My thoughts on Philips CD-i

[manic23]

I recently picked up a Philips CD-i 450 console and added the Digital Video Cartridge to it. after playing a few games and a few of those interactive CDs that were going to take over the work in the early 90's I realised what a missed opportunity the system was.

The vast majority of the so called interactive titles I tried like Compton's Encyclopaedia for example are pretty awful and unusable if I'm honest, and the less said about Mad Dog McCree the better (sorry FitzSteve) but there were some games I played like [ Show youtube player ] that actually are not that bad, graphiclly it is really impressive and it got me thinking, what if that system had been released a few years earlier? I bet it would have been a far better success than it was, I find it a real shame that more companies did not release games for this system, imagine what could have been possible with a large budget thrown at it.

Just watch this video of [ Show youtube player ] and wonder to yourself what might have been if more time and money had been given to this system.

[Zak]

And even the MSX / MSX2 computer some earlier was all good in layout, all that you would need for a mid eighties home computer, but Philips was just bad in promoting their technology. The rumor said that they can sell light bulbs and should keep their hands off all other projects.

I personally must say though that I was not much impressed of the lifetime and quality of Philips electronics. I had an MSX2 prior to the Amiga, a Philips CRT TV and other products and they didn´t get very old. And it´s not that I spilled my coffee into them or something, they were just dead after some years for no reason.

[s2325]

CD-i have impressive first person shooter [ Show youtube player ] and Amiga Dimo's Quest in disguise.

[turrican3]

i never liked the cd-i because it can't make a scrolling.

[fitzsteve]

My fondness for Mad Dog McCree comes from the Arcades when I was a youngster I was amazed to see real Video and game combined. It's true the game is actually pretty awful, especially the acting. But that doesn't stop the nostalgia!

I don't think we were ready for CD/Multi Media Games systems until the PS1/Saturn, they were too expensive at the time compared to Snes/Megadrive and the Games didn't do them justice.

I got a 3DO recently, I'm also really impressed with this system. Some great games amongst an excellent port of Super Street Fighter II and Need For Speed is great too!

Sadly my 3DO has decided to stop working, probably capacitor leakage so it's out of commission at the moment...

[manic23]

I totally get the whole 'it's good because of nostalgia' thing, there is nothing like playing games you remember from your childhood, if im honest that is 99% of the reason I got back into Amiga/consoles of my youth.

But another big part of retro gaming is playing games that you didn't play back in the day either because you couldn't afford them or just didn't know about. I do remember playing Mad Dog McCree back in the day in the arcades but I'm afraid that my views of the game have not changed since then and no amount of nostalgia can make that game playable!

Having just said all that your setup Steve, with the projector does look awesome and maybe it's more playable that way, sadly I don't have that luxury

[mikele]

The FMV was a deceiving fad back in 90s, judging by screenshots and commercials I thought that movie like games would be a blast. This concept of next generation of electronic entertainment totally sucked me in. Then the reality rained down the whole fascination with this kind of games, they turned out to be a joke instead. Single speed cd roms just couldn't handle big chunk of data right (like video animation), let alone the quality of those "games on rail" in the spirit of Dragon's Lair. You get 100x replay value even from old black and white Mac games, not to mention Amiga titles.

The only good thing about CD-i was MPEG movies and the fact it had a handful of decent games like Apprentice.

[switchblade]

The CD-i was not a missed opportunity, because of the fact that other big name companies tried to cash in on the CD format as well. The CD-i had to compete with other CD-based offerings such as: Sega CD, PC Engine CD, Neo Geo CD, Jaguar CD, 3DO, and maybe even the Amiga CD32 so to speak. Apart from the PC Engine CD and Neo Geo CD, all the others were capable of doing FMV too.

The hardware itself wasn't even spectacular in comparison to the others. The system couldn't even do graphical effects like parallax scrolling which could have been done on a Mega Drive, SNES, or even a 1 MB Amiga 500. The controllers were no better with the fact that most CD-i games could only use 2 buttons, even if you had a 3 or 4 button controller.

And whilst that Apprentice game doesn't look so bad, it's the sort of game that could've been easily done on the consoles, or on the Amiga. If that's the best game the CD-i could come up with, then it's no wonder the system failed so badly.

It was just not equipped for gaming, period.

[Lonewolf10]

As far as the CDi goes, the only highly rated game I can remember for it was Burn Cycle. I have, however, never played on the system.

