21st October 2007, 7:40 PM
Pod was a racing game made by one of Ubisoft's internal French studios for the PC in 1997. It was one of the first games to support Intel's then-new MMX technology and also supported DirectX (3 and 5), 3DFX Glide, and lesser cards like the S3's junk and whatever ATI had then. From day one, the game has had a lot of issues, and while time has made some things simpler (most of the myriad of patches they made are now unnecessary; you only need one to four of them, depending on configuration), it has made others more complex... which results in this: the POD folder in my Game Downloads folder being 715 files and 425MB large (though a lot of that is the track and car downloads).
Major Problems:
- The sound is broken. The CD audio music is fine, but the sound effects are broken. Voices ('3-2-1-go') crackle and break in and out, engine noises stutter loudly often nearly drowning out the music for the whole duration of the race... it's really annoying. It's kind of a blessing when the sound breaks completely...
- The process of properly installing the patches and emulator needed to run the game are a big hassle. The process: To run the game on a modern computer, first install the game from the CD, in normal DirectX3 mode. Then install the 40MB OEM-to-Retail patch if you have the OEM version CD (as I do). Next install the 24MB 3DFX patch. Then install it again; it's buggy and needs to be ran twice. Next install the Force Feedback patch if you either have a force feedback gamepad or joystick or an ATI CPU, because for some reason that patch fixes the game for them. Next, if you have a Pentium 4 (and only that, not any other Intel CPU) run the unofficial Pentium 4 exe patcher and patch the EXE to get it to run.
-Next, copy a Glide emulator and its files (I use dgVoodoo) into the Pod folder and configure the emulator to your liking. This emulates Glide so you can run Pod in higher resolutions (or 800x600, at least, maybe higher) and with better graphics than you can get in the second-best graphics patch, the (640x480-limited) D3D DX5 one. Test the game until you find settings that (hopefully) get the game to actually run on your system. dgVoodoo requires a decent video card -- I could not run Pod on my old computer because my GeForce2 wasn't good enough to display anything ingame.
-Alternately, instead of the Glide patch, if you want worse graphics but no emulator, you can install the D3D DX5 patch, if that still works with modern versions of DirectX (I have no idea). This will probably require installing the two Gameservice patches (in the correct order) to fix speed problems, as without the emulator the game tends to run too fast without the Gameservice patches.
-The game is buggy -- it can crash, even after all this. The window-switching that it does in between the menu and race is also annoying, though it's obviously an artifact of the emulator. That window-switching is also a cause of some of the crashes, I'm pretty sure...
-The game has a lot of tracks and cars -- in total, 49 cars and 56 or 57 tracks, counting ones that don't work right. 36 of those are official courses that generally work correctly. The others are user-designed ones that are more limited in function -- many have crash bugs in them, user-designed courses have no AI unless they're reskins of official courses, so they're only usable in multiplayer or timetrial modes. In addition, the game only allows you to add 32 cars and 32 tracks on top of the base 16 tracks and 8 cars. This is enough for all of the official tracks, but not all of the cars. To change which are installed you use the POD CDPatcher program, an official app that lets you install and remove extra cars and tracks. The program doesn't tell you when you get over 32, so you just need to keep track (it'll be obvious, the game will crash when next run). Ingame, while the tracks are easy to choose, broken into three 16-vehicle pages, the cars are a bit more difficult, as only eight can be selected at a time, and they are the eight that you select between and that will show up in-race. In a sub-menu you can switch which eight vehicles are selected among the up to 40 available (32 + base 8). There are no names or indicators here so you just need to select them, and no 'reset to default' option, so you need to remember which are the originals if you want to go back to the default, or uninstall all add-on cars. Blah.
Lesser Problems:
-If you want the intro and ending videos to play, figure out a way to get Intel Indeo to function on your system. Otherwise just watch them externally and skip them ingame... the video files are in an open format, so you can watch them in any video file player. (I thought I'd gotten Indeo working on this computer, but running Pod yesterday it clearly isn't working...) Modern computers and OSes don't exactly like Indeo... Annoying.
-You need to set Windows to 16-bit graphics for the game to start, even if you have dgVoodoo set to 32-bit color (which would be a bit odd given that 3DFX cards can only do 24-bit color...).
