We are happy to see more interest in the CD-i system lately with great initiatives like the Preserve CD-i blog and the upcoming 'Popular Retro' CD-i coverage. Now, another interesting blog has been active for a year but slipped our eyes: CD-i member Dante (aka alarmsoundslikewhoop) presented himself as The CD-i Completionist: He is going to review every single CD-i game (or title?). He already published quite some reviews (find the index here) including more rare CD-i games like Jeopardy, Name that Tune, Christmas Country and also high profile CD-i titles like The 7th Guest and Who Shot Johhny Rock. Dante: "I’d always wanted a CD-i console since I first played it at the Virgin Megastore in West Los Angeles in the early 90s, and in 2020 I finally purchased one. Though there are some CD-i resources online, it doesn’t have nearly the coverage of its fellow retro console brethren. So I thought, gee, should I play and review every CD-i game? And here we are."Let's have a look at some of the reviews.
One of our personal favourites in Inca. Dante: "You fly from location to location, engaging in first-person space combat, either with asteroids or with enemy ships. It works surprisingly well, and there aren’t a lot of slowdown or other issues as you rotate your ship in any direction, trying to catch the enemy in your radar and take them out. It’s all a little abstract, and certainly doesn’t compare to the dedicated space combat games of the day, but at least it’s functional. "
Litil Divil is another great game in our opinion, but Dante has a different look at it: "There’s no on-screen indication about what you can interact with and what you can’t, and so some rooms took me a few minutes of wandering around, achieving nothing, until I stood in the exact right spot to trigger something to happen, which may be only a pixel or so to the left and right of other spots I’d already tried. "
Alice in Wonderland is a platform/adventure which is always catching attention of people who play this, together with Laser Lords these two are rather underestimated CD-i gems. Dante: "The Alice novels are some of my all-time favorites. I don’t know if this completely captures their spirit, but it does an admirable job reworking the locations, characters, and various elements into what’s ultimately a rather traditional (if a bit basic) adventure game."
All in all, we really recommend these reviews, they are certainly above the current average CD-i reviews that appear nowadays. We'll keep our eyes open for new articles :)
[Thanks, Dante from The CD-i Completionist]
