The game stars a goofy sorcerer’s apprentice who works his way through six levels by jumping on enemies and shooting things with his magic wand. The Apprentice is one of the few platformers on the CD-i. The 3D environments are completely unconvincing and the acting is pretty hammy, but Burn:Cycle is still the best example of an “interactive movie” released on the CD-i. The game culminates in a complex Pac-Man-inspired maze, and players wil also get to partake in games of chance or test their skills in a mini-game based on wiring circuits. The gameplay mostly consists of clicking on various items in the background, but it occasionally adds some excitement with a shooting section or a puzzle. With only two hours before his brain deteriorates completely, the game is a race against time as the player attempts to find a cure. The game’s story revolves around a small-time electronic data thief whose brain is implanted with a virus.
Many games that used extensive FMV played out like a series of continuous quicktime events, but Burn:Cycle is a cross between an interactive movie and a point-and-click adventure game. The game played to the system’s strengths and focused heavily on full-motion video. Classic Mario and his glowing pants, right?īurn:Cycle may very well be the closest thing the CD-i had to a killer app. The game features a fire flower which allows players to shoot fireballs and a power mushroom that gives the player glowing pants and allows them to withstand an extra hit. No Mario game would be complete without cool power-ups, and Hotel Mario delivers. If the action gets too intense, the brothers Mario can step into an open door for a breather while their enemies walk on by. The roster of enemies includes familiar faces like Goombas, Koopas, Boos, and never-ending onslaughts of Wigglers. Players will fail if they touch an enemy, run out of time, or fall off the edge of one of the floors.
The goal in each stage is to negotiate a multi-floored hotel and close all of the doors for reasons that are never adequately explained. The game harkens back to single-screen arcade platformers from the early ’80s and could almost be described as a worse version of Door Door. And what did Philips do with the most powerful licenses in the entire industry, you ask? They farmed them out to unproven developers and released shovelware, of course! The three Zelda games released on the CD-i were hilariously bad, but Hotel Mario was kind of okay aside from its horrendous animated cutscenes. During negotiations between Philips and Nintendo regarding the unreleased CD add-on to the Super NES, Philips somehow managed to secure the rights to use Nintendo characters in CD-i third-party developed games.