POD

The Good
First of all I should mention I absolutely love this game and spent a lot of time playing it, especially with friends.

Why's that?

First of all, the game has an actual, quite complex and detailed, background story. You don't only see that in the excellent, pre-rendered introduction to the game, but also in the (bonded!) manual, which has several reports and background stories printed. This fact makes the racing game already unique.

The gameplay itself is absolutely arcade orientated. It's possible to adjust the settings for each car, though that is not a complex procedure like in other (more realistic) racing games. Before starting the race you can create a "playlist" of tracks you want to play in this race, let the game select random levels for you or just play all tracks, where also the story comes to it's end.

The game features an fish-eye like perspective which makes the gameplay look fast - and in fact it also is. Good reflexes are essential for the game, especially on higher difficulty levels. The levels are very different from each other and fit the setting of the game perfectly. While driving errors are not always critical, the main reason for me to avoid them is because of the perfect "flow" when avoiding them. This is also true for the abbreviations where you have to choose whether to take the risk to take them, or live with the often drastic consequences when you failed them.

The game features only one single (12 minutes long) soundtrack, but it also fits the atmosphere perfectly and surprisingly isn't annoying even after a long time of playing.

One of the other outstanding features of the game aside from the playability is the multiplayer ability. The game doesn't only feature numerous techniques like Splitscreen, TCP/IP, IPX/SPX or serial cable, it's even possible to combine them! We used that to play with four persons on two computers against each other in teams.

It should be also mentioned that the game had very good graphics for it's time. Especially the Glide version had great effects like lens flares, which were not often seen before.

The Bad
The game had several technical issues. This started with the fact that there existed dozens of (and for it's time gigantic) patches, which in term had issues to correctly apply. Ingame the problems continued with stuttering sound and huge lags also with fast network connections.

And worst of all: The game isn't playable on modern systems any more.

The Bottom Line
The game probably isn't for everyone (as seen at the other ratings). I'm an adventure and role playing fan myself, but this game absolutely won my heart despite it's several technical annoyances. As a fan of realistic simulations you will likely forgo the game. But if you like a good presentation and arcade games with a good flow, you should at least try this game (if you have an old enough system).

The Good
In POD everything is about speed (on the basic tracks you never had to brake). For a long time this was the fastest and most beautiful game residing on my harddisk (writing about the Glide-Version; the game ran very well on my former P90 with Voodoo1 card; comparing the visual quality between the hardware accelerated version and the sw-version is like talking about two different games) and who cares about realism anyway (I hate simulations :-)).
It was the first racing game I have played where you could leave the main track and search for shortcuts.
The game featured superb multi-player support (including split screen). Maybe not extremly realistic, but predictable car handling (including different cars with different behaviour and the possibility to tweak with their settings) and futuristic to plain weird scenarios.
Everybody who has been repelled by the s/w-versions should give it a second look (preferably Glide and not Direct3D).

The Bad
Only one (although great; about 12 minutes) audio-track. There would have been enough space for more on the CD.

The Bottom Line
Visually stunning and very fast fun-racing game with great playability (even though simulation fans might hate it).

The Good
Nothing. It was meant to demonstrate the abilities of the new (at the time) MMX instructions Intel came up with, and didn't do a very good job at it.

The Bad
Horrendously slow 3D engine (to the point that watching the demo Machines of Madness on a 486 seems fast-paced), blocky and unvaried graphics, bad controls and complete lack of decent music and sound effects contribute to the general damn-I'm-gonna-delete-this factor of this game. The pointless and unchanging gameplay doesn't add much either, and the fact that this thing barely runs on the machine it was intended to demonstrate, a Pentium 166 MMX with a genuinely fast graphics card, doesn't show a great deal of capability on the developers' side.

The Bottom Line
A really horrible game. Keep away from it.

The Good
The rendered cinematic at the beginning of the game wins the award for "Most Elaborate Cinematic Sequence Not Pertaining To Gameplay". The music during that sequence was also pretty good.

The Bad
Racing games all come down to gameplay, and POD's gameplay really stinks. The cars feel very slow and turn like a boat; even during keyboard play while holding the steering key down you can't steer enough to avoid the track walls at practically any speed. I know that sounds harsh, but I was very discouraged from the get-go playing POD.

The graphic engine could have been faster; it was a disappointment after hearing all the hype surrounding the game. The fabled MMX support was all in the 3D Dolby sound engine and didn't do anything at all for the graphics.

The Bottom Line
Steer clear of it (pun intended).