Originally posted by: XYZ
No surprise the first thing people talk about w/ CDI is the Zelda games. There are quite a few awesome games on the system. I highly recommend Zenith, nothing quite like it other than maybe a Virtual Boy game. I also really enjoy Inca, which is an underrated game.
I have around 40 titles and that's still what I immediately talk about when CD-i comes up (well, those and Tetris).
I recall seeing the system demonstrated in Macy's opposite the 3DO. Of course, the 3DO stole much of the thunder, but I still sat through, watched both demos loop, and listened to the sales pitches (each had someone paid to stand next to it and promote it). One sales person told me that CD-i was supposed to be the open-standard "VCR of CD videogames." Years later, I found out that the 3DO was pitched to investors the same way. I wasn't aware of the VHS/Beta format wars (thought all VCRs were VHS) but I knew that they were made by multiple manufacturers and all played the same movies, so the analogy worked.
Later I saw Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon in a then-current Babbages flyer and thought "What on Earth?! How did this happen?!" I wasn't subscribed to Nintendo Power yet so I didn't even know about the proposed SNES CD system.
I still wasn't interested in buying a CD-i. The demo made it clear to me that it was really more for encyclopedias and stuff and that 3DO was the system to have if you wanted games and didn't want to wait for Saturn/PlayStation.
I'd suggest some like Defender of the Crown except that it exists on other platforms and I have no reason to think that the CD-i version is particularly good in comparison (Tetris certainly isn't).