POD (PC)

Round and Round and Round and Round and Round and Round we go. Repeat for a couple of hours. Hello there, sorry, just thinking of how much I used to play this in ‘Time Trial’ mode and boy did I play it a lot.

POD, a 1997 PC racer, was a technological tour-de-force in its day - taking advantage of the emerging 3D revolution and of the next big thing: online gaming. But my love for POD doesn’t come from either of those – in fact the former is now stopping me from being able to have another go on my modern Super PCs.

Forget the frankly stupid story about trying to escape from a doomed planet by winning a couple of races, forget too about the usual nonsense around balancing car setup. I’m a reasonable racer so it was always fairly easy to drive round the problem of a nervous and bouncy car so long as I had the speed – which you can never get enough.

"That's fine Mum, you fucking bounce on it - this is making me want to hurl."

What makes POD one of my all-time gaming loves is the ‘Time Trial’ option. Sounds pretty boring and probably to 99% of the population it is. But to me it’s about the glory of marginal-numbers. You see for an sad anal git like me, spending three hours trying to break a lap record by a mere sliver of gaming time is enough to pass the time of day wonderfully. The trance-like state that can be found by circulating a course you know better than the back of your hand is gaming manna-from-heaven. Stick some decent electronica on the stereo, dim the lights and it gets even better than that.

And it’s not even a lap record that’s important – no we’re talking bits-of-Laps: ‘splits’. This is the only game I know where each course keeps a top five of these splits in addition the full Laps themselves. So you can’t stop playing – even on your worst lap, after being put off by the cat jumping on your lap or by your girlfriend demanding to know why you’re STILL playing THAT game, there’s still the possibility that you could grab yourself a top five split time. It drives you on relentlessly, and actually prevents that usual racer-game ‘may as well re-start because I fucked up the 5 th corner’ niggle.

Graphics right at the bleeding edge waaay back in 1997. Christ, seems like it was just last year.

The drive for perfection pushed you even harder: you just had to pull together the five individual best splits into the mythical ‘perfect lap’.

And before you explode with excitement about this game, there’s something else. We all know about ‘ghost cars’. Well POD aced this option as well with not just one ghost on the track, not two, or three or four, but five of the little beggars. This ghost-extravaganza meant a guaranteed top five placing was all yours if you beat just one of the shimmering ghoulies.

Now THAT'S a ghost.

Time trial perfection, trance-like gaming and the only reason to keep an old PC with Windows 95 up and running: that’s why I love POD.

ELY, May 2004.

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