American Flyer

PhilKo's first (known) game seems to rip off Capcom's Side Arms: Hyper Duel in some way, as the code contains some residues of the 1986 game2. This is 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 of, as the R-Type boss to the left shows. All this legal questionabilities didn't prevent the game to be exported to the USA and Japan, a feat achieved only by few Korean games even until the late nineties.

American 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.

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.

Tetris with a traditional Korean skin. Not much else to say here.

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

And, finally, a Snake clone. If Philko released any other games after 1990 (see above), nothing is known about them. May they rest in piece.