A History of Korean Gaming

Turtle Ship / Geobukseon Jeonjaeng (거북선전쟁) - Arcade (1988)

Flyer

PhilKo's first (known) game seems to rip off Capcom's Side Arms: Hyper Duel in some way, as the hardware is derived and the code contains some residues of the 1986 game.10 This seems rather surprising, as the two games don't actually have much in common other than both being 2D shoot 'em ups. Turtle Ship consists of a mix of sidescrolling and vertical stages, 8 overall. Upgrade items are quite rare, so all but the more skilled players are stuck with the boring weapon systems for the most time. There are a few interesting elements, like a powerup that slows enemies down for a short time, or missiles as a limited secondary weapon.

The music seems to be original, other than in most Korean arcade games at the time, but nonetheless Side Arms isn't the only game being ripped off, as the R-Type boss below shows. All this legal questionabilities didn't prevent the game to be exported both to the USA and Japan, a feat achieved only by few Korean games even until the late nineties.

Dyger (다이저) - Arcade (1989)

Flyer

A female(!) employee of the global defense organ called Dyger accidently sets of an atomic bomb, killing thousands of people. To forget her guilt, she locks herself in static sleep inside a time capsule. But someday she's waken up in by the turmoil caused by an alien invasion and now remains earth last hope for survival.

That is the, quite grief for the time, introduction to Dyger, a vertical scrolling shooter based arount the then common weapon system divided into an air-to-ground- and an air-to-air weapon. The latter one can be upgraded multiple times, but if there's no further upgrade picked up for too long, the superior weapons get lost gradually. The difficulty level is imbalanced, especially for bosses, but the fact that the player's plane is reset to checkpoints after every hit makes the game overall very hard. Except for the boss rush at the end, the game can be considered ordinary in every aspect.

The presentation is quite nice, other than the intro cutscene there's a sequence of a mother ship picking up and dropping off the player in between missions, and the player's initials for the high score line are entered as a tag on the plane.

Whizz / Twin Falcons - Arcade (1989)

American Flyer

Whizz goes back to horizontal scrolling, but like Diger features air-to-ground missiles. Only here they also destroy airplanes, maybe because ground targets are not too frequent. Not the most brutal game to begin with, the diagonal 3-way shot makes this a real cakewalk among shmups. Frustrating is only the extremely short invincibility time upon respawn, especially when the game decided to fill the entire screen with enemies in the meantime.

Together with boring stage design, a slow pace and subpar graphics and music even compared to its "predecessors", this is one of Philko's weaker games. Like many other arcade games in the 80s, Whizz was released in North America, under the title Twin Falcons.

Xyonix (자이어닉스) - Arcade (1989)

Tetris with a traditional Korean skin. Philko's puzzle games of the later period apparently used some stripped-down System 16 clone hardware without any sprite capabilities. Not much else to say here.

Atomic Point - Arcade (1990)

This time it's Tetris 2. One cannot help but diagnose the beginning decay of Philko by this time.

Snapper - Arcade (1990)

And, finally, a Snake clone.