-Ubisoft shut down the online system years ago, meaning that all that's left for multiplayer is IPX, modem, 2-player splitscreen, or direct cable link. You can, I believe, do stuff like combine splitscreen with modem though, I think. I've only ever played it online (when that was available) or splitscreen.
-The game occasionally freezes for a moment, like a sudden drop in framerate that it quickly recovers from.
-The save system is a bit wonky -- save data has been known to disappear or corrupt. In addition, in championships you can only save after every four races, which is annoying at times when you keep doing badly at the last race before the save point...
-There's an odd black space between the sky textures and the track, like a black ring in the lower edges of the sky between the ground and the sky...
So um... yeah. There are a ... few ... problems with Pod. But even so it's still a great game, provided that you can actually get it running.
+Pod is a pure racing game. There are no weapons or attacks of any kind, except for just bumping into the other cars. Weapons work in a lot of futuristic racing games, sure, but in this case not having them focuses the game on the racing, and it works really, really well.
+The controls are very simple -- In fact, the game only has four controls: turn left, turn right, accelerate, and brake. Nothing more is needed. Well, there are some configuration buttons and a pause button, but none of those are related to the actual gameplay...
+ Those cars and tracks... despite the irritation of the CDPatcher, how many racing games have this kind of variety? There are a huge number of available tracks and cars in this game! 16 built-in tracks and 8 built-in cars form the basic game -- the main Championship goes through those sixteen tracks. There are an additional 20 official tracks available for download and 44 official car downloads. In addition, there are five unofficial car downloads, seven OEM versions of official original courses available (that were altered in the final release), two other beta versions of official courses available, and a bunch of user courses -- 11 new tracks (some of which crash), 8 reskins of official courses, and several reskins of user courses (some of which crash). I don't know of any other futuristic or arcade racing games with this much variety...
+The actual track DESIGNS are fantastic and unique. Pod has a visual style all its own, and unique track designs as well. The tracks are highly varied in locations, length (though overall race time is kept similar by having more laps on short courses and fewer on long ones), width, style, and difficulty, providing for great variety. This is probably the greatest strength of the game, as no other racing game ever has tracks that have the feeling and design of Pod's. The harder tracks are truly hard -- blind turns, dead ends, tricky shortcuts, mazelike arrays of passages you have to find your way through, traps, obstacles you can bump into and push around... At times, when you're winding your way through a particularly hellish maze of corridors (see: the track of doom, Megapol), the game can barely feel like a racing game at all... except for that lap time of yours, falling minutes behind the competition, that is. :D Of course, spend the time to memorize the course and you can do well too... but not all the tracks do that. Others are much more simple tracks that are not hard to navigate and have no alternate paths or trap dead ends. The game has the full variety of courses available. Note that most of the most difficult tracks are add-on tracks, not the original 16; they added harder tracks in the downloads.
+As I began in the previous point, the game also has great art design, as you might expect from a French game. The abandoned, futuristic world of Io presented here is very well designed. Each track has a consistent theme and style which comes together very well. The cars are just as well done and also come in great variety. The graphics are admittedly a product of their time -- they have a similar '1997 PC' feel to, for instance, Jedi Knight 1 -- but while this means a very limited polygon count, it also gives them a distinctive style. Considering when the game was made the graphics are fantastic, and the texture work looks amazing in emulated 3DFX mode at 800x600 or higher.
+While some of the add-on cars and tracks admittedly don't fit the game's bleak, abandoned-futuristic-world them, they end up being some of the most unique courses in the game -- the island jungle castle track with matching pirate-themed cars, the ice level with penguin obstacles, the halloween-themed course with witch, etc, cars, and more... great stuff. :)
+Even if they only work in multiplayer or timetrial and some crash, the user-made tracks that don't crash are interesting and can be as well designed as any of the official courses. There are still Pod websites active on the internet (yes, it had a real fanbase, and this has lasted. There are still Pod fansites on the internet. :)) and you can find other timetrial times to compare yours to if you wish. These fansites also provide a place or link to places to download all of the patches, emulators, track downloads, and car downloads that I've talked about from.
