Electronic Gaming Monthly's Top 13 Philips CD-i Games

Long before Sony, Sega and even SNK released dedicated CD-based consoles, there was the Philips CD-i. Released in the early 1990s as a way to use the emerging CD-ROM technology as vessel for education and reference applications, this expensive console was aimed directly at parents who were in the market for a set-top box that did more than just play mindless video games. Philips was gambling on edutainment, hoping for a future where you were just as likely to take a virtual tour through an art museum as you are to shoot down demons in a first-person action game.

In the eight years that Philips kept the CD-i dream alive, there were a total of 208 games released for the system. Electronic Gaming Monthly managed to review ... 13 of them. Okay, so that’s not very many. In fact, it’s only 6% of the library. To be fair to EGM, there were a lot of systems vying for attention at the time and only so many critics on hand. What’s more, the CD-i never caught on, selling only a million units and focusing more on the edutainment titles that EGM usually ignored. Instead of dwelling on all of the games the magazine skipped over, I instead want to highlight the thirteen titles they bothered to review. What we’re going to do is countdown the best and worst CD-i games using Electronic Gaming Monthly’s own words and scores. There’s no editorializing here, we’re going to focus on what the critics said back when these games first came out. Join me for this incredibly niche episode of EGM Ranks the Philips CD-i!

0:00 – Introduction
1:52 – Commercial: Philips CD-i (Phil Hartman)
2:24 – Who Shot Johnny Rock?
3:05 – Kether
3:35 – Lemmings
4:08 – Litil Divil
4:38 – Hotel Mario
4:55 – Axis & Allies
5:17 – Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp
5:50 – Dragon’s Lair
6:19 – Caesar’s World of Boxing
6:39 – Space Ace
7:09 – NFL Hall of Fame Football
7:33 – The 7th Guest
8:05 – Burn:Cycle
8:44 – Commercial: Burn:Cycle
9:15 – Question of the Day

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