Mario's Wacky Worlds and the Zelda CD-I games

I got a new toy yesterday - something I had passed up a few years back (presumably because these babys were really really expensive and didn't offer much bang for the buck). I just got a shiny almost new Philips CD-I player. This was one of those multi-media systems that came out around the same time as the Playstation, Saturn, 3DO and the Jaguar and touted itself as a "multi-media" device. It played music CDs, Video CDs and special CD-I (I for "Interactive") discs, some of which qualified as video games. When I caught wind of a lost Mario game that was fabled to exist for the system, I dug and dug until I found a copy of it on the net. Since there aren't any actually working emulators for the CD-I system, I was forced to purchase one in order to play this Mario game that never was. I was surprised to discover a small but rather dedicated fan following for this platform.

The lost Mario game was about what you can expect from a very early alpha prototype. The levels are there but there is no continuity between them. The code for Mario dying doesn't exist yet so he can't be hurt - there are no bottomless pits. The system has to be reset to get back to the menu because there is not in-game menu or way to exit the stage. The stages themselves would have been impressive if released back in 1993. And the control is surprisingly close to the the real Super Mario World, which, based on what I've read is really impressive. It's beyond the base capabilities of the CD-I system. If this game had been completed, it may have actually saved the CD-I format. It makes me wonder about how many other little gems like this were just washed away into obscurity by money troubles.

This platform is also host to an infamous trio of games (I use the term loosely) based on the Legend of Zelda series. These were the fallout from a deal that Nintendo made with Philips back when the company had been commissioned to provide the CD-ROM add-on for the Super Famicom/Super Nintendo (around 1992). I also acquired this trio of games and I have to say after having played them first hand that they're not horribly scar-you-for-life bad like everyone likes to say. True, they don't come close to measuring up to the standard set by the real thing, but if there had been a competent artist/animator working on them, they wouldn't have been so craptacular. It looks very much like someone was trying to storyboard everything to get the syncing and voice acting done with every intention of going back with a proper artist and re-animating everything. The games Link: Faces of Evil and Zelda: Wand of Gamelon were animated and voiced with intentional humor. The animation itself was surprisingly fluid, albiet still badly drawn, but these games weren't even trying to be serious Zelda games. Once you get past the animation sequences, there's actually a halfway passable platform game underneath, in the vein of Zelda II. I think the biggest shortcomming of these two games has to be the fact that the animation and dialogue were clearly aimed at younger children, but the difficulty is so high that I doubt many young children would enjoy playing them. The third game, Zelda's adventure was probably the worst of the lot. I was actually surprised by this because I had heard from several sources that it was the best. While the game actually makes a stab at being a proper RPG (it actually has an equipment menu), everything in the game is a digitized bitmap (ala Mortal Kombat and Pit Fighter) which means that there was no art direction whatsoever. The acting and plot are laughable, largely because they are attempting to be so serious. Frame rate wasn't something that we used to think about back in the days of 2D gaming, but it actually becomes an issue here.

In conclusion, I agree that these are clearly the worst Zelda games ever made, but given the standard set by Zelda games in general they're aren't absolutely horrible.