I have played on the 3DO though, and found it quite impressive (this was before the Saturn & PS1 were out).

[prowler]

I think that CD-i was created first and foremost to be an entertainment, or possibly edutainment, system, and the gaming aspect was just an afterthought.

I have a Philips CD-i 470 Player, with integrated FMV cartridge, which was supplied with three titles: Mad Dog McCree, Compton's Interactive Encyclopaedia and Dr No CD-i Video disc.

The wireless infra-red controller was hopelessly slow and absolutely useless for playing Mad Dog McCree, so that was the only game I owned until McNought held their closing-down sale when Cd-i and VideoCD titles were made available from prices starting at £3, and I bought a CD-i mouse and mat from them too (and Mad Dog McCree plays rather better with the mouse ).

I have never put the Compton's Encyclopaedia disc in the player; I mainly used it for playing VideoCDs and CD-i Video discs before the advent of the DVD. Many CD-i Video titles I own have only ever been made available in that format.

I've found that the most playable CD-i game I own is CD-i Pinball, but even then it's too easy to lock the ball in an infinite loop and cheat.

I was disappointed when Kodak's original PhotoCD format was discontinued and replaced by a new, inferior version. The CD-i Player was just as adept at playing PhotoCDs as it was VideoCDs and CD-i Video discs, and I prefer Video CDs to DVDs because each one I have bought plays perfectly, but I have bought far too many DVDs which have turned out to be faulty.

[s2325]

Flashback for CD-i have exclusive intro made with different style but same story [ Show youtube player ] I think it's nothing special but it's nice to watch different version of well-known intro.

[Mad-Matt]

The intro isn't that exclusive, as it was used in the pc cd-rom, mega-cd and 3d0 versions.

[s2325]

Really? I never saw it, thanks for info.

[stu232]

The only game I ever liked on the Philips CD-i was 'The 7th Guest'.

[lifeschool]

I used to work in the same industrial park as Phillips, their Blackburn branch, and was allowed to go into their canteen and shop during lunch. Played some CD-i Golf thing which looked better than Links Golf on PC but not by much. Yes the CD was manufactured and invented by Phillips and Sony together in a project for Nintendo around 1988. Nintendo pulled out of the deal and left phillips with a CD system they couldnt run games on, and Sony with a front end called 'Playstation' but no discs to use it with. I think Sony licenced the CD to make the Ps1 while Phillips took the long and slow way to develop a pretty crappy hardware package to use their CDs. Sony won.

Phillips big mistake was bad build quality (as usual) and a poor spec machine which relied on streaming sound and video rather than number-crunching 3D polygons.

[gimbal]

If I had the money I would have gotten a CD-i for the 7th Guest and Lost Eden. And then I'd have been royally pissed off because that would have been the ONLY thing I would have used the system for

Wasn't one of the breaking points which lead to not much software being developed the fact that you had ridiculously little space to store information in?

[Amicol]

Yeh, this is another system I spent a lot of money on at the time. Fond memories of playing Burn Cycle and 7th Guest, not much else. Oh and the FMV games like Dragons Lair 1 & 2, Space Ace etc. totally rubbish 'gameplay' but I loved the animation....
Still have everything in the loft

[Lonewolf10]

Originally Posted by lifeschool

Phillips big mistake was bad build quality (as usual) and a poor spec machine which relied on streaming sound and video rather than number-crunching 3D polygons.

True, but around the time the CD-i was lauched (1992-1994, IIRC) polygons were only just taking off. Virtua Fighter (arcade) and Virtua Cop (arcade) were among the few titles to show off the true potential off polygon based games (VR stuff at the time was nothing worth talking about - or atleast the stuff I saw wasn't), whilst on the console front Virtua Racing (Megadrive) and Starfox (SNES) were among the few polygon-based games wowing us at home. I still love the launch sequence from Starfox - "Good luck...".

[Cpt. Hindsight]

I can't say a lot about the CD-i (there were a lot of really crappy Zelda games for that system, right?).

Unlike the rest here, I'm quite convinced by Philips. My CRT TV is working fine for 15 years now and there is even a feature to stretch the picture. That's really nice for a PAL user who likes to play badly NTSC to PAL converted games like Final Fantasy X without the usual black borders. It's still 50Hz, but it's a lot better than the squeezed standard picture.

[s2325]

I think these Zelda games for CD-i were not bad, just cut scenes were hideous.