I may have covered this previously, but: Some fun(?) technical background on exactly *why* various CD-i games had these sorts of cutscenes.pic.twitter.com/6yRCBzVcbn
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Given that a full frame of 320x240 pixels at 16-bit color resolution is exactly 150 kilobytes, that would seem to mean that the best you could hope for is a "video" running at one frame per second. That's not a video, that's a slide-show. So, how do we solve it?
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Well, the Apple IIgs had a prescient aspect of its own video hardware: It supported run-length encoding (RLE) for graphics. The CD-i spec called for video hardware that could do RLE, too. In English: RLE is a value and a repeat count. "Blue, 25 times" instead of "blue blue bl...
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This was the key to compressing cutscenes to be small enough that they could be streamed at a reasonable frame rate. You'd load up a static background on one video plane, then stream RLE cartoons onto the second plane, layered on top. Easy.
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Now, none of this is meant to defend or approve of the atrocious art found in the CD-i Zelda games, or Hotel Mario. As RLE fills were limited to a single line (I believe), I can't think of a reason why some amount of shading couldn't have been done, as long as it was vertical.
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Beyond that, the art style was a grotesque caricature of humanity, more resembling strips of flesh welded to a metal frame, more resembling Animal Soccer World or Aladin from Dingo Pictures than any sort of memorable cartoon. But that's not the console's fault.
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So: Why did CD-i games have flat-shaded cartoons? To stream off of a 1x-speed disc, they had to. Why was the artwork so terrible? Blame the developers on that one. The CD-i itself was remarkably capable. That same RLE mode could have been used to do Starfox before Starfox.
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