CD-I

[A Black Falcon]

The thing you usually hear about the CD-I is that it can do good-quality video, but for both hardware and game design reasons doesn't have much in the way of good action-style games.

Well, so far I'd say that yes, this is true. The system can indeed play some quite nice-quality video, either animated or live action. This is particularly true with the Digital Video Cartridge (DVC), which is required for full-screen video and also some games that use the hardware in it for more animation and such, but even without it the CD-I can do colorful, sharp graphics. Compared to the Turbo CD, which released several years before it, or the Sega CD, which released in Japan around the same time that the CD-I was first releasing here in the West, the CD-I, even without the DVC, can do better-looking video with a LOT more color. Sure, without the DVC videos play in a window, often a small one, but they look pretty nice. Backgrounds are often colorful and detailed as well; see the Zelda sidescrollers for examples of that, the backgrounds look like paintings. And of course thanks to the CD format, CD-I software often has voice acting and quality CD music.

Of course, however, having good graphics doesn't mean you have good gameplay, and that is where CD-I games usually founder. It's a fine platform for early '90s edutainment and educational software. The PC is of course better since even back then it has so many more releases, but some of this stuff is pretty entertaining. It's also got music CDs with graphics and the first Video CD movies, but I don't have any of those things, yet at least.

But the games? Well... well, I got a lot of 19 CD-I software items recently. These are all earlier releases ('91 to '93), in these CD-I exclusive, DVD case-sized boxes that are kind of tricky to open. I have seen three kinds of cases for CD-I games already, and these look nice, in their slipcovers anyway, but the latches are a pain. The discs are a mixture of games, edutainment, and more. I've tried a few so far:

Games

Jigsaw - This is a jigsaw puzzle game. It's well made and is good for the genre, with 64 pictures to choose, 12 different types of pieces to break those pictures up into, and four different piece sizes to use. With the more complicated types of pieces and small pieces, solving these puzzles might take a while, but you choose the difficulty. Of course, there is no progression here and nothing for the game to save, but while simple it's competently done.

International Tennis Open (1 player version) - This game has two revisions, this first one that's only for one player, and a later revision that adds a two player versus mode. I don't know if that revision makes any other changes, but going by this one, this game is a nice-looking tennis game with standard, average controls and gameplay for a tennis game of its time. So, expect timing your serves to be tricky, as hitting it out is very easy, aiming shots to be difficult, and for the AI to usually win. You do have a couple of different types of shot options, but the mediocre gameplay definitely doesn't match up to the digitized-actor character sprites and nice backgrounds. Also, you can only play as one character, creatively named Victor Player. V. Player, yeah... okay. There are eight digitized-actor guys in the game, but you can only play as one of them. There's plenty of voice acting here, from announcers and such, and again good visuals, but the gameplay's pretty 3rd-gen and average.

Video Speedway - This is an in-the-car style racing game. It's trying to be simmish, with a Formula One theme, but has a lot of problems. Visually, this game doesn't look as good as many CD-I games; either this hardware isn't good at this kind of fake-scaler-style racing game, or these developers aren't. I know it doesn't have hardware sprite scaling and rotation, and you can tell that in the game, but I'm sure you can do a lot better than this... not that anyone tried, as I think the only other couple of CD-I racing games are overhead, not in-the-car like this one. But the visuals aren't bad, just bland. The audio is worse, as it's really quite annoying; you reach maximum speed very quickly, and can stay at max speed through most of the race... if you stay awake that is, it's boring. Despite this you'll almost certainly lose badly, as the AI is almost impossibly good and finishes far ahead of you. There must be some trick to this game, but I don't know what it is and most people online don't either, as when I've heard about this game online the absurd challenge is almost always mentioned. Still, Video Speedway is a totally playable game, and it has an okay number of tracks and will save your best times and progress and such, which is nice. But with gameplay that is both boring and way too hard, unfortunately this one does seem to be not very good. I don't know that I can take much more of that incredibly annoying engine sound, but really overall my first impression here is that Video Speedway is below average and isn't really worth playing much, but perhaps not the horrible atrocity some people make it out to be; I've played worse for sure.

The Palm Springs Open is a golf game. As with the tennis game this game has pretty nice looking digitized actors for characters, and you've got photographs of the courses to play on, pretty much, but with constant slow load times and interface issues this game is slow, very slow... and I don't like golf games anyway. For 1991 hardware the still screenshots look good though.

Additionally I got Battleship and Connect Four, but haven't played them yet. They are conversions of the two board games of the same names and look like they play just about as you expect. So yeah, the early game library was like this stuff -- these five games, Dark Castle (which also was an early release), things like that... surely games worth paying $700-plus to get access to!

I haven't played the rest of the stuff in this bundle yet, but to list it all: Word/trivia games include Text Tiles (a word tile game, perhaps Scrabble inspired) and NFL Trivia Challenge (football trivia, circa the early '90s and before... yeah, I'd do just great at this... ); several kids' games/software toys: Tell Me Why Volume One, Tell Me Why Volume Two (discs answering questions about various things they think kids might want to know about), Richard Scarry's Busiest Neighborhood Disc Ever (based on the book, but with minigames and such), A Visit to Sesame Street: Numbers, Cartoon Jukebox (it's a music-first disc apparently), Mother Goose: Hidden Pictures (a find-the-differences game, see what's different between these two versions of an image), and Zombie Dinos from Planet Deltoid, an informative disc with dinosaur info and an adventure game where you have to save dinos from aliens, or something like that. It's apparently not as exciting as the name makes it sound, but I haven't tried it yet so you never know. And in the infomative-stuff-for-adults (or anyone) category: Time-Life 35mm Photography is a photography tutor game where you learn how to take good photos, National Parks Tour (look at photographs of places in national parks and read a bit about them.), Treasures of the Smithsonian is like that but for items in the Smithsonian museum's collection, and Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia is that popular early '90s CD encyclopedia, on CD-I. There are two versions of the disc, this original one and a later jewelcase release with Digital Video Cartridge support for full-screen video, but either way these things are quite silly from a modern perspective. We did have some things like this back in the mid '90s of course on PC, including Encarta and some other one, but the internet eventually rendered these irrelevant... and Compton's is no Encarta unfortunately.


But that's the CD-I -- the early library is stuff like this, and the later library is only kind of better -- Lucky Luke's a lot better than Dark Castle, but it's nothing above average in terms of gameplay, for instance. I still don't regret buying the system though, it's such a weird thing that it's fascinating to experience! And there are a few exclusives that I either like or see enough in to want to play more of, most notably Link: The Faces of Evil (flawed, yes, but interesting...) and Laser Lords, and I will definitely need to get Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon eventually. There are other games I'm interested in too, including Burn:Cycle, Accelerator, Zenith, Kether, and some more; the CD-I may not be some great action game format but it has enough weirdly interesting stuff to be kind of fascinating to use here and there.

Oh yeah, and the Game Pad controller is way more comfortable than I expected. It looks pretty average, but it actually works well and fits in the hand well. The rounded back parts are nice.