Weird Weekend
Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it’s the canon height of Thief’s Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
Halo: Combat Evolved may have finally ended PC gaming’s reign as the de-facto FPS platform, but it was by no means the first shooter to try. Rare put a fair old dent in the PC’s shooter hegemony with GoldenEye and Perfect Dark, while other shooters like Turok, Powerslave (Exhumed in the UK) and Alien Trilogy all showed it was possible, at least in theory, to drag first-person monster-blasting kicking and screaming away from the PC.
Unfortunately, Escape from Monster Manor released around the same time as Doom, and all its innovation in bringing the FPS to consoles was obliterated in a hail of shotgun blasts and rocket fire. Undeterred, The 3DO Company began searching for another shooter to publish, eventually finding a new contender being developed by a studio called Any Channel, beavering away on an FPS called PO’ed.
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Could PO’ed succeed where Escape from Monster Manor Failed? Nope! In fact, barring a PlayStation port in 1996, PO’ed would be largely forgotten until 2024, when a remaster by Nightdive Studios’ breathed new life into its neglected corpse.
Nightdive’s remaster also brought PO’ed PC to the first time, meaning we can finally see what our console brethren were up to in the early ’90s. To be perfectly honest, I wish I hadn’t looked. If you came to this article hoping to discover some hidden gem, prepare to stumble away, sorely disappointed, and possibly feeling a little sick.
On paper, at least, PO’ed sounds interesting. Its premise sees you play a chef on a spacecraft hijacked by aliens, an interesting perspective given FPS’s were still very much about playing as musclebound heroes. Its key features, meanwhile, make it sound like an evolutionary missing link between Doom and Duke Nukem 3D.
It has a kooky array of weapons like a frying pan, a flamethrower, and a drill that causes blood to spatter on the screen. It has a jetpack that enables movement in six-degrees-of-freedom. And it aimed to be a slightly more lighthearted affair than Doom’s grim murderfest, preceding Duke Nukem by several months with its tongue-in-cheek toilet humour.
What could possibly go wrong? The answer, sadly, is ‘everything’. As a shooter, PO’ed is iffy from the off, dropping you into a nondescript square room filled with enemies that immediately begin to attack you. Compounding the disorientation is the fact that PO’ed has almost no floor textures, so it constantly feels like you’re floating across a monochrome void. In fact, I initially thought my Steam download had messed up and missed a bunch of files. But no, that’s just what PO’ed looks like.
The enemies you face, meanwhile, are a random assortment of monsters ranging from relatively normal creatures like bats that spit acid to giant arses on legs. I know that arses generally come on legs, but usually there’s a torso, arms and a head involved somewhere too.
Anyway, the disembodied arses fart projectiles at you. Now, I’m not above fart jokes in small doses, and I make allowances for the fact that this game came out in 1995. However, PO’ed doesn’t do small doses of anything (except fun) so these enemies are scattered all over levels. And since PO’ed lacks any in-game music, large chunks of the game are played to a dynamic symphony of guffs.
Somehow, it gets worse from here. To differentiate PO’ed from Doom, Any Channel dispensed with the maze-like level design of id Software’s shooter, instead building large, open-ended maps. Unfortunately, this often translates to levels with minimal pacing or sense of direction. The second level, for example, is just a massive room made of cubes that you can waltz to the end of. PO’ed also tends to partition levels into multiple segments and separate those segments with false walls, which can make figuring out where to go a nightmare.
Compounding this issue is a control scheme that feels rough even after it has passed through Nightdive’s digestive system. Movement is of the slippery-slidey Doom/Dark Forces variety, but it’s too pronounced, making it easy to propel yourself over ledges. Jumping is a total gamble; you’re never sure whether you’ll hop neatly onto the platform or spring right over like a startled gazelle.
And then there’s the jetpack. Again, I want to stress that putting a jetpack in a game in 1995 is a neat, forward-thinking idea, and Any Channel isn’t that far off getting it right. But there are two problems. Ascending with the jetpack is too slow, and there’s no function to hover automatically. You’re either going up or you’re going down, all the time. This becomes a problem when, say, you’re trapped in a silo-shaped room bristling with gun turrets and devoid of cover.
Given how PO’ed favours frying pans and farting aliens over things like floor textures and accurate jumping, you might question whether Any Channel had their priorities straight. But who needs such things when you can do a cool backflip? Yes, PO’ed dedicates an entire button to your character going ‘”Hwaaah!” and reverse-somersaulting on the spot. Is this useful? No! Does it come alongside more functional abilities like crouching? Of course not! Did I die multiple times because the backflip button is assigned to the C key, reserved for crouching in virtually every other FPS? You betcha!
There’s no escaping it, PO’ed is terrible; a clunky, ugly, flatulent mess. And it begs the question as to why Nightdive chose to remaster it. Nightdive’s CEO, Stephen Kick, has told me previously in interviews that good or bad, every game deserves to be preserved, which is fair. But if that’s the case, then why not dig deeper into the game and try to make it something actually worth playing.
The answer is probably one of cost to benefit, at least in part. But I think there is also a more specific case to preserve PO’ed as is. The game is so deeply flawed that actively trying to improve might well result in a completely different game, and that isn’t what preservation is about. If archaeologists discover lurid graffiti in a Roman bathouse, they don’t work with the material to improve it. They record and maintain it.
And that’s how I feel about PO’ed. It is the FPS equivalent of Roman bathhouse graffiti. It’s crude, vulgar, and totally unsophisticated, a throbbing cock and balls scrawled on the genre’s cubicle door. I never want to play it again. But I also wouldn’t change it for the world.