Planet of death windows

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POD (POD: Planet of Death^[3] in Germany) is a futuristic racing video game for Microsoft Windows released by Ubi Soft in 1997.

Set in the distant future where humanity has successfully colonized one of Jupiter’s moons, Io. After years of prosperity, a mining accident unleashes a deadly fungus^[4] from within the mining facility, causing widespread destruction and panic throughout the colony. Desperate, most of Io’s population escapes the now-termed «p.o.d.» (planet of death) while a few survivors remain, voluntarily or otherwise. With only one ship remaining, the survivors soup up cars, which they use to race each other in tournaments throughout the desolated city streets, and the winner of the final tournament will commandeer the last ship and escape to safety, leaving the others to die.

As the player (and narrator) wins the final race on the «HQ» circuit, the creeping fungus nearly engulfs the remaining portion of land where the platform with the last ship still stands. Ditching the vehicle, he successfully take off with the ship before the mold consumes the launch pad. As the last person to leave the «p.o.d.», the player witnesses Io’s final stage of destruction: being reborn as a giant flower in outer space.

POD was influenced by games such as Super Mario Kart and Ridge Racer.^[5] It was published in 1997. It was one of the first games to support the MMX instruction set^[5] 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. A retail version of POD (called POD 2.0 by Ubisoft) was later released and featured more circuits and cars, 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 an expansion pack under the title Back to Hell (also known as Extended Time in France) in late 1997. This pack contained 19 circuits and 15 new vehicles, including motorcycles, a floating purple batlike creature, and a witch riding a broom. Another version called POD: Gold was later released, which included POD, its expansion, plus a new sound set.^[2]

A port of POD for the Nintendo 64 was announced,^[6] but never released.

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. Bonus cars and tracks could 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.^{[citation needed]}

On October 6, 2011, POD was re-released by GOG.com, with added compatibility with modern operating systems.^[7]

Next Generation rated it three stars out of five, and stated that «Pod is a fantastic ride, with high-color graphics at high resolution and a steady, high frame rate. It could very well be the prettiest racing game you can buy right now.»^[11]

The game sold 3 million copies.^[12]

• Electric Games (1997)^[13]
• PC Multimedia & Entertainment (Apr 11, 1997)^[14]
• Coming Soon Magazine (May, 1997)^[15]
• Game-Over! (Jun 07, 1997)^[16]
• Gamezilla (1997)^[17]
• World Village (Gamer’s Zone) (1997)^[18]

• POD at MobyGames
• Holger’s POD Info Archived 2009-03-03 at the Wayback Machine — Page with info and installation tips for Windows XP
• PODPhreaks, a useful website about the game. It contains a lot of downloads.
• nelsonspbr’s POD, with information, videos, tips and tricks about the game.

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)

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[]

• POD — Wikipedia article.
• POD at MobyGames
• Holger’s POD Info — Page with info and installation tips for Windows XP
• PODPhreaks, a useful website about the game. It contains a lot of downloads.
• nelsonspbr’s POD, with information, videos, tips and tricks about the game.

References[]

Это специальное издание игры, которое имеет несколько дополнительных трасс и автомобилей.

Как это ни странно, но в игре есть даже сюжет. В далеком будущем Земля стоит на пороге Армагеддона. Из какой-то шахты был выпущен опасный вирус, который начал быстро распространяться. В спешном порядке земляне эвакуируются на космических кораблях на другие обжитые человечеством планеты. И так случилось, что желающих покинуть Землю оказывается несколько больше, чем может позволить взять на борт последний корабль, отлетающий с планеты. Остается только одно вакантное место. Но кому же его отдать? Увы и ах, мои кровожадные читатели, турнир Mortal Kombat никто устраивать не стал. Было решено провести чемпионат по автогонкам. Победитель получит заветный пропуск с обреченной планеты. Жестоко? Может быть, но таковы реалии прогнозируемого разработчиками будущего.

Итак, играющему предстоит выбрать одну из футуристических машин и провести несколько гонок в рамках чемпионата. По окончании каждой из них вам начисляются очки в соответствии с занятым местом. Затем набранные баллы на всех пройденных трассах суммируются, и таким образом выстраивается турнирная таблица. Естественно, ваша главная цель – первое место.

Гонки проходят на кольцевых трассах. В перерывах между заездами вы можете улучшать характеристики своего автомобиля, такие, как ускорение, управляемость и т.д.

Для своего времени P.O.D. может похвастаться тем фактом, что это одна из первых игр, созданных с применением революционной технологии Intel – MMX. Графически она смотрелась весьма не плохо (если не сказать большего). Футуристические трассы, не менее футуристические машины, хороший саундтрек, простое управление.

Подводя итог, можно сказать, что данная игра — неплохой способ скоротать вечер-другой перед компьютером, сделав перерыв для мозга после прохождения очередной RPG или квеста. Стандартная аркадная гонка с приятной графикой и спецэффектами — что еще нужно для расслабления перед монитором, и приятного времяпрепровождения?

К слову, данная игра – одна из первых официальных локализаций в России.