Pandora

Firebird (198?). Programmed by Shahid Ahmad, David Eastman and Terry Greer.

A nice opening screen followed by a title screen with a pleasant star field and a reasonable if slightly repetitive chip tune effort. Probably a shooter I thought to myself. Actually no, more like Zelda in space! Good looking graphics, with great detail and a flick screen overhead exploration of a space station. Sadly no manual meant that I never fully got to the bottom of this one, but you seem to be set to explore the station collecting useful items and then using them to get further into the game. On the way you get to engage in fights with various crew members, which sadly take place in a sort of Asterix style cloud of dust. You do get to kick seven shades of sh*t out of a bank manager though. Which proved pleasing.

One thing that proved very annoying about the game was the first few seconds of play. If you move in any direction then you get fried by some sort of electricity. You have to hold still until some blonde lady turns up, tells you not to move and then promptly gets zapped by the electricity herself. The control system can be a bit frustrating, pressing the space bar opens up your back pack, and you can swap what's in your hand with what's in there, or pick up things off the ground. One of things you can pick up is a sonic screw driver (Doctor Who anyone). Another is a syringe. Hhmmm, surely that's not hygenic. Pandora looks like it could be a great game, I'm going to track down an original and a manual to find out!

Zogging Hell Rating: 7/10 (Based on not having the manual to explore the game properly)

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Cheats

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