Pandora’s Box is a game machine, with games pre-loaded. It tends to have thousands of arcade games pre-loaded.
It’s a popular choice for restoring actual full size arcade machines, with dead motherboards. It’s also an option to upgrade (or just revive from motherboard death) an Arcade1Up.
With some effort, a cheap PC will do the same job, but some folks like that they’re premade and ready to use.
As someone who sometimes buys these, the price, when on sale, is often cheaper than buying wood and hardware to build my own outer cabinet, control deck and screen.
There’s trade-offs - the materials used aren’t quite as nice as I would pick, but then the included, already applied, art is very nice. And there’s the convenience of not having to plan out all the details like control layout, monitor, side art, top bezel.
To me, it’s really a piece of furniture, rather an affordable way to play the included games.
The CPU cores also only last about 5 years, for me. Which isn’t good, considering that a cheap modern computer will easily last 8-15 years.
I, personally, don’t give a ton of consideration to the included games. I’m really just buying the outer shell and licensed artwork. That’s what I’ll be looking at when not playing.
I’ll replace the innards with a Raspberry Pi when it dies, if not sooner. So I’ll play whatever games I want that fit the control scheme.
I also replace all of the controls, about half the time. The included controls outlast the CPU core, but don’t feel as nice to play on as a set that’s reasonably easy to replace them with.
A third party login requirement is usually a deal-breaker for me, but not in an exciting way. I just have a lot of games to catch up on that don’t require me to go make an account.
Exactly. The last year of news full of mistreating game developers caused my to retune my news feeds and Steam wishlist to completely exclude all triple A titles.
There’s years and years worth of great gameplay I haven’t experienced yet in the Indie game market.
“We can say that, during his time at Telltale, Zak was one of the most talented, balanced and inclusive game directors we have ever worked with, and that is evident in the games he has delivered.”
That statement doesn’t read as the defense they think it reads as.
It reads as “all of our other game directors are somehow actually worse.”