Gaia - The Last Choice Of Earth

[system11]

For a while now a flyer has existed for a SemiCom shmup known as 'Gaia - The Last Choice Of The Earth'. You can see it here:

http://flyers.arcade-museum.com/?page=t ... db&id=4024

Well as some of you know I am a collector of Korean arcade games, and as some of you probably suspect I do actually comb auctions, shops and forums daily trying to find new weird things from that region. It's been pretty quiet since Cute Fighters was uncovered and a couple of alt versions of things, and honestly I was fairly sure Gaia lived in the "never really came out" category which isn't uncommon.

Then a few weeks ago one appeared....



It's similar in play to a Psikyo game but you can feel that the engine isn't a direct code rip, also the game turned out to be horizontal aspect with optional vertical panning as we used to see in some home console ports in the past. Does an actual vertical revision exist in the wild or just as a promo flyer? No idea. I'm surprised this exists at all. I notice they dropped 'The' from the game title between the flyer and the finished game.

I've already sent the dumps to Haze, and he's already got a preliminary emulation running which will be completed before the next MAME release - there's some security chip decoding work to do first which is a little time consuming, you can see more screenshots and videos on his blog post about it:

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/2015/07/0 ... st-choice/

It also proved something I've long believed, that a game called 'XESS' in MAME was mis-named because that looked much more like a team/developer/publisher name to me. Turns out it was the name of an internal SemiCom team as they developed Gaia too.



You'll all be able to try this game out in the next MAME release, another obscure title discovered and preserved

[copy-paster]

Never heard that b4, it reminds me for 1944 Loop Master.
Is the gameplay are same as the flyer depiction?

[Pretas]

Spotted a sprite rip from the original Aero Fighters/Sonic Wings:




(SNES version screenshot)

There's most likely other stolen sprites as well, either from the Strikers or 19XX games.

Also, Semicom's unicorn mascot seems to have been inspired by the Area 88 emblem.

[BPzeBanshee]

Some of the material looks a lot like that from X2222 which I understood to be a different Korean company. May be some relation there, or the Koreans steal stuff from their own local companies as well as the Japanese.

Great find system11, glad you're onto this sort of thing. Curious to see if the vertical one still exists in some form somewhere.

[KAI]

You da man 11.

[emphatic]

You da man 11.

[D]

Wow, awesome find.
"horizontal aspect with optional vertical panning"
I don't understand why they would do that?
Are there any other real arcade games that do this besides the obvious console ports?

[gray117]

Top work! ... So many tales, let alone full games, just fall by the wayside. Here's an interesting bit of history filled in right here; let alone the clarifications it evidences (along with a couple more interesting questions

If you don't mind me asking where did the board come up? ... did these make their way over stateside/eurozone?

[Pretas]

Wow, awesome find.
"horizontal aspect with optional vertical panning"
I don't understand why they would do that?

To sell to operators that don't have any vertical cabs.

[Skykid]

I must say I do like your crusade for hunting down obscure Korean games, that's fun, and I was in a similar mindset after discovering R-Shark and buying that Korean version of Nostradamus (which you know about very well Sir 11!).

Unfortunately R-Shark doesn't quite justify owning for me after extended play and I don't really buy PCB's much anymore, so it's down to you. Keep up the good hunt and please open threads like this with any finds, it's good for posterity. Might be wise to actually put 'Korean' in the thread title for future searching justice, if this is going to be a habit.

[system11]

Maybe not all of them, I have 148 Korean PCBs so far.

[Skykid]

Maybe not all of them, I have 148 Korean PCBs so far.

[dink]

awesome find, system11