Category: Philips

Philips Archives | A collection of posts relating to the Philips family of computers and games.

Hotel Mario: Philips CD-i May Review

Posted by  on May 1, 2021

Hotel Mario: May featured game

Mario’s first outing on the Philips CD-i comes in the shape of Hotel Mario.

Hotel Mario: Philips CD-iHotel Mario: Level 1

I’ve seen Hotel Mario slated on many occasions. As a Mario game I can understand the dislike but I prefer to look at Hotel Mario as an ode to the Golden Age arcade era. If you strip away the Mario-ness of it all and look at Hotel Mario for what it is then there’s a game akin to the likes of Donkey Kong or Burgertime, admittedly 10-15 years too late, but it can still be fun.

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Philips CDi and a little confusion from the internet

Posted by  on May 21, 2018

I got my hands on a Philips CDi

While browsing a local charity shop a couple of weeks back, amongst the Hi-Fi equipment, something caught my eye. A Philips CDi 210/45.

Philips CDi

A price label was just about visible as I leaned over some TVs to the shelving the CDi was sitting on. I pulled the unit closer and the price label had “£20 -no remote” written on it. I bought it anyway figuring I can get a remote later.

Only vaguely recalling the CDi back in the day I decided to do a little research on the internet. There was a demo model up and running in Heward’s Home Stores I remembered seeing and that there were some really awful Zelda games for it but that was as much as I knew.

This is where the confusion comes in.

Every review I read, every Youtube video I watched, every forum thread I found all spoke of a major irritant with the CDi. Even though there was a controller socket on the front the gamepad didn’t work in there, only the wired remote.

Now, I have no idea what the people on these sites are talking about because I bought both kinds of gamepad on eBay and both work just fine in the front input socket. Unless my Philips CDi is some kind of unique unit there must be a lot of people out there in internet land with broken CDi’s.

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