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.
Trilobyte’s haunted-house phenomenon needed the Digital Video Cartridge to exist on CD-i at all — and rewarded the upgrade with the format’s most atmospheric port. Welcome to the house.
A cyberpunk thriller with a two-hour real-time countdown, a soundtrack CD in the box and ambition the CD-i rarely saw. Burn:Cycle is the format’s one essential original — here is why.
Viridis’ top-down Zelda photographed real landscapes, filmed actors against blue screens and produced the most valuable disc on the format. Whether it produced a good game is another question.
Released the same day as The Faces of Evil, The Wand of Gamelon put Zelda herself in the lead for the first time — and is quietly the better-built of the pair. Our review explains the small margin.
Animation Magic’s first CD-i Zelda is a beautiful, broken thing: gorgeous painted worlds wrapped around controls that fight every step. We play it properly and score it plainly.
Fantasy Factory’s door-closing platformer gave the CD-i its most infamous Mario game — a tight arcade loop wrapped in the most quoted cutscenes ever animated. Our full review scores it honestly.
Scrapyard Dog, Zarlor Mercenary, Dracula the Undead, a chess computer and six more: ten games from the Lynx’s second shelf that the battery joke has hidden for thirty-five years.
A finished Eye of the Beholder nobody sold, an RPG rescued from floppy disks, and a catalogue full of promises: a tour of the forty cancelled games that shadow the Lynx library.
Songbird’s new releases, rescued prototypes, game-jam graduates and a French publisher: the Lynx’s release calendar is busy in 2026, three decades after the last official game.
Unlimited sprites, hardware scaling, a built-in maths unit and a chip named Suzy: the 16-megahertz graphics engine that gave the Lynx its look — and its appetite.