It’s been roughly six months since Santa was kind enough to put an AYN Odin 3 Pro under my tree and make me the happiest boy in the whole wide world. Back in February, I called it “pretty much a perfect handheld,” and my feelings haven’t changed much since. It’s everything I need a handheld to be, and given the amount of untapped potential that may still lie behind additional driver updates, maybe even more than I need.
The Odin 3 has unquestionably become my go-to handheld. If I don’t know exactly what I want to play, I just pick up the Odin 3. If I want to try a new Steam title I picked up, I could grab my Steam Deck, but that’s all the way over by the TV on the dock – better to just pick up the Odin 3 lying on the table. This handheld provides lazy convenience, and for that, I love it.
So what have I been playing more recently on this Swiss-Army knife of go-to gaming goodness? Let’s check it out.
Old Stock Made New Again
The power of the Odin 3’s Snapdragon 8 Elite (or Dragonwing Q8, depending on who you ask on what day) means that games from the PS2 and Gamecube era can run at resolutions and frame rates beyond the wildest imaginations of gamers of the era (me). Emulation is something of a solved problem for a lot of the major systems.
Why emulation remains such an interesting hobby to me today is harnessing the power of new hardware to create experiences beyond the scope of what the original developers could have hoped for. Who needs to buy a PS2 game “remastered” in HD re-release again when I can just use the Odin 3 to make the original ROM look even better than what you’re offering?
Shadow of the Colossus – PS2
This is a game that has been in my backlog for the better part of 20 years. When it was first released on the PS2’s then aging hardware, it was easy to see it was pushing the boundaries of Sony’s hardware at the time. It saw re-releases with quality-of-life improvements on both PS3 and PS4, and I’m sure those are lovely, but I have a hard time believing this game could look any better than it does running on my Odin 3.
The way the beautifully rendered character and horse animations display so fluidly at 60FPS is a joy to behold, and thankfully, the gameplay still totally stacks up in the years since its initial release. Players will ride across a barren landscape to encounter larger-than-life boss figures and solve puzzles to bring them down. It’s a unique game that certainly highlights the style of Team Ico, and if you’ve been waiting as long as I did to play it, then stop stalling and go try it with the full power of modern emulation behind it.
FEX is the Future. Platforms are Dead. Everything is a PC Now.
The single greatest leap forward in the retro handhelds hobby in recent years has been the emergence of the FEX ecosystem. FEX is a translation layer that allows Android systems to emulate Windows and X86/64 architecture.
The result is nothing short of magic, as my Android handhelds just got transformed overnight into a fleet of mini Steam Decks. The vast majority of gaming that I do on my Odin 3 isn’t spent emulating, it’s playing PC titles from my Steam, GOG, and Epic accounts.
Vampire Crawlers – Steam
Fun fact – the first writing samples I ever did for RH were on my then obsession with Poncle’s one-man-dev behemoth that spawned a whole genre of copycats – Vampire Survivors. Only a couple of years after successfully kicking my VS habit, Vampire Crawlers is here with a new gaming high to suck me right back into the vortex of addiction.
Vampire Crawlers takes the characters, weapons, settings, and style from Vampire Survivors and places them into the dungeon crawler/deck builder. It might sound like a strange evolution on paper, but it translates directly into 2 AM late nights and promises to myself that it will only be “just one more run”.
Dead as Disco – Steam
This is a Steam Early Access title that I just picked up the other night. Things are still extremely early, but if you can imagine what would happen if Hi-Fi Rush and Beat Saber had a kid, you’d have something like Dead as Disco.
Part beat-’em-up, part rhythm game, this stylistic genre-bender looks to be something you can jump into for a quick session or a long play through, and features like Bring Your Own Music mean that there will be life left in the game long after the credits roll.
RACCOIN: Coin Pusher Roguelike – Steam
It’s funny to talk about my addictive tendencies with the Vampire Survivors series and note that I still bought Raccoin, knowing full well it would be the type of Balatro-adjacent experience that would suck me right in.
Part mindless arcade novelty machine, part gaming and gambling strategy simulation. You’ll look up at the clock and wonder where the hours went. And if you run out of coins to push, you can always pick up the cabinet and violently shake it in the hopes that you jar enough coins loose to make it to the next round.
Sine Mora EX – Epic
Sine Mora EX is a modern (2017) take on the classic horizontal shooter genre. I’d originally picked this game up on the Nintendo Switch when a friend had told me that they thought I’d enjoy it. The hours I did play were fun enough, but regular chuggy performance issues on the original Switch made it a less-than-ideal way to play the game. Thank the demons below for Epic and their free games.
Now, thanks to a free PC key courtesy of Epic Games and the power of my AYN Odin 3, Sine Mora EX looks absolutely stunning. The frame rate never falters during heavy action segments, and when the game’s visuals transfer from bright to broody, the Odin 3’s OLED display still makes everything on the screen pop with color.
The whole idea behind Sine Mora EX is that you’re in a constant race against the clock. Think of the Outrun formula, but in a horizontal shooter! Players are aided in their fight to beat the seconds with a time-slowing mechanic that makes navigating impossible hordes of bullets much more manageable.
I Still Use It for Streaming, Too
Lots of different handhelds of varying degrees of power can do a great job streaming games from your local PC or services like Xbox Game Pass, but the Odin 3 does it so well that I’m not often inclined to put it down to go play on something else. Whatever magical networking wizardry may be happening in the background on the Odin 3 vs another device is beyond me. All I know is – it just works.
Forza Horizon 6 – Xbox Game Pass
Certain genres of games translate better to being streamed to a handheld than others. Twitchy first-person shooters, for example, probably aren’t going to be high on the list. The Forza series, and the Horizon portion of it, especially, translates wonderfully. There have been more than a few occasions where I’ve stopped what I’m doing in-game to just marvel at how outstanding everything looks here on the Odin 3.
Horizon 6 takes everyone’s favorite arcade-sim racing mashup and drops us into the Forza Horizon Festival’s latest locale – Japan. Anyone with even a passing interest in motorsport owes it to themselves to check this one out. It’s incredible.
In Closing
So there you have it. The favorite titles that I have been playing on my AYN Odin 3. The state of PC components being what it is at the moment, I doubt we’re going to see anyone gunning for the Odin 3’s crown until markets calm down a bit. I’m not worried, though, because the Odin 3 is here to assure me that it’s all I need, and the more I play it, the more I think it might be right.
