Is the CD-i the world's best gaming system? Definitely no. But are the memes about the CD-i overblown? Yeah actually! The CD-i has some genuinely good games, a bunch of games that are just so weird they're fun to talk about, and yeah it's got the just plain bad games that are fun for being bad. So let's talk about more than Zelda and Mario memes!
I also really like Laser Lords, an extremely weird claymation western RPG where the main game mechanic is collecting nouns that people bring up in conversation. It's weird and unpolished with frankly pretty frustrating combat, which is to say it's like a lot of DOS-era western RPGs too. If you can come to terms with the frustrating bits there's not much else out there like it.
And if you want to actually try CD-i for yourself? Actually a lot easier than it used to be! MAME has pretty good CD-i emulation these days, and MAME frontends like Retroarch should be able to play most games just fine. There's also a paid CD-i emulator with even better compatibility.
