majority of them never ever played the game and were only exposed to them via YTP), most everyone else simply ignore them while a few will defend them to death. As far as the CD-i goes, however, they are actually nice games that can be fun depending on your mileage, a mix of action-RPG platforming in the vein of Zelda II. They have the most hilariously atrocious cutscenes in the history of gaming, but beyond that the only thing that holds them down is the choppy scrolling. Give them a try if you're not prejudiced. Fun fact: the lead designer was Dale DeSharone, whose adventure Below The Root is acclaimed as a cult classic of the 8-bit computer era. There's a fan remake for Windows and Linux, here.
	Mutant Rampage: BodySlam	Beat 'em Up	A competent, well-made brawler with hilariously corny cartoon cutscenes (from the same team as the Zelda and Mario CD-i games) and even some mild nudity. One interesting feature is that you can switch you character at predetermined tag points in the levels, something that could've been done more often in games of this genre. As a result of the team of three playable characters you have, you essentially have 9 lives at the start to clear the entire game. Abuse stunlocking the enemies on wakeup to make things more manageable. DVC required.
	Pac-Panic	Puzzle	A falling-blocks puzzle game where the goal is to create paths of ghosts so that they can be eaten by the Pac-Man pieces as they move down the screen. Additionally, creating full lines of crates will cause them to clear, just like in Tetris. Is also on SNES and Genesis where it's known as Pac-Attack.
	Tetris	Puzzle	CD-i Tetris plays to the strengths of the platform with CD quality new-age music and full-motion nature backgrounds for a relaxing experience. Includes 10 levels of play but no 2-player mode.
	The Apprentice	Platformer	A vertically scrolling platformer with some pretty good graphics. There's a fan-made PC port.

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