Years and years ago (~2006-2007), after one of my many Wikipedia rabbit-hole nights, I stumbled upon the CD-i, and consequently the Zelda CD-i games. I immediately had to find an emulator, and play Faces of Evil, and I couldn't stop laughing once cut-scenes started playing.
I took my video camera, pointed it at my monitor (my computer was too slow for desktop capture), and sent the video to my friends, and it became a bit of a meme that we'd send each other. If I had only had the foresight to upload it to YouTube, I could have been the person responsible for the "My boy!" memes.
The games suffer from awful controls, but I actually did manage to complete Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon...there is a bit of fun to be had playing them, though you'd be better off finding one of the Link to the Past romhacks at this point if you want some more Zelda action.
You don't even need a romhack for Link to the Past now, it's available on the SNES virtual console for Switch. It's free aside from the cost of the Switch.
A romhack typically implies an edit of the original. The original is just called a 'rom', while a 'romhack' might include a different map, story, mechanics, etc.
The link to the past randomizer is a fairly notable romhack for link to the past that randomizes the locations of all items in the game. Another mashes up Super Metroid and Link to the Past, causing certain doors to travel between the games, collecting items in one that are accessible in the other. (E.g. you might find the bow and arrow in Norfair, or the Varia Suit in a dungeon.)
My favorite romhack is https://alttpr.com/en (A Link to the Past Randomizer). It basically takes your rom and swaps the location of all items in chests, pendants / crystals, and can even swap enemies, keys in dungeons (for cross dungeon shenanigans) and entrances.
So I much prefer the romhack to the original now, given my familiarity. Now if only I could play it on the switch...
Edit: a recent playthrough had me without the bow for much of the game. A different one had me start without my sword and I got through a dungeon before finding it. Fun times.
I think I didn't explain myself very well, so I apologize; I meant that if you've already exhausted one of the mainline Zelda games (which you probably have if you're looking at the Zelda CD-i games), then I would recommend one of the many many many fan romhacks out there that add new levels and characters. Emulating a CD-i is kind of a pain in the ass...installing romhack patches is too, but at least if you choose one of the more popular romhacks you'll at least get something decent.
I remember playing one of these games. It was super cool that you got to play as Zelda, but the controls where so unresponsive and awful. That ruined most of the experience. The graphics where very different then the competitors. That was also pretty cool. Think we borrowed the player from someone else for a couple of weeks. Thinks we knew more about the cd I because of my Dutch roots (philps). Also the console/video player was incredibly expressive at the time.
While these games have become infamous for the hilariously bad animation quality, the studio that did them continued to do work for the videogame industry. They were contracted out to do the animation for the ill-fated Warcraft Adventures game by Blizzard:
They also worked on IM Meen and its sequel, which retained a lot of the art style from the Zelda CD-i game animations (and garned some of the same internet infamy as a result).
Slightly OT. Whilst the CD-i was a poor seller and far from the best gaming console of its generation it had the best digital video playback of any platform on the market thanks to its excellent MPEG-1 decoding add-on.
PCs did have MPEG accelerator cards available but these were niche and expensive. The Philips CD-i offered this for less and in a convenient VCR type form factor - pitching itself as a premium Video-CD player with gaming thrown in.
This was important at the time since full motion video games like The 7th Guest and Rebel Assault were very popular. Some of these titles debuted on the CD-i and indeed offered the best experience there, better than even the PC by quite some margin.
I remember my jaw dropping when I played The 7th Guest on my friend's Philips CD-i. It was smooth as silk vs the jerky PC version.
Other titles like Space Ace and of course Burn Cycle were also incredibly impressive. Basically any game with heavy video elements played to the strengths of the CD-i in a pretty big way.
As gaming graphics started to improve FMV games became less popular and with DVD on the horizon the CD-i came to a dead end.
Mario Teaches Typing 2 was released in 1996 for PC and Mac. There are the mobile games for ios/android. And I saw an article that they were going to release some older (emulated) titles for nvidia shield in China.
I remember the CDi as an awful platform. My friend parents got one bundled when buying a big paper encyclopedia that came also with some "interactive content" CDs. Some sort of Encarta precursor.
So, from what I can recall right now, for interactive/video/hypertext content for that "encyclopedia" style stuff wasn't that bad. For games, at least with the selection my friend had at home, was awful, and we rather play with his Nes/Famicom clone.
Well, they're making phone games these days, and they made a bunch of edutainment PC games in the 90s (Mario Teaches Typing, Mario is Missing, etc.).
They didn't make the CD-i games. They did license out Zelda for it, though. The CD-i is a bit of a mess. There are YouTube videos of the games, they're quite atrocious :) There's also Hotel Mario [1] and the unreleased Super Mario's Wacky Worlds [2] on the CD-i as well.
You're better off watching the cutscenes on youtube, the game is truly terrible.
Also the CD-i focused on "interactive media" rather than what most would consider a good game. Hulk Hogan's "Thunder in Paradise" was a companion game to go along with his TV show. Youtuber SuperGreatFriend has a good playthrough of it. It looks awful.
The FMV-era is something that's more fun now than it was in the 90's I think; there seems to be a near-endless supply of these low-budget movie games, and the combination of terrible acting, cheap special effects, and over the top writing actually makes them incredibly fun to play on a so-bad-its-good level.
Honestly, even Thunder in Paradise has its moments if you play it with a group of friends to laugh at. As somewhat of a bad-movie lover, I actually have a more modern appreciation for the crap on the CD-i.
Not sure how much he paid for it, but my brother actually bought one of these travesties online not that long ago, so he could get the "real" experience playing these games on it. It looks like a VCR but feels like a lead brick to lift.
