PandoraPress

In this episode:

• Mutant Tank Knights
• Flesh Chasmer: The Eve
• Worship Vector
• Adamant Armor Affection
• Adamant Armor Affection Adventure

Some of you probably remember Quasist, for those who don’t here is a piece of Pandora history:

Way back when the Pandora was still just an idea and the community was only starting to form (or rather split from the gp32x.com community, but we will be getting there), most stuff happened over on gp32x.com.
This forum is dedicated to open-source handhelds, mostly products by GPH. Out of that a few members of the forum got together with the idea to create the “ultimate” open-source handheld – the Pandora was born.
Quickly a lot of people liked the idea and the “Pandora-community” (also helped by the pro-orders) started to form.
Other people were not so enthusiastic about the idea and as community members of one group started posting harshly worded posts in the other section a small “war” broke lose.
Quasist was one of the people strongly wording his discontent about the project and the behaviour of its attached community. He even created a game (Adamant Armor Affection – not to be confused with his recent game Adamant Armor Affection Adventure) about his opinions (more info below). Several people on both sides, including Quasist, were banned over the course of this.
With the split of the forum and the creation of a dedicated Pandora forum the hate seemed to be gone and things have settled so far.

Yet (sadly) many of Quasist’s quotes live on as well as the hate for the other side on both ends.

Quasist is a very talented game designer, producing both art and sound as well as code in most of his projects.
He has made several interesting and certainly unique games for GPH consoles like the WIZ or the CAANOO.
Thanks to the words and work of sebt3, who got Quasist to release the source-code for ports and Quasist himself for doing so and assisting sebt3 a lot, these games now can also be played on the Pandora.
Does that mean this chapter finally comes to an end and the past is just water under the bridge now? I will leave that answer up to you.

Mutant Tank Knights
A top-down shooter in which you take control over a soldier or a variety of tanks and try to clean a planet of an alien infection.
You are accompanied by several characters giving you instructions over radio and moving the story forwards.
The game (like all of Quasist games) features some very unique visuals with unusual and saturated colours, different environments such as caves, labs and the surface as well as a nice soundtrack and sound-effects.
Download
Discussion

Flesh Chasmer: The Eve
From the description it’s a “Hardcore 3D Action-RPG”, which describes the game pretty well.
You play a bounty hunter being attacked by a strange huntress and her tentacle-like creatures. After you are initially overwhelmed by the creatures you awake in an underground cave with a strange feeling in your belly and the game begins to unfold.
It plays a lot like Resident Evil games with semi-static camera positions changing between parts of the scene.
Ammo is limited, but the hordes of monsters attacking you does not appear to be, so you better find a way out quickly.
3D graphics are rather simple, but keep in mind this game has been developed for the GP2X initially, yet it features some nice textures, effects and animations and is one of the few 3D homebrew games available.
Download
Discussion

Worship Vector
Worship Vector is a tower defence game with an unique vector-graphics setting.
The objective is simple – keep those attackers from running over your base by placing different towers (each with their own special ability) next to the path.
The games has several twists such as not the whole environment being flat enough for building in the beginning (which you can fix at cost) and the path expanding every few waves to reveal more of the map, giving you additional space to build and the attackers more path to run.
There are not many games of this type available for the Pandora, so this also is a very nice addition, especially as it’s as well made, just like all the other games by Quasist.
Download
Discussion

Adamant Armor Affection
A heads up in the beginning: This game can be disturbing.
As mentioned above it was created in the Pandora forum “war” as a method to voice Quasist’s opinions in an unusual way.
You play a highly-skilled agent of an anti-terrorist organisation on your mission to stop an act of international terrorism, known as the “Pandora” project.
As you have probably guessed it’s about the device mostly prominent on this blog and therefore you seek out to destroy a shipment of boards.
You will also fight the heads of the organisation, so if you ever wanted to fight “the CraigX” or “the evil dragon” in a video game, this one is for you.
Now seeing this anti-Pandora game running on the Pandora is kind of ironic and as it’s a nice action side-scroller, it’s rather fun to play.
Download
Discussion

Adamant Armor Affection Adventure
This got in here just before the submission deadline.
AAAA, the second place winner of the recent RIOT competition was also ported to the Pandora.
AAAA as the name suggests is the sequel to AAA, although it has not much in common with the other game apart from the name.
It kinda looks like Minecraft with the blocky environment and characters, but the gameplay is vastly different. You play a specially trained ninja on a hostile planet set out to kill some mobs for a mysterious organisation using a sword and a handgun.
Contrary to AAA it actually features some nice stealth elements as you can hide in the dark and sneak past enemies or just go berserk and kill everything in your path (or you lure enemies in a good position and finish them off one-by-one, there are many possibilities).
AAAA is played from a third person perspective and makes excellent use of the Pandora’s controls as it uses both nubs for input.
Apart from the main stealth game it also features 11 secret bonus levels, one changing gameplay to the way you probably expected from the graphics.
It’s running a tad slow at the moment, but Quasist and sebt3 are already trying to track down the source of the problem. [This has been fixed]
The game was released anyway as a birthday gift to Quasist, who turns 25 today, so Happy Birthday from PandoraPress, too
Download
Discussion

Source code for all of the games is available in the discussion threads.

[You probably noticed we are a week late on this, well sorry about that]