Happy Easter! CD-i member Jaco van Schie asks us if there are any Easter eggs hidden in CD-i games? Of course we remember the well-known naked and violent scenes in The Apprentice: When you push a certain combination of buttons at the right time, the 'Nudality' or 'Fatality' scene will start. You can find the details here. The Apprentice has another Easter egg with the game 'Marvinvaders', which can be unlocked as described in this article. I always wonder, which such attention to detail in the SPC Vision game 'The Apprentice' to this kind of Easter eggs, if other games by The Vision Factory also featured an Easter egg that we just do not know about, including Dimo's Quest, Lucky Luke, Steel Machine or one of the others?
Are there more? Yes, there are more programmer's trick for you to discover. One of the lesser known Easter egg is the singing referee in Striker Pro. And we invite you to discover when it will happen, but at certain conditions, the referee will walk to the middle of the screen and starts to sing the song 'My Way' (by Frank Sinatra). We talked about it many years back but unfortunately I can't find the original post on the forum anymore. Who remembers the singing referee?
Other than that, thanks to the internal clock of the CD-i, a couple of software tricks were in a few games. If you remember, every time you select a level in Hotel Mario it would show a black screen and then display something like, "Morton Koopa and his creepy pals are waiting for your arrival!"
And then a couple seconds later it would display one of the special
messages based on the internal clock of the CD-i player, with "Here We
Go" being the default one. It's one of the few times I find out how a
CD-i game actually makes use of the internal clock. At certain days, the message will change into this one:
Happy New Year:January 1st
Happy Valentines Day:14th of February
Do Not Forget Mothers Day:2nd Sunday of May
Schools Almost Out:End of May
Happy Fathers Day:3rd Sunday of June
Happy Fourth Of July:July 4th, silly!
Ready To Go Back To School:End of August
BOOOOOOOOO:October 31st
Happy Turkey Day Gobble Gobble:4th Thursday of November
Happy Holidays:From the middle of December to January 1st
Here We Go:Default
Its Hollies Birthday:Sometime between New Years and Valentines Day. Refers to Hollie S. Lohff, the play consultant on this game.
These are the dates specified in the US version of the game. I'm not
sure if they localized these dates when they released it outside of the
US.
Less of an 'Easter egg', but it was nice to discover the behaviour of Maxx in the CD-i game Max Magic. The personal character Maxx tells you things depending on the time od day and the date. For example: Maxx always has something different to say. It's worth just to start the disc to have a chat with Maxx. You'll notice as Maxx wants to sleep at night. If you start the disc at night, you'll find Maxx sleeping. Ofcourse he wakes up, mumbling: "You know it's passed my bedtime, Bas!"
There is a dog walking in the scenery of Tetris, 'at certain
conditions'..... This happens to be a programmer joke by David Todd,
anyone ever seen this dog? I remember that there wasn't anything that
triggered this. It just happened. It's mentioned in one of the Dutch
CD-i magazines. The scenery of Tetris was in fact a looping movie and
this scene had at one point a dog walking in the sand. It was over in
seconds and you had to pay attention to it otherwise you missed it.
Small jokes like this we like a lot here and I wonder if any more CD-i
developers have programmed some jokes in CD-i games that happened at
certain conditions! Who else has spotted the Tetris dog in the CD-i
version?
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