The Pandora is basically the successor of the popular (in South Korea) GP32 and GP2X portables. Released in 2010 the Pandora has been a darling of the homebrew market – which it was marketed for first and foremost. While the Pandora handheld is a little tough to find, forget looking on eBay for one – the name is too ambiguous and too many other products shared this name. Believe me, I tried. Anyhow, for the lucky few that own one of these bad boys of open source portable gaming, let me show you 10 games that you need to play.
Hurrican
Basically, a fan made homage to Turrican – a title that made its rounds on the 16-bit consoles and computers of the time. Some ports are better than others and some need to be forgotten. Hurrican is one of the better ones in the grand scheme of run and jump 2D side scrolling shooting games.
Super Tux Kart
After Super Mario Kart hit the Super Nintendo it was very clear that fan ports and copies would be coming and quick. One of the better ones is Super Tux Kart, available for a crap ton number of platforms, this game is quite good. I enjoyed this one on Linux as it was one of the first “Linux” games I tried with my copy of SuSE 9.x going on 20 years ago.
Glaxium
Oh man, this one reminds me so much of Axelay on the Super Nintendo. Sure, the game world is not warped like it is in that forgotten Konami classic (Konami you can fix that and should. Now). This is a 3D “into the screen” style shooter shows the genre is not dead.
Serious Sam 1 and 2
Think the Pandora is not capable of good 3D? Think again. Serious Sam 1 and 2 are grouped together but I am counting them as separate entries. Partly because they are different but still similar. Anyhow, you are in for some great, hilarious, moments with these games as 3D gaming tropes are flaunted and run over – kind of like that Ash vs Evil Dead television series, don’t take anything too seriously when playing these.
Gorynlich
How long has it been since we got a good Gauntlet style game? Too long. That is how long. This one is basically an overhead dungeon crawl that makes use of Roguelike elements such as random level generation and tons of enemies to wade through and slice and dice. Gotta love this genre. Please someone, bring more like this out.
Tread Marks
Like Worms? How about driving around and just blowing the crap out of stuff? Yep, Tread Marks is just that. The environment is destructible and you should make use of that to your advantage. Make a canyon, cut a swath through a mountain, whatever you need to do to win. Interestingly, I have not seen this level of level deformation since Star Fighter on the 3DO (and later PlayStation One). Blow stuff up. Nuff said.
Freeciv
Civilization. Duh
Odamex
Doom, the grand daddy of first-person shooters has a port on the Pandora. Even cooler is, this port of Doom has access to online matches. How cool is that? Just as fast as you remember so get in there and work those BFGs double time.
OpenRA
Finally, we have a Command & Conquer Red Alert port. What list would be complete without a real-time strategy title? What game better than Red Alert? I used to rock this one on the PSOne console back in the day before I got a computer – then I learned how much better the game could be. Now it is even better because you can game on the go.
Know of a cool Pandora game? Let me hear about it in the comments below. Want to see more articles like this? Like, share, upvote, resteem, whatever you must do to get this article in front of friends. I pay attention to what is going well with you, the reader, and give more like it.