2015/12/26: Philips CD-i: Caesars World of Gambling, Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia

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2015/12/26: Philips CD-i: Caesars World of Gambling, Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia

Postby VideoGameCritic » December 26th, 2015, 12:28 pm

Hope you enjoy these reviews of two oddball CD-i titles.

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Rev
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Re: 2015/12/26: Philips CD-i: Caesars World of Gambling, Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia

Postby Rev » December 26th, 2015, 4:11 pm

Man, the CD-I knows how to makes games entertaining... An encyclopedia and a tour of Caesar's Palace in the 70's. How can I not pick these games up....? Still, these were fun reads. It's amazing all the "games" on the CD-I. Thanks for the reviews, they were fun reads.

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Re: 2015/12/26: Philips CD-i: Caesars World of Gambling, Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia

Postby Sut » December 26th, 2015, 4:49 pm

I've never played a CD-I and to be frank looking at it's library that's probably not a bad thing.
You must be really scraping the barrel to wind up reviewing an encyclopaedia!

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Re: 2015/12/26: Philips CD-i: Caesars World of Gambling, Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia

Postby VideoGameCritic » December 26th, 2015, 6:48 pm

I bought my CD-i from some lady (locally) about 15 years ago and it came with a bunch of random disks. One was Compton's Encyclopedia. I never thought I'd actually review it, but I noticed it on the shelf recently and thought it might make for a funny review.

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BlasteroidAli
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Re: 2015/12/26: Philips CD-i: Caesars World of Gambling, Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia

Postby BlasteroidAli » December 26th, 2015, 10:33 pm

I remember when the Philips cd i came out. It was vastly over priced and had no good games on it. So whilst I looked at it, it was not in awe. It was more like ahh... a video games player for people who do not know anything about video games. Sadly I was proven right.
Though as VGC points out there are many curios of interest for the retro gamer. I would never in a million years but it is intriguing.

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Re: 2015/12/26: Philips CD-i: Caesars World of Gambling, Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia

Postby goldenband » December 26th, 2015, 10:37 pm

CD-i reviews! Always glad to see those, even if the titles are a bit, er, unexpected. :) Hope to see more in the coming months.

Sut wrote:I've never played a CD-I and to be frank looking at it's library that's probably not a bad thing.
You must be really scraping the barrel to wind up reviewing an encyclopaedia!


The CD-i's not nearly as bad as its reputation if you're willing to put up with the production values and gameplay of an early 1990s CDROM game, which is pretty much what the CD-i does. I'm actually really impressed with the presentation on a lot of games -- menus, UI, that kind of stuff -- which is substantially better than the majority of its competitors.

There are a fair number of reviewable CD-i games left that the Critic hasn't covered, like the two Kingdom games (the first one is also on 3DO), which I liked a lot; Dimo's Quest, which is pretty decent; the tennis game (International Tennis Open); Steel Machine which is a port of a C64 shooter; etc. It's actually got a surprisingly big library, though you're not going to find anything that strays too far from the system's usual fare, and certainly no hidden-gem action games. Still, I bought a CD-i system earlier this year and have no regrets.

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Re: 2015/12/26: Philips CD-i: Caesars World of Gambling, Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia

Postby VideoGameCritic » December 27th, 2015, 10:26 am

goldenband,
Thanks for those recommendations. I want to review more games for the CD-i but I never know what's out there!
Now I have a few titles to track down. I did buy Clue recently.
VGC

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Re: 2015/12/26: Philips CD-i: Caesars World of Gambling, Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia

Postby Gleebergloben123 » December 27th, 2015, 5:06 pm

I thought the Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia review was pretty hilarious.

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Re: 2015/12/26: Philips CD-i: Caesars World of Gambling, Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia

Postby VideoGameCritic » December 27th, 2015, 7:10 pm

Thanks Gleeber! Glad someone found it funny.

By the way, I find it interesting how video-based CD-i games "require digital video cartridge". My system came equipped with one, but can you imagine how worthless the CD-i would be without it? Seems to be the full motion video is the one thing the system has going for it!

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Re: 2015/12/26: Philips CD-i: Caesars World of Gambling, Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia

Postby goldenband » December 28th, 2015, 12:51 pm

VideoGameCritic wrote:Thanks for those recommendations. I want to review more games for the CD-i but I never know what's out there!
Now I have a few titles to track down. I did buy Clue recently.


You're very welcome! There's an almost-complete list of CD-i games here:

We count a total of 133 released CD-i games

As you can see in the comments it's missing at least 5-6 games (plus some edutainment) and has 2-3 non-games included, but it's the closest thing to a good list that I know of. The CD-i release list is very very slippery, and much larger than I ever realized, thanks to all the movies, edutainment, multimedia discs, etc.

The Kingdom games (Kingdom: The Far Reaches and Kingdom II: Shadoan) would be my top picks for a review, though I haven't played them on CD-i (the first came out on 3DO and the latter I played on a Macintosh). They have a really interesting history: the first game was originally made for a failed laserdisc-based console and subsequently turned into an arcade game, while the sequel that completes the story came out over a decade later (!) and was a console exclusive for the CD-i (though it also came out on home computers and DVD).

Be warned that I actually found both games harder to play on the easier difficulty (Apprentice). The first game is shortened on Apprentice, with fewer puzzles to solve and scenes to see vs. the harder (Wizard) difficulty, but the cuts are confusing and end up leaving a lot of red herrings. Meanwhile Kingdom II had a game-breaking bug that only showed up for me on the easier difficulty, but maybe that was just the Mac version.


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