For the 1981 game, Adventure A: Planet of Death, see Adventure A

Adventure A

Adventure A: Planet of Death is a 1981 adventure game from Artic Computing for the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum computers. In this adventure, the player is stranded on an alien planet. The aim is to escape from this planet by finding his or her captured and disabled spaceship...

.

POD - Planet of Death is a futuristic racing game for Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 released by Ubisoft

Ubisoft

Ubisoft Entertainment S.A. is a major French video game publisher and developer, with headquarters in Montreuil, France. The company has a worldwide presence with 25 studios in 17 countries and subsidiaries in 26 countries....

 in 1997. The game is set in the distant future on the planet Io. A mining accident unleashes a virus 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.

History

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

Pentium II

The Pentium II brand refers to Intel's sixth-generation microarchitecture and x86-compatible microprocessors introduced on May 7, 1997. Containing 7.5 million transistors, the Pentium II featured an improved version of the first P6-generation core of the Pentium Pro, which contained 5.5 million...

  MMX processors, and some AMD-K6

AMD K6

The K6 microprocessor was launched by AMD in 1997. The main advantage of this particular microprocessor is that it was designed to fit into existing desktop designs for Pentium branded CPUs. It was marketed as a product which could perform as well as its Intel Pentium II equivalent but at a...

 systems. The OEM 1.0 version did not support 3dfx

3dfx

3dfx Interactive was a company that specialized in the manufacturing of 3D graphics processing units and, later, graphics cards. It was a pioneer in the field for several years in the late 1990s until 2000 when it underwent one of the most high-profile demises in the history of the PC industry...

 cards or 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

Glide API

Glide is a 3D graphics API developed by 3dfx Interactive for their Voodoo Graphics 3D accelerator cards. Although it originally started as a proprietary API, it was later open sourced by 3dfx. It was dedicated to gaming performance, supporting geometry and texture mapping primarily, in data...

. 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

Direct3D

Direct3D is part of Microsoft's DirectX application programming interface . Direct3D is available for Microsoft Windows operating systems , and for other platforms through the open source software Wine. It is the base for the graphics API on the Xbox and Xbox 360 console systems...

. 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

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

) in late 1997. This pack contained 19 circuits and 15 new vehicles including motorcycles, a floating purple bat creature, and a witch riding a broom.

In the winter of 2000, Ubisoft released the game's successor, POD: Speedzone

POD 2

POD 2: Multiplayer Online was the sequel to the 1997 racing game, POD, made by Ubisoft and available for Dreamcast. In POD 2 the player had the option of connecting to the Internet to play against other people...

 (also known as POD 2: Multiplayer Online), available for the Sega

Sega

, usually styled as SEGA, is a multinational video game software developer and an arcade software and hardware development company headquartered in Ōta, Tokyo, Japan, with various offices around the world...

 Dreamcast console. It is another futuristic racing game, but players are able to attack their opponents. Each player is a miner

Miner

A miner is a person whose work or business is to extract ore or minerals from the earth. Mining is one of the most dangerous trades in the world. In some countries miners lack social guarantees and in case of injury may be left to cope without assistance....

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 featured 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.

On October 6, 2011, POD was re-released by Good Old Games, with added compatibility with modern operating systems.

Reception

POD was generally given high marks at the time of release, and later re-releases of the game often included several of these ratings on their packaging. The game was considered to be a showcase of what computers could do, and updates were often released to adapt the game to newly released hardware. At one point, so many various updates and patches were available for the game that several sources claimed they were confusing, even for the reviewer.

There were mixed opinions regarding game-play, however. Some reviews claimed that the simple style and easy controls made the game more accessible and more fun, while others argued that the game was too simplistic, and that more effort should have been put into adding more features and elements to the game. However, most sources seemed to agree that the game offered an easy to use system that made it simple to learn and play.

Reviews of the track design and graphics were also mixed. Some commented that the game amounted to learning how to go through an entire track at full speed without applying the brakes, while others countered that the tracks were far more detailed and complex than those found in other racing games. There was also argument over graphics, with some bewailing the native resolution of 640x480, while responses countered that the game was stunning, and that only the passing of time had reduced the quality, with new releases pushing further and further past the abilities of this game.

External links

• Holger's POD Info - Page with info and installation tips for Windows XP
• Good Old Games.com POD gamecard - POD's page on GoG.com