Keeg

Estelle: Time for ul-tra-vi-o-lence. ♪

This week's game is P.O.D.: Proof of Destruction, a hectic single screen shoot 'em up for Commodore computers (and the ZX Spectrum) with a bit of Jeff Minter energy. Simple as it may be, it's got ideas, and those ideas give it a distinct feel:

P.O.D. here reminds me of some of my favorite Atari 2600 (and early arcade) games, things like Demon Attack and even Kaboom. It takes a simple concept (shoot things, don't get shot), ratchets up the speed, and provides a unique hook to both make it stand out and make it surprisingly exhilarating. In this case, the hook is that you move along a grid and every time you destroy something, the part of the grid it occupied is temporarily destroyed as well. This makes P.O.D. a game where you want to panic-move all over the place because of how fast it is, but can't because you need to exercise extreme caution in everything you do. This single mechanic dictates best practices in a way that I find quite compelling. Every enemy is a threat and sometimes you'll have to rely on strategies like kiting instead of just shooting. All of this is backed by some seriously intense backgrounds for the platform, like if Space Harrier was set at a light show or something. That's what gives it a Jeff Minter vibe to me and it seems to be very similar to Gridrunner in particular, though the programmer on this game claims to have never seen Gridrunner before, so that's a pretty amusing coincidence!

If you like things like Galaga and Centipede, this one's definitely worth giving a try. I wanna say it's an ~unsung gem of the Commodore 64~, but I've barely ever played any Commodore games, so I'll let you be the judge of that! It must have did something right because it eventually got a sequel/remake of sorts on the... Gizmondo? Yeah, surely that must mean something good, right? Right?