Chaos Control

Despite Chad's warnings and mostly negative reviews of CD-i games I bought a second-handed CD-i. Of course, such an action needs an explanation. First of all, you have to realize Philips is a Dutch company. That means a lot of CD-i players were produced in the Netherlands, where I happen to live. Anyway, the system flopped just as much in the home country as in the rest of the world. Everyone wants to get rid of that room taking, useless device, so you can get one for almost nothing in Holland on the second-hand market. It also isn't too hard to get the games, since most were also produced and released by Philips themselves. So I bought one because it was cheap and I like to collect silly defunct systems so I can check out if they were really so crap as everyone says they were.

The first game I inserted into my new defunct console fulfilled the expectations which one created of the quality of CD-i games. Chaos Control is crap, crap painted up with fancy graphics.

The story behind the game can be watched in a boring lengthy introduction, but the plot is pretty basic. There are aliens attacking Earth, kill them all! The game is the CD-i equal of the first Rebel Assault only with even LESS interaction. That actually means that the player can't in any way influence the way in which his starship is moving. He or she just watches the ship automatically maneuvering among landscapes which are sometimes decent rendered and sometimes average. The only thing to do is aim the cursor and shoot enemies. The first level in which you fly near the Statue of Liberty looks quite good for a CD-i action title, but the later stages are boring without many colors and with the addition of dull enemies.

The sound of your laser, however, will drive you insane. On a few occasions an average electro-tune can be heard, but overall you just hear your canon and the explosions of shot enemies. The laser sounds more like a badly loaded cannon out of the Middle Ages than a laser. Together with the crappy shooting sounds is a robotic voice that yells "overheat!" 25 times a minute.

That annoying voice is complementary to the gameplay. Because the only thing to do is shoot; the player should be able to just hold the shoot-button down and be on his way. But unfortunately that it isn't possible. There is a meter for your laser as well, and if you use your weapon too much at once I won't shoot anymore for a short while ("OVERHEAT! OVERHEAT!"). If you're having Freudian associations here, you're not the only one. So you'll find yourself pressing the shooting button like a freaking maniac, until you hardly have a thumb left. With that the cursor easily gets lost in the ugly mess of explosions, and there seems no way to avoid enemy shots - you'll take a lot of cheap hits.

Maybe Chaos Control looked impressive in 1994, but nowadays it won't impress anyone anymore. Since the game was never any fun, neither back then nor in the year 2006, it's in our best interest to leave it alone and forget this pathetic shooter ever existed. Why Philips disgraced themselves even further by re-releasing this garbage for Saturn and PC is incomprehensible. Maybe it proves that their idea of what a decent game should be differs enormously from the rest of the game playing population.