From the Vault columnist. Grew up feeding quarters to the Ms. Pac-Man machine at his uncle's pizza place; still owns his childhood SNES and every Nintendo Power he ever begged his mother for. Writes the retrospectives and the hidden-gem hunts.
Infogrames’ flagship for the Digital Video Cartridge: anime briefings, full-screen rendered flight and a cursor where a light gun should be. GamePro’s CD-i game of 1995, reappraised.
Philips’ Tetris plays its falling blocks against filmed waterfalls to Jim Andron’s serene score — a mediocre conversion wrapped around a soundtrack that later conquered vaporwave.
Infogrames built a stern, statistical tennis simulation — with television phone-in pedigree — for a machine sold to families. One of the deepest sports games of its era, hiding in plain sight.
Gremlin’s Mutt hunts the Mystical Pizza of Plenty through fifty inventive dungeon rooms. The tunnels tax you; the rooms repay you. The CD-i’s best cartoon game by a distance.
Guy Selva’s spaceflight adventure split 1993’s reviewers between dazzled and frustrated. Thirty years on, we settle it: a beautiful, demanding oddity that only the CD-i would have published.
SPC Vision rebuilt an Amiga frog puzzler into a skateboard-kid charmer for the CD-i: 51 levels of keys, boxes and crumbling floors. The format’s best pure puzzle game.
No home version could match the laserdisc original — but the CD-i’s full-screen video came closest of the cartridge-era ports. Dirk the Daring, preserved in full cartoon colour.
Cyan’s island of books and brothers reached Europe’s CD-i players in 1996 — the reference-shelf machine meeting the games shelf on a single disc. A gentle port of a gentle landmark.
Delphine’s rotoscoped classic arrived on CD-i with its vector cutscenes replaced by rendered, voiced cinema. The game underneath remains one of the finest action-adventures of its generation.
DMA’s masterpiece reached the CD-i with all 120 levels and a charming film intro — and a conversion that forgot televisions are not monitors. A great game in a careless port.