+There is an optional car damage system. You can set it to Off, Global (the car is one sector), or Sector, which breaks the car down into six parts which take damage separately. While cars cannot be destroyed (unlike in the intro... :)), and there is no visible car damage, just an on-screen graphic, damage affects top speed and performance, making avoiding it a very good idea. This is particularly true because while each track has a heal-area somewhere, they are always on sidings that generally delay you some, so deciding to go fix your car will usually lose you some time (but will fix your top speed). It's a tough decision on some courses...
+The championships use a flat point system, no disqualifications. There are eight cars per race. Eight points for first, seven for second, etc, to one point for last. You only win if you finish in first overall at the end of the championship, but how you get there doesn't matter. Except for the only-every-four-races save system, it's pretty much the ideal championship design. There are also random championship and custom championship options, in addition to the default one, and single race and time trial modes, as well as multiplayer.
+Despite the loss of online play, the two-player split-screen multiplayer mode works great. If you have another copy of the game (or a copy), you could also try IPX, direct-modem, or modem-to-modem play options.
+That aforementioned intro is really, really awesome. It's long -- a several-minute-long FMV -- and tells the backstory of the game, which is essentially that you are on the moon of Io, where the horrible Pod virus is destroying the planet. Most people have left, leaving only a few... and the few remaining people are having a race series. The winner gets a seat on the last ship off the planet; everyone else...
+It'll bring you back to the days when MMX was supposed to be the next great thing... (and darnit, after playing this game, I still thought it would be... oh well. :))
+When fully patched and with dgVoodoo installed, the game WORKS on a modern, Windows Vista PC! Sure, there are issues, as I listed, but the game WORKS. Considering the game's age, this is amazing. In fact, in some ways the game works better on this PC than any previous one we have owned... (well, it did work well on the P800, and functioned on the 233. It just didn't run at all on my 1500 (could get into the menus, but ingame all textures were black thanks to my videocard not being fully compatible with dgVoodoo)...)
In conclusion, despite more (quite) major and (relatively) minor flaws than probably any other game I like, Pod is one of my favorite racing games ever and has been a personal favorite of mine for ten years now. It's a great, unique game, flaws included. There's really nothing else quite like it, though that point is very hard to make clear to someone who doesn't have knowledge of the game's greatest strength, its track designs and styles. From the narrow tunnels and cool shortcut of Canyon to the long two-way road in Beltane to Skyrace's cool style and Downtown's short, twisty route, or that island Beach, icy Iceberg, awesome Hellway, the abandoned bridges and construction machines in tracks like Pompeii... Pod's tracks are unlike anything else. And that's only a few of them...
Major Problems:
- The sound is broken. The CD audio music is fine, but the sound effects are broken. Voices ('3-2-1-go') crackle and break in and out, engine noises stutter loudly often nearly drowning out the music for the whole duration of the race... it's really annoying. It's kind of a blessing when the sound breaks completely...
- The process of properly installing the patches and emulator needed to run the game are a big hassle. The process: To run the game on a modern computer, first install the game from the CD, in normal DirectX3 mode. Then install the 40MB OEM-to-Retail patch if you have the OEM version CD (as I do). Next install the 24MB 3DFX patch. Then install it again; it's buggy and needs to be ran twice. Next install the Force Feedback patch if you either have a force feedback gamepad or joystick or an ATI CPU, because for some reason that patch fixes the game for them. Next, if you have a Pentium 4 (and only that, not any other Intel CPU) run the unofficial Pentium 4 exe patcher and patch the EXE to get it to run.
-Next, copy a Glide emulator and its files (I use dgVoodoo) into the Pod folder and configure the emulator to your liking. This emulates Glide so you can run Pod in higher resolutions (or 800x600, at least, maybe higher) and with better graphics than you can get in the second-best graphics patch, the (640x480-limited) D3D DX5 one. Test the game until you find settings that (hopefully) get the game to actually run on your system. dgVoodoo requires a decent video card -- I could not run Pod on my old computer because my GeForce2 wasn't good enough to display anything ingame.
-Alternately, instead of the Glide patch, if you want worse graphics but no emulator, you can install the D3D DX5 patch, if that still works with modern versions of DirectX (I have no idea). This will probably require installing the two Gameservice patches (in the correct order) to fix speed problems, as without the emulator the game tends to run too fast without the Gameservice patches.
