A History of Korean Gaming

퍼즐게임 (Puzzle Game) / Puznic - MSX, 1990 (1990)

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Taito's Puzznic got officially ported to about a dozen platforms, but not the MSX, so Zemina produced relief one more time. For some reason the title on the box differs with the ingame one, where it's origin is made clearer as Puznic. The nudies that got deleted from any other version than the Japanese arcade board are missing here too. As in the original, levels are cleared by dragging stones vertically, until two or more of equal color meet and disappear.

The MSX game contains a completely new set of 48 levels and some new gameplay elements. Stones are moved in half steps here, which makes for interesting new situations. There is a special item that can make any block disappear alone. This might fool players into thinking they can use it to correct some mistakes, but its use is limited to three, and there's exactly three stones in the game that are impossible to delete without it. After the last stage, the game starts from the beginning, so the game ultimately ends when the first stage that requires to delete a single stone is entered for the second time.

후레쉬포인트 (Flashpoint) - MSX, Master System (January 1991)

Gam*Boy Cover

After the overwhealming success of Tetris on the Game Boy, everyone and the cat ripped it off with their own version, so it was only a matter of time when Flashpoint would come about. The game is a direct adaption of Sega's 1989 arcade Tetris clone with the same title. In 90 stages the player has do delete special bomb stones in order to detonate the stage. As in the original Tetris, the blocks get consecutively faster, but their speed level can be toned down again by clearing stages fast.

As any stage ends when the bombs are out of the way, some stages that seem to be incredible hard by standard Tetris rules turn out ridiculously easy. A lot of the stages form images or characters.

사이보그 Z (Cyborg Z) - MSX, Master System (August 1991)

Zemmix Cover

This seems to be one of the rarest Zemina games, after all by 1991 people had started to turn to more advanced hardware. The company finally made the transition to Megabit roms (equals 128KB), so this contains a lot more graphics than previous Zemina products, as well as eight distinct levels. The character is a copy of the giant mecha Mazinger Z from the 1972 anime series, including his trademark Rocket Punch attack. The game has the same weapon system as The Three Dragon Story, with the multiple weapons that can be cycled through. It is much more forgiving, though, and the mecha is allowed a number of extra lives.

Each one of the rather long levels has a mid- and final boss fight, the latter one takes place on a seperate screen. Afterwards, the player can earn upgrades and extra lives in a bonus round. Like the earlier game, Cyborg Z also suffers from the MSX's terrible vertical scrolling abilities.

원시인 (Wonsiin) - MSX, Master System (October 1991)

Zemmix Cover

Wonsiin is a port of the Famicom game Shin Jinrui: The New Type (Adventures of Dino Riki in the US), which apparently gave Zemina opportunity to exploit their vertical shmup code even once more. Typically, the scrolling is choppy here, too. There have been several other small compromises, but overall Wonsiin is a decent port of the Knightmare inspired game. Especially some elements that one would think would have been sacrificed on the MSX, most impressively the attacking dinosaur skeletons, are intact. Still, Wonsiin ends after three stages, leaving out the final challenges. Those are based on the first three tilesets, so they probably wouldn't have used up much space, so maybe Zemina thought them unnecessary.

Like in the NES game, the caveman shoots his way through the autoscrolling vertical stage, upgrading his weapon from spears to stone axes, boomerangs and a flame thrower(!) and has to jump over the odd obstacle to finally reach the bosses. For some reason, those are switched around between stages, and also got their patterns improved a bit. The final boss looks suspiciously similar to Bowser. The game is very tough, but not The Three Dragon Story tough.

In early 1992, Zemina announced the sequel Wonsiin 2, which didn't get finished before the development staff left to form Open, and was most likely realized as Wonder Kid.

슈퍼보이 III (Super Boy III) - MSX, Master System (1991)

Zemmix Cover

The third part in Zemina's only long-running series. One would expect half of Super Mario Bros 3 cloned, but only Mario's sprite and few others are ripped from that game. Everything else is redrawn, though mostly stolen from Super Mario World. This makes for some awkward elements, like diagonal pipes realized as stairs.

