POD

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).