-The game is buggy -- it can crash, even after all this. The window-switching that it does in between the menu and race is also annoying, though it's obviously an artifact of the emulator. That window-switching is also a cause of some of the crashes, I'm pretty sure...
-The game has a lot of tracks and cars -- in total, 49 cars and 56 or 57 tracks, counting ones that don't work right. 36 of those are official courses that generally work correctly. The others are user-designed ones that are more limited in function -- many have crash bugs in them, user-designed courses have no AI unless they're reskins of official courses, so they're only usable in multiplayer or timetrial modes. In addition, the game only allows you to add 32 cars and 32 tracks on top of the base 16 tracks and 8 cars. This is enough for all of the official tracks, but not all of the cars. To change which are installed you use the POD CDPatcher program, an official app that lets you install and remove extra cars and tracks. The program doesn't tell you when you get over 32, so you just need to keep track (it'll be obvious, the game will crash when next run). Ingame, while the tracks are easy to choose, broken into three 16-vehicle pages, the cars are a bit more difficult, as only eight can be selected at a time, and they are the eight that you select between and that will show up in-race. In a sub-menu you can switch which eight vehicles are selected among the up to 40 available (32 + base 8). There are no names or indicators here so you just need to select them, and no 'reset to default' option, so you need to remember which are the originals if you want to go back to the default, or uninstall all add-on cars. Blah.
Lesser Problems:
-If you want the intro and ending videos to play, figure out a way to get Intel Indeo to function on your system. Otherwise just watch them externally and skip them ingame... the video files are in an open format, so you can watch them in any video file player. (I thought I'd gotten Indeo working on this computer, but running Pod yesterday it clearly isn't working...) Modern computers and OSes don't exactly like Indeo... Annoying.
-You need to set Windows to 16-bit graphics for the game to start, even if you have dgVoodoo set to 32-bit color (which would be a bit odd given that 3DFX cards can only do 24-bit color...).
-Ubisoft shut down the online system years ago, meaning that all that's left for multiplayer is IPX, modem, 2-player splitscreen, or direct cable link. You can, I believe, do stuff like combine splitscreen with modem though, I think. I've only ever played it online (when that was available) or splitscreen.
-The game occasionally freezes for a moment, like a sudden drop in framerate that it quickly recovers from.
-The save system is a bit wonky -- save data has been known to disappear or corrupt. In addition, in championships you can only save after every four races, which is annoying at times when you keep doing badly at the last race before the save point...
-There's an odd black space between the sky textures and the track, like a black ring in the lower edges of the sky between the ground and the sky...
So um... yeah. There are a ... few ... problems with Pod. But even so it's still a great game, provided that you can actually get it running.
+Pod is a pure racing game. There are no weapons or attacks of any kind, except for just bumping into the other cars. Weapons work in a lot of futuristic racing games, sure, but in this case not having them focuses the game on the racing, and it works really, really well.
+The controls are very simple -- In fact, the game only has four controls: turn left, turn right, accelerate, and brake. Nothing more is needed. Well, there are some configuration buttons and a pause button, but none of those are related to the actual gameplay...
+ Those cars and tracks... despite the irritation of the CDPatcher, how many racing games have this kind of variety? There are a huge number of available tracks and cars in this game! 16 built-in tracks and 8 built-in cars form the basic game -- the main Championship goes through those sixteen tracks. There are an additional 20 official tracks available for download and 44 official car downloads. In addition, there are five unofficial car downloads, seven OEM versions of official original courses available (that were altered in the final release), two other beta versions of official courses available, and a bunch of user courses -- 11 new tracks (some of which crash), 8 reskins of official courses, and several reskins of user courses (some of which crash). I don't know of any other futuristic or arcade racing games with this much variety...
+The actual track DESIGNS are fantastic and unique. Pod has a visual style all its own, and unique track designs as well. The tracks are highly varied in locations, length (though overall race time is kept similar by having more laps on short courses and fewer on long ones), width, style, and difficulty, providing for great variety. This is probably the greatest strength of the game, as no other racing game ever has tracks that have the feeling and design of Pod's. The harder tracks are truly hard -- blind turns, dead ends, tricky shortcuts, mazelike arrays of passages you have to find your way through, traps, obstacles you can bump into and push around... At times, when you're winding your way through a particularly hellish maze of corridors (see: the track of doom, Megapol), the game can barely feel like a racing game at all... except for that lap time of yours, falling minutes behind the competition, that is. :D Of course, spend the time to memorize the course and you can do well too... but not all the tracks do that. Others are much more simple tracks that are not hard to navigate and have no alternate paths or trap dead ends. The game has the full variety of courses available. Note that most of the most difficult tracks are add-on tracks, not the original 16; they added harder tracks in the downloads.
