It’s no secret that I genuinely loved my 3DO. While the majority of people present-day totally bash it into the ground, let it be known that 98% of the people saying this never even owned the system, and are simply restating tired Internet memes while acting like they know what they’re talking about. I’m not going to sit here and defend the system though. It honestly doesn’t need defending at this point. Though I can at least say it had a damn fine library of games for such a niche (and expensive) system that a lot of people overlook simply because no one owned a 3DO. Not only did it have the best version of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, and many other great franchises, but also saw the rise of huge developers like Crystal Dynamics, Naughty Dog, and several other studios that produced some great original game franchises.

Po’d was not one of those

Po’d (Pronounced as if you were abbreviating “pissed off”. Clever, yes? No.) is simply put, one of the strangest, most cracked out stupid FPS games ever made. It is so strange, that even just attempting to remember it for this write-up seems like some sort of strange fever dream. I can still somewhat make things out…I went into the video store, saw nothing else of worth in stock, and picked up Po’d out of sheer desperation. What followed is a haze of memories involving killer chefs, buttflaps attached to legs trying to shit on me, levels seemingly designed to infinitely confuse you, and a jetpack that only helped to make the latter even worse. I am still not convinced I wasn’t bitten by a spider and simply hallucinated for a few days instead.

So yes, NOTHING about Po’d made sense. I can barely describe it to you. At it’s core, it’s a fps like 90% of all games released at the time, but that’s where the similarities end. The first hint you get that things have went terribly wrong is when you notice the character you’re actually playing as:

Yeah, that's you. Really makes you want to save the world from pissing aliens, huh?

Nightmares hardly ever materialize so vividly in picture-form, but yet here we are. This fine fellow is who you will be controlling in an effort to escape whatever is happening in this game. I’m sure there is an official plot for this game, along with some sort of explanation as to why you are playing the most nightmarish main character of all time, but my eyes would most likely sink into my head and explode out of the back of my skull should I even try to make you comprehend it. Just know that you’re a fatass chef for some reason with enough weapons to bring down an entire planet single-handedly, and you need to kill a lot of aliens. Why? Because you’re pissed the fuck off, that’s why. Sound good? Good. Let’s pretend it doesn’t go any further than that. Also that the alien that just spewed bile at me out of it’s pixelated anus doesn’t exist either. Oh God my mind…

Yes the game was violent, but it only seemed to make things even stranger.

So the game is insane. Yes. You’ll eventually glaze over and just accept this part of it. But how does it play? Even if the game featured a somewhat less mind-altering setting and characters, it would still be a terrible fps. For starters, the game moves EXCRUTIATINGLY slow. And I don’t mean “slow jaunt” slow like many slower-paced fps games move. No, I mean you move as slow as you’d expect a 780 pound chef carrying a small country’s worth of weapons to move. It’s even worse that the game environments are massive, causing the sense of scale to make you seem like you’re moving even slower than you are. But wait! You also have a jetpack attached to you! That should pick up the pace, right? Well, the jetpack must be working overtime to make our morbidly obese chef airborne in the slightest, because it moves you around just as slow as walking does. With the only added benefit of making even less maneuverable because of the terrible jetpack physics. I suppose that wouldn’t be so bad if the game didn’t have several “platform” areas where you had to fly that fat fucker on top of rocks the size of a pinhead before your jetpack fuel is gone. Most of the time even just using the jetpack would have you fly into one of the game’s many transparent floors, becoming stuck and realizing you’d have to slowly fly all the way back from where you came from just to land. Or die. Well, mostly die. It’s almost like Po’d went out of it’s way to make you hate yourself for playing it all the way to it’s very core.

Even green slime monsters make an appearance. And when they show up in a game, it may be time to pack things up.

So yes, the 3DO had a damn fine library of games, but it also had one damn fine stable of terrible games, too. Some that were barely 16-bit games, and others that were just plain broke. Po’d is neither, as it’s a fully functioning (then) next-gen game. It just went out of it’s way to be as awful a game as possible. And really, those are about the worst games you can think of. And honestly, there’s no way I can start to defend shit like that.

No matter how many assflap monsters you try to put in.