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POD

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POD (also known as POD: Planet of Death in Germany) is a futuristic racing video game for Microsoft Windows released by Ubi Soft in 1997.

A previous version of POD, known as POD 1.0 or POD: OEM, was bundled together with MMX systems in 1996. Later, this version was released, being the proper 'retail' version of the game, and version 2.0. Owners of the 1.0 version could also upgrade to 2.0 with a patch that was available in UbiSoft's website at the time.

The retail version features Multiplayer, 3DFX support, slightly redone physics, minor differences in some of the car textures and 4 extra tracks.

Gameplay

The game features several different modes of gameplay, such as Single Race, Championship, Custom Championship, Multiplayer, Time Attack, and more.

The normal championship mode features all tracks from the game, with the ability to save after every race. The goal is to get the most points by winning as often as possible in the races.

There are three difficulty and damage options to choose from. Each difficulty level changes the speed of the cars and the opponents, as well as their behavior, with more difficult levels making them much more agressive and less prone to failures. The damage options are: Off, Global and Sector. You can only turn off the damage in Easy mode. Global and Sector are the only options on Normal, and Sector is the only option on Hard.

Story

The game is set in the distant future on the planet Io. A mining accident unleashes a fungus from within the planet on its inhabitants, causing widespread panic. After most of the population escapes the planet, a few survivors remain on Io, with only one ship remaining. The survivors soup up cars which they race in tournaments, the winner of the final tournament taking the last ship and escaping to safety, leaving the others to die.

The following information has been transcribed from the introduction video, which is voiced by one of the racers remaining on Io. (Possibly Manzano or police captain Derek Stealth)

It'll be over soon; everything will be gone, and this place will be forgotten.

It's too bad really, because the whole thing started out so well. Io is—I mean, was—one of the most successful new planets. It was colonized rapidly, industries developed, and people came from everywhere to take advantage of the work opportunities here.

For years, we all prospered. It was like living on a new frontier. And then...it all came to a halt. An accident in one of the mines exposed some sort of virus.

The press called it..."POD". It's practically destroyed everything here.

Everyone has left Io now—or at least, almost everyone. A few of us stayed behind, some by choice, others because they had no choice. Our days are numbered now. We're all doomed, all except for one person. There is one ship left, one of us will get away to safety. POD is in the final stages of its destructive cycle. Planet Io and everyone left on it will die.

To kill time, we've been using parts from abandoned factories and forgotten equipment to transform cars into super-powered vehicles and race them around the empty streets of Io. Today's races aren't like the others, though. Today each driver is racing for his life. The winner will take that one remaining place in the last ship. The others? Well...

Characters

While not the main focus of the game, several characters exist in the archives from the game's manual, its website and other stories. They mostly focus on the story of Captain Derek Stealth, which voluntered to stay behind to hunt looters.

Cars

The cars from POD seem to mostly stem from super-powered junk cars, each of them having a unique body design and paintjob.

The original game included 8 cars. Several downloadable cars were released after the game's launch.

Tracks

The tracks from POD mostly stem from the ruined cities of New Columbus, but all of them are unique from one another, never sharing the same visuals. Other types of environments include a red desert, mining facilities and a wild jungle not occupied by civilization.

The original game included 16 tracks, four of them being new to this release (Beltane, Roc, Nuke and Bank). Several downloadable tracks were released after the game's launch.

History

Influences on POD included Super Mario Kart and Ridge Racer.

POD was published in 1997. It was one of the first games to support the MMX instruction set and came bundled as an OEM version with computers using Intel Pentium or Pentium II MMX processors, and some AMD K6 systems. The OEM 1.0 version did not support 3dfx cards or a network mode.

Later, a demo for the retail version of POD (called POD 2.0 by Ubisoft) was released March 5, 1997.[2] The actual full version was released a later on the 28th of the same month. It featured more circuits, plus support for 3dfx video cards and network play. A special multiplayer program called "Game Service" was provided by Ubisoft for POD players so that they could race on Ubisoft servers. POD was among the first games optimized for video cards with a 3dfx chipset using the Glide API. Only video cards with the 3dfx Voodoo 1 chipset were supported upon the game's release. Ubisoft later published patches which added support for the Voodoo 2 using the Glide API and non-3dfx chipsets via Direct3D.

Less than a year after publishing POD, Ubisoft issued another version called POD: Gold, which included POD, eight extra cars, sixteen extra tracks, and a new sound set. Later in that same year, a expansion pack under the title Extended Time (also known as Back to Hell in other countries) was released. This pack contained nineteen circuits (three of them being new) and fifteen new vehicles including motorcycles, a floating purple batlike creature, and a witch riding a broom.

In the winter of 2000, Ubisoft released the game's successor, POD 2 (also known as POD 2: Multiplayer Online and POD: SpeedZone), for the Sega Dreamcast console. It is another futuristic racing game, but players are able to attack their opponents. Each player is a miner on the colony of Damethra, and an alien virus has taken over the cars on the colony, creating mutant cars. It was one of the first games playable on SegaNet, and one of the few games to support the Dreamcast Broadband Adaptor. The game features eight vehicles to use on five tracks. Two of the cars and one of the tracks could only be unlocked if the game was played online and the user had a Game Service account, but due to the shutdown of SegaNet these are now inaccessible legitimately.

On October 6, 2011, POD: Gold was re-released by GOG.com, with added compatibility with modern operating systems.

Soundtrack

The game's soundtrack was composed by Daniel Masson. It is a single nearly 15 minute long track that played on every race.

Trivia

  • The 29th issue of the NEXT Generation magazine (May 1997), mentions that the game was expected to launch on Nintendo 64. Whether this was true and the port was cancelled, or it was some kind of poor communication is unknown.[3]
  • The company LucasArts couldn't include the words "pod" or "podracer" in the title of their game (Star Wars Episode I Racer) because UbiSoft had trademarked all uses of the word "pod" in all interactive media.[4]

Gallery

External links

References

  1. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/19970606072617/http://www.ogr.com/news/news0397.html
  2. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/19970606072617/http://www.ogr.com/news/news0397.html
  3. ↑ https://archive.org/details/NEXT_Generation_29/page/n57/mode/2up?view=theater
  4. ↑ https://twitter.com/LucasArtsMemory/status/1130143959941079040/photo/1
Games & Versions POD ( POD: OEM · POD: Gold · POD: Extended Time) · POD: Arcade · POD 2: Multiplayer Online
Story Archives · POD: Alternatives · IO Gazette
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Other Media Credits · Soundtrack · Tools · Player Car Voting · Fan Sites