+As I began in the previous point, the game also has great art design, as you might expect from a French game. The abandoned, futuristic world of Io presented here is very well designed. Each track has a consistent theme and style which comes together very well. The cars are just as well done and also come in great variety. The graphics are admittedly a product of their time -- they have a similar '1997 PC' feel to, for instance, Jedi Knight 1 -- but while this means a very limited polygon count, it also gives them a distinctive style. Considering when the game was made the graphics are fantastic, and the texture work looks amazing in emulated 3DFX mode at 800x600 or higher.
+While some of the add-on cars and tracks admittedly don't fit the game's bleak, abandoned-futuristic-world them, they end up being some of the most unique courses in the game -- the island jungle castle track with matching pirate-themed cars, the ice level with penguin obstacles, the halloween-themed course with witch, etc, cars, and more... great stuff. :)
+Even if they only work in multiplayer or timetrial and some crash, the user-made tracks that don't crash are interesting and can be as well designed as any of the official courses. There are still Pod websites active on the internet (yes, it had a real fanbase, and this has lasted. There are still Pod fansites on the internet. :)) and you can find other timetrial times to compare yours to if you wish. These fansites also provide a place or link to places to download all of the patches, emulators, track downloads, and car downloads that I've talked about from.
+There is an optional car damage system. You can set it to Off, Global (the car is one sector), or Sector, which breaks the car down into six parts which take damage separately. While cars cannot be destroyed (unlike in the intro... :)), and there is no visible car damage, just an on-screen graphic, damage affects top speed and performance, making avoiding it a very good idea. This is particularly true because while each track has a heal-area somewhere, they are always on sidings that generally delay you some, so deciding to go fix your car will usually lose you some time (but will fix your top speed). It's a tough decision on some courses...
+The championships use a flat point system, no disqualifications. There are eight cars per race. Eight points for first, seven for second, etc, to one point for last. You only win if you finish in first overall at the end of the championship, but how you get there doesn't matter. Except for the only-every-four-races save system, it's pretty much the ideal championship design. There are also random championship and custom championship options, in addition to the default one, and single race and time trial modes, as well as multiplayer.
+Despite the loss of online play, the two-player split-screen multiplayer mode works great. If you have another copy of the game (or a copy), you could also try IPX, direct-modem, or modem-to-modem play options.
+That aforementioned intro is really, really awesome. It's long -- a several-minute-long FMV -- and tells the backstory of the game, which is essentially that you are on the moon of Io, where the horrible Pod virus is destroying the planet. Most people have left, leaving only a few... and the few remaining people are having a race series. The winner gets a seat on the last ship off the planet; everyone else...
+It'll bring you back to the days when MMX was supposed to be the next great thing... (and darnit, after playing this game, I still thought it would be... oh well. :))
+When fully patched and with dgVoodoo installed, the game WORKS on a modern, Windows Vista PC! Sure, there are issues, as I listed, but the game WORKS. Considering the game's age, this is amazing. In fact, in some ways the game works better on this PC than any previous one we have owned... (well, it did work well on the P800, and functioned on the 233. It just didn't run at all on my 1500 (could get into the menus, but ingame all textures were black thanks to my videocard not being fully compatible with dgVoodoo)...)
In conclusion, despite more (quite) major and (relatively) minor flaws than probably any other game I like, Pod is one of my favorite racing games ever and has been a personal favorite of mine for ten years now. It's a great, unique game, flaws included. There's really nothing else quite like it, though that point is very hard to make clear to someone who doesn't have knowledge of the game's greatest strength, its track designs and styles. From the narrow tunnels and cool shortcut of Canyon to the long two-way road in Beltane to Skyrace's cool style and Downtown's short, twisty route, or that island Beach, icy Iceberg, awesome Hellway, the abandoned bridges and construction machines in tracks like Pompeii... Pod's tracks are unlike anything else. And that's only a few of them...