I have a strange memory about these games. Whenever I was a kid I was looking through some boxes and found a bunch of my older video game magazines. I saw an ad in GamePro for these games and Philips CD-i. I was shocked! How could I have missed multiple Zelda games being released on a console that used CDs? Why had I never heard of this? I am pretty sure that this would have been in 1998/1999 or so, but the magazine was much older.
It had a 1-800 number, which I called immediately to see if they were still selling the games and the system. Someone answered and they were still selling them, but I seem to remember the price being pretty high despite the age of the games and the system. Soon after I must have searched on the internet and discovered that it was mainly a system for edutainment games and lost interest.
Now I have to go look to see if there are any GamePro scans in the Internet Archive that have that ad.
edit (unrelated): Steel Machine was a decent shooter. I recently found some background info about the game and how it was like to develop for the CD-i at the time.
Oh man, I wanted the CD-i so badly because they had this infomercial and showed watching movies on CD, which was very exciting to a 10 or 11 year old me.
Very grateful my mom ignored me and and my protestations that we get one because if we had adopted this thing, I know the battle to get a DVD player in 1998 would have been way harder (even then, I had to get it as a DVD-ROM on the computer I got for Christmas and had to buy the stand-alone player myself in 1999 once I turned 16 and had a job).
Also, these games are complete trash. But this partnership was historically very interesting.
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I took my video camera, pointed it at my monitor (my computer was too slow for desktop capture), and sent the video to my friends, and it became a bit of a meme that we'd send each other. If I had only had the foresight to upload it to YouTube, I could have been the person responsible for the "My boy!" memes.
The games suffer from awful controls, but I actually did manage to complete Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon...there is a bit of fun to be had playing them, though you'd be better off finding one of the Link to the Past romhacks at this point if you want some more Zelda action.
The link to the past randomizer is a fairly notable romhack for link to the past that randomizes the locations of all items in the game. Another mashes up Super Metroid and Link to the Past, causing certain doors to travel between the games, collecting items in one that are accessible in the other. (E.g. you might find the bow and arrow in Norfair, or the Varia Suit in a dungeon.)
So I much prefer the romhack to the original now, given my familiarity. Now if only I could play it on the switch...
Edit: a recent playthrough had me without the bow for much of the game. A different one had me start without my sword and I got through a dungeon before finding it. Fun times.
If you have Twitch Prime, you can get up to a year for free but only through Tuesday.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warcraft_Adventures:_Lord_of_t...
Though the game was never released, someone leaked a copy years later, and playthroughs were subsequently uploaded online:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUNFrbpOSTE
Chill Manor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYGgLZL2vUU
PCs did have MPEG accelerator cards available but these were niche and expensive. The Philips CD-i offered this for less and in a convenient VCR type form factor - pitching itself as a premium Video-CD player with gaming thrown in.
This was important at the time since full motion video games like The 7th Guest and Rebel Assault were very popular. Some of these titles debuted on the CD-i and indeed offered the best experience there, better than even the PC by quite some margin.
I remember my jaw dropping when I played The 7th Guest on my friend's Philips CD-i. It was smooth as silk vs the jerky PC version.
Other titles like Space Ace and of course Burn Cycle were also incredibly impressive. Basically any game with heavy video elements played to the strengths of the CD-i in a pretty big way.
As gaming graphics started to improve FMV games became less popular and with DVD on the horizon the CD-i came to a dead end.
Up to you how much of that counts.
https://www.mariowiki.com/Mario_Teaches_Typing_2
So, from what I can recall right now, for interactive/video/hypertext content for that "encyclopedia" style stuff wasn't that bad. For games, at least with the selection my friend had at home, was awful, and we rather play with his Nes/Famicom clone.
However, we did get some of my favorite quotes out of it for the past few decades: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN8-Pdz-ns8
My wife and I often say 'I guess I better get going!' and 'How about a kiss, for luck?' to each other
Squadala we're off!
They didn't make the CD-i games. They did license out Zelda for it, though. The CD-i is a bit of a mess. There are YouTube videos of the games, they're quite atrocious :) There's also Hotel Mario [1] and the unreleased Super Mario's Wacky Worlds [2] on the CD-i as well.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Mario [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario%27s_Wacky_Worlds
Also the CD-i focused on "interactive media" rather than what most would consider a good game. Hulk Hogan's "Thunder in Paradise" was a companion game to go along with his TV show. Youtuber SuperGreatFriend has a good playthrough of it. It looks awful.
Honestly, even Thunder in Paradise has its moments if you play it with a group of friends to laugh at. As somewhat of a bad-movie lover, I actually have a more modern appreciation for the crap on the CD-i.
Nintendo has released several mobile games in recent years. They didn't develop them—but then, Nintendo didn't develop these CD-i games either.
Dead Comment
It had a 1-800 number, which I called immediately to see if they were still selling the games and the system. Someone answered and they were still selling them, but I seem to remember the price being pretty high despite the age of the games and the system. Soon after I must have searched on the internet and discovered that it was mainly a system for edutainment games and lost interest.
Now I have to go look to see if there are any GamePro scans in the Internet Archive that have that ad.
It also had cringeworthy cut-scenes though :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxKCqxAWXmo
edit (unrelated): Steel Machine was a decent shooter. I recently found some background info about the game and how it was like to develop for the CD-i at the time.
http://www.cdinteractive.co.uk/forums/cdinteractive/viewtopi...
Very grateful my mom ignored me and and my protestations that we get one because if we had adopted this thing, I know the battle to get a DVD player in 1998 would have been way harder (even then, I had to get it as a DVD-ROM on the computer I got for Christmas and had to buy the stand-alone player myself in 1999 once I turned 16 and had a job).
Also, these games are complete trash. But this partnership was historically very interesting.