The Philips CD-i is a failed system, best remembered for its weird 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.
There is just one problem with this story: Philips actually had been working on the CD-i long before the SNES existed. 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 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 the worst Zelda games ever made.
Similarly to the 3DO, Philips also licensed the CD-i standard to other hardware manufacturers.
The list
| Box Art | Title | Genre | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
|
The Apprentice | Platformer | A vertically scrolling platformer with some pretty good graphics. |
|
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. |
 
|
Link: The Faces of Evil Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon |
RPG/Action | These games got an undeservedly bad reputation over the years, but they're actually pretty good action RPG's similar to Zelda II: Adventure of Link. They have gotten the most hilariously atrocious cutscenes in the history of gaming (which were spoofed to death on Youtube), but beyond that there's nothing actually bad about the games at all (though they're definitely not amazing, they're not the pieces of trash everyone claims). You can read a very good article about them here! PRO TIP: Stay away from Zelda's Adventure, that one is really bad! |
|
Mutant Rampage: BodySlam | Beat 'em up | A competent, well-made brawler with hilariously corny cartoon cutscenes and even some mild nudity. |