The 10 Worst Philips CD-i Games

I'm a sucker for a good vertical shooter, with Strikers 1945 holding a special place in my heart, to the point I own the arcade cabinet. That said, it should't be all that difficult to make a competent vertical shooter on any platform. A cool looking ship, some basic enemies and a varied set of enemy patterns and stages. Alien Gate has none of these things.

You pilot what looks like an A-Wing with cartoon hands and feet and fly over stages that make no logical sense in any universe. The layout simply doesn't work as you are too close the the face that constantly spits our enemies at you. The game is bad and the deverlopers should feel bad. I'd say more about them but there isn't even a Wikipedia page for the game, so this little blurb is more than anyone has probably ever written about Alien Gate.

I think there was some sort of mandate that required CD-i games to make no sense. I watched the intro to Atlantis - The Last Resort half a dozen times and I'm more confused now than before I watched it. When the game starts things don't get much better as you get a strange FPS that places you someplace(?) surrounded buy large turd trees.

Oh, and you shoot crabs, dragons and colon monsters and minature Silver Surfer knockoffs using your non-existant crotch rifle, thingy. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go watch more of this game and try to picture just what the hell was going on in the developers heads.

Connect Four was a launch title for the Philips CD-i and is the biggest "Fuck You!" to gamers. It's just the game Conenct Four, you know, the game you can get for $10 at every store that sells toys.

Hope you had fun spending $600 on the console and $60 on the crappiest version of Connect Four ever, assholes. It's a wonder how the Philips CD-i never took off with consumers with industry pushing game like Connect-fucking-Four.

Mutant Rampage: Body Slam is a fucking nightmare of a "thing". It's the sort of game that is thought up by a group of six-year-old who are sick with the flu. The worst/best part of the game is the insane animation. If you weren't paying attention you'd be forgiven for thinking you were watching an episode of that really messed animated Adult Swim show Super Jail.

Mutant Rampage: Body Slam isn't a wrestling game (pretty sure there aren't any on the system), but instead a side-scrolling beat 'em up in the vain of Final Fight, but nowhere near as good. On any other system the game would be pretty bad, but on the CD-i it's a hidden gem, even if it still sucks mutant balls. The voice acting is pretty good so that's something. Right?

Tetsuo Gaiden might sound like to a cool ninja themed game, but in reality it's just a really poor man's Galaga clone. Yeah, what I'm saying is that Galaga, a game that came out several years before this, puts Tetsuo Gaiden
to shame in all departments. I'm not sure who made the game but the death sounds of the enemy ships seem lifted straight from Galaga. The game is really slow and while the screen looks like it's scrolling, it really isn't.

You are stuck on the single left to right plane like Space Invaders. You get some poor techno music and a guy yelling "Score increase" every time, well, your score increases. I'm starting to think so many of thee CD-i games were simply jokes because Tetsuo Gaiden can't even hold a candle to the poorest NES games from two generations before this.

The team behind Dark Castle had one hell of a plan when making their game; get the damn thing on anything that could play video games regardless on controller input. Before people were putting the original DOOM on everything, the people behind Dark Castle were doing the same thing, only in an official capacity. The game originally came out in 1986 for the Macintosh and was in black & white and used an odd keyboard and mouse combo for controls.

All future versions of the game (including this CD-i version) were essentially ports with none designed specifically for the system they were on, thus all the control issues that game deals with. To give the game a little credit, that original B&W Mac version was actually a pretty darn cool game for the time and platform it was on. Such a shame they just milked.

Christmas Crisis is not a good game, but even saying that it's still probably the best traditional platformer on the console. You play as Santa and you hit blocks like in the original Mario Bros. (the non-super arcade version) and collect the presents that come out. And that really about it. The game does absolutely nothing to make the CD-i look good as the game could easily be done on both the SNES and Genesis, and probably even the Master System.

You get the standard CD sound, but as it's all Christmas music it really isn't great. The team also couldn't figure out how to properly loop audio so the games soundtrack feels like your are listening to a CD with stops between each track. Also, the game is just sort of stupid and you won't be playing it 11 months out of the year.

Carnival by Coleco was a fun little game that was on the Atari 2600. I mention this because Mystic Midway: Rest in Pieces is pretty much the same game. In fact, it might be worse because how it uses the CD-i technology to trick the player. Mystic Midway: Rest in Pieces starts off with you in purgatory, or something like that, and you get a pretty awesome FMV of some dude laying everything out.

It's damn cool and the acting is spot on, so when it tosses you into the game which is nothing but a shooting gallery, you'll be really pissed. $600 for a console and probably another $40 for this piece of crap all while you could have bought a Super Nintendo that came bundled with Super Mario World. The CD-i was the worst way to sell people on CD technology when this is the best they can do.

On the surface Chaos Control looks like a pretty awesome game. The graphics look really slick and flying about looks fun. The problem is that Chaos Control --much like many CD-i games-- was a complete lie. The entire game is simply a video created using very primitive 3D animation.

You simply move the crosshairs across the screen shooting at the enemies that come at you. As everything is pre-recorded you can't actually kill anything and the game simply puts a smoke overaly over the enemy ships if you do hit them. Hell, I'm not even quite sure if you can even die while playing. Since nothing ever changes you can figure out the entire game after a few runs.

Okay, so there was no way I could make a list of CD-i games and not mention these two very, VERY non-canon Zelda games. I'm leaving out the third entry, not because it's good (it's not), but because you at least get to play the entire game as Zelda and that's pretty cool in theory. These others don't get any breaks as they are utterly terrible. The gameplay isn't quite broken, but it doesn't quite work right either. It all depends on the controller that you use with the CD-i, but whatever you use you are going to have a bad time.

The real painful stuff comes from the animated cut-scenes that the game employs to shockingly bad effect. But the thing that pisses me off the most are the covers the games use for their CD cases. Both games, instead of creating something totally original or have the art department put something together, just used promotional art of Link and Zelda from The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past. So you have the worst Zelda games ever (so bad Nintendo won't even mention they even exist) using art from the best Zelda game ever. Also, some of those cut-scenes are fucking terrifying