The game consists of 16 levels, which equals the number in both previous Super Boy games, but this time, they're entirely new. At the end of every level awaits a Hammer Brother, the final boss is the fat one from SMB3. Mario's(?) walking speed is extraordinarily slow, but even running he's not really fast. Extras are limited to those that are in since the first game. Quite everything looks like how the next Super Mario game would have turned out if Miyamoto wouldn't have had any more ideas. Seeing how almost everything in the game is newly pixeled, one cannot help but wonder why they didn't just create their own characters to begin with. Was the developer really so unimaginative? Other games by Zemina like Cyborg Z suggest differently.

In other news, the hero of the series finally gets to rescue his first princess in the short ending.

Street Master (스트리트마스터) - MSX, Master System (1992)

Zemmix Cover

The last game from another copyright owner Zemina spawned on the MSX was Street Fighter. Based on the first game, it also sports a few challengers from Street Fighter II. The five enemies are Joe, Chun Li, "Ninja" (for some reason they dropped Geki's name), Bison (the boxer, in his SFII-attire) and Gen. The player always takes the role of Ken, Ryu isn't available (although the sprite is actually colored like him). In 2-player mode the second player, who fights on the left side in this game, gets to chose between the 5 enemies. Player one is denied that privilege, though.

Street Fighter 1 was soon forgotten after its release because of its atrocious controls. Well, in Street Master, they're even worse. The only moves that can get the player near the AI opponents are the special moves, against which the enemies are helpless. So the only viable and at the same time incredibly cheap strategy is to spam these over and over again. It's nonetheless quite possible to lose that way, as the execution is only recognized spontaneously every once in a while.

The game seems like a stepback compared to some other Zemina games, technically. The graphics don't look so bad, but the black boxed enemies return again. That's why the lower half of the screen is black, anyway, but it becomes visible when they jump. When all opponents are beaten, the game just drops back to the title screen, without showing any credits or even a short message.

도술동자 구구 (Dosuldongja Googoo) / Magic Kid Googoo - Famicom (1992)

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Apparently the most rare Zemina game. While cartridges of Cyborg Z are sighted every once in a while, there is absolutely no mention on the web of Magic Kid Googoo other than the few Korea gamers that vaguely remember it. Back in the day, though, it has been extensively covered in Game World 6 and 7/1992, where all screenshots are taken from.

Still quite obviously inspired by Super Mario Bros., Magic Kid Googoo nonetheless shows some interesting ideas. Hero Googoo can transform himself into a variety of forms with different abilities, be it jellyfish, penguin or turtle. The game features 7 worlds with 5 stages (plus a boss stage) each, and 20 different music tunes. It is also the only Korean Famicom game with a password system.

슈퍼보이 4 (Super Boy 4) - Master System (December 20, 1992)

Another step in the evolution of the Super Boy series, without any real surprises or new ideas. Only this time, the game was developed for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Master System exclusively, so it remains the visually most advanced Zemina game. A lot of graphics are once again hijacked from Super Mario World, but as with the third game, many of them are redone. Other than the previous games, more and more original enemies appear in the later stages, like cuttlefish or butterflies. In the end, a few anthropomorphic frogs serve as the sole bosses. Super Boy himself now looks distinctive from Mario for the first time, and instead of eating mushrooms to grow bigger, he is drinking milk.

While the game contains a lot of visual elements of SMW, a lot of them are not used for gameplay means at all. The berries Yoshi used to eat are plain decoration (there is no yoshi in this game), and what were trampoline platforms in Nintendo's masterpiece are just simple platforms. It seems not everything works as expected in this game as well, there's a part that clearly suggests to kick a turtle shell to destroy bricks, but it just bumps back from them, occasionally falling through.

The game also has to be credited for the most ugly princess ever. She positively looks like a zombie in the ending. But then again, so does Super Boy.