#dooyong

[khhsh-t]

Underrated K artist part 12

KIMMUSEUM Ted Park Dooyoung 

Mcdaddy Yella D Seungrae

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[arcadebroke]

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Two for one day! Title screen art for Gulf Storm, Dooyong’s other 1991 shoot-em-up release. Unlike Pollux, this game was not a shining example of making good use of old hardware. Gulf Storm is a drab game with uninspired layouts and a tedious repetitive soundtrack (only the third stage is remotely salvageable in that regard.) Then there’s the subject matter. While games based on the Gulf War were a moderately popular topic at the time (as we’ll see next week), most of them attempted to depict something that might be mistaken for action in the region of Iraq. Jet ski and motorcycle assaults didn’t get much airplay on CNN for a good reason: they didn’t really happen in the desert. If not for the game’s name, you wouldn’t actually have any idea while playing this of what conflict it’s supposed to represent.

While the ending does manage to include someone who is presumed to be Saddam Hussein, even then it looks you’re taking him out for coffee (albeit at gunpoint):

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Graphical art from Dooyong’s 1991 shoot-em-up title, Pollux. which continues in their tradition of releasing games that would have been amazing five years earlier. Overlook the slightly dated presentation and generic setting, and this isn’t a bad game.  It was actually Dooyong’s mission statement to try and create 16-bit quality games with 8-bit hardware. Frankly, it’s amazing what they managed to achieve with such antequated technology, as my self-recorded Best of Dooyong music collection can attest.

You’ll never actually see this image presented like this in game. The upper part of the image here is from the game’s title screen, and the lower area is part of the presentation that comes up when you start a new game. But in the game’s tilemap viewer they’re placed right on top of each other and I left them like that. It gives the impression of a futuristic crowd in a movie theater taking in some sci-fi film, although for them I guess it would just be a standard action movie.

[vgjunk]

Yam! Yam!?, arcade.

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Backgrounds from Dooyong's 1995 game, R-Shark. This is, sadly, the last shoot-em-up ever released by Dooyong; after this they would bring out just a small handful of puzzle games before going out of business. Their entries in the shoot-em-up genre are something I'll miss. I admire the dogged persistence of their programmers and designers to try and make the best they could with what always seemed to be hardware half a decade behind the times. These screens here could have been churned out by top-end games five years earlier; their soundtracks were perky but limited to the jangled, almost tinny sounds of the mid-80s. Whether their Korean origin was a hindrance to game design or they intentionally wrote love letters to the arcade glories of a decade earlier, I'll never know, but I'll miss them either way.

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Dooyong's Flying Tiger is a 1992 arcade shoot-em-up which is fairly forgettable, at least in terms of gameplay and overall quality, but it did have a couple items that bear remembering. First of all, true to the game's name, the title screen shows of an actual winged, flying tiger, which is pretty cool (the Korean letters are actually part of the bitmap for the image and not an overlay, so there's no way to remove them.)

Second, and more perplexing, is the game's assortment of bosses, which reveal themselves after each stage. This is by far the most bizarre assortment of characters I've seen in a shoot-em-up, and possibly in any game. They include not only a cybernetic bear who advises against drugs (or may just be confirming that the developers did not take drugs during the creation of the game), but also a jetpacked-mouse who believes that 1x1 is 3, and--I kid you not--a cybernetic Alf with a picture of what looks like a ring-gagged Pac-Man. After that sentence it seems anticlimactic to point out that the tiger who wishes you good luck is the last boss after which the game ends and the only luck you'll need is with paying your therapist bills.