Liquid Kids (1990)

Name:Liquid Kids AKA Mizubaku Daibouke

Number:215
Year:1990
Publisher:Taito
Developer:Taito
Genre:Side-scrolling Shooter
Difficulty:4/5
Time:2 hours
Won:No (88W/69L)

One of the oddities of 1992 FPS is an arcade exclusive FPS, which is allegedly quite clever for 1992. Before we reach that however, we'll take a look at one of the designers, Toshiaki Matsumoto, and see some more oddities.

Firstly, Liquid Kids, or as it's known in Japan, Mizubaku Adventure among possibly others, is an arcade side-scrolling platformer/shooter. It's not quite the stereotype of a bad arcade side-scroller, you are not forced between feeding it coins and being bored to tears or trying to replay it from the start and finding it frustrating. I mean, you can still do the former, you respawn roughly where you died, enemies disappear, and even after a continue everything is as you left it. I'll explain why it sucks in a moment.

That's a thing that's been said in English.

The story, told in Engrish, is that you are Hipopo the Hippo, the last of the cute cuddly animals from Woody Lake, and you must go after the Fire Devil who kidnapped the rest. This doesn't really have much purpose to what little story exists, you just get some animals at the end of each stage.

The story, told in Engrish, is that you are Hipopo the Hippo, the last of the cute cuddly animals from Woody Lake, and you must go after the Fire Devil who kidnapped the rest. This doesn't really have much purpose to what little story exists, you just get some animals at the end of each stage.

There are three stages a section, most of which depict cute, pleasant areas full of cute creatures who want to kill Hipopo. So Hipopo has the power of throwing water balls. This is not the joke weapon it sounds like. Yeah, it has exactly that arc which means you can't hit smaller creatures at a certain spot, but the game doesn't really have that many...and more importantly, the water balls explode, shooting a flood of water across the ground, downstream. That said, this doesn't kill them as much as moving your rotund creature into the frozen/wet enemies, which shoots them like a billard until it hits a wall, even down levels. Powerups exist which increase the power, but I only found one in the first section.

The problem is, your hippo moves like people imagine a hippo moves, extremely slowly. This effects everything, you can't really dodge, your jump has a very narrow arc, so you can't really dodge or get out of the enemies way. The game doesn't really offer a counterpoint to this starting off, so long as you pay attention to where enemies are spawning and don't rush in, there's no time limit, you'll get by easily.

Enemies aren't very interesting at this stage. You get things with shells which don't seem to do anything special. Seals or something that shoot at you, but ever so rarely. The two trouble enemies are ones with a conch shell on their head, which they then shoot up. That was throwing me at first, because most enemies are non-entities as far as I'm concerned. Then bombs, which have this habit of shooting out flames, I guess them exploding.

They spawn in some places, but in others they slowly trickle in via burning portals. These seem to be limitless, and tied into the slowly darkening sky. They're not the interesting part of the level design, instead, you occasionally get things like water wheels, they're not connected to anything, but if you shoot them, they spin like crazy. Then there are flowers that need to be watered, these give powerups, and fire flowers, which you need to shoot.

At the end of 1-3, I get my first boss fight. It's certainly a boss fight. He jumps around and occasionally opens up to reveal a line of fire which I'm sure would hurt me if it ever hit me. I never died to this, saying it's a joke implies it's funny. It's not fun, because combat isn't fun. It's not interesting, the most unusual thing I had to do was find a choice of words for the not helicopter blade it has. It is, to quote a Rush song, "Why are we here? Because we're here -- Roll the bones." That, or the developers wanted the game to be a minute longer.

After this you get two doors, which determines which of two stages you start at.

Section two is unusual. It's a water section, which by logic of my character being a water creature, should mean I play better, or by logic of crappy video games, it's unplayable. Throw logic out the window, it's the same as other stages, except sometimes your hippo is floating on water and some enemies lie under the water. This actually makes some annoying sections, because said enemies can't be hit with your water attack under the water, but they can above, and it hurts above. Figure it out yourself. Why does it happen? Because it happens. Roll the bones.

This is actually enough to shift the game from basically a joke to challenging, but not very interesting. It's very easy for the enemy to pin you down here, moving over water while there's a horde of fish is not going to end well for you. This really eats up the lives, but it's still more of a failure to deal with them then them being cheap. They're very slow in reaching you, which puts you in an annoying place.

The boss of this section is unusual. He's somewhere between the first boss, here because he's here, and a serious boss. He shoots out sponges, which are water absorbing landmines, but he himself is very vulnerable to your damage and if you hit him from above, he's just wrecked. His movement is very predictable, except for one moment, otherwise you basically take him out easily.

This brings us to the fire section. The first fire section if the map screen is any indication. You want to know a coin munching section? Here's a coin-munching section. For starters, you have to make a blind drop onto a singular platform, everything else is spikes, or get lucky with a moving platform. Then there are falling blocks, at the end of which is a strange, and big new enemy. He's tough, but still stupid, he has body parts you have to dismember. That's a strange consideration in this game.

Saying this section delights in torturing the player is an understatement, because I feel like everything the game could do to screw over the player is put here. Platforms that move up and down? Well, you won't get crushed, but they're going to put spikes halfway up, at the top, and possibly somewhere else to, because you paid money to play this, you will suffer. That said, this wasn't too bad when I went through my second time.

Then we have the metal knights. My first thought were that they were like the knights from the Zelda series, but they're just as dumb. No, what makes them nasty is that they're fast and it doesn't seem like you're damaging them. This is extremely tight quarters, they will kill you unless you know what you're doing. Before the fire stage I could at least pretend to be trying to 1CC this, but no, there's no chance of that now.

There's a train at the top, and some more types of enemies. I don't know how you fight the train, or if you can. Fighting a train is kind of like fighting against technological progress itself, impossible. Or I'm just missing something. Maybe this level wasn't simply a series of memorization challenges and there's something to it.

The second stage is really just more of the same, but the boss is interesting. He killed me quite a lot, but I can't say I mind too much. He's like the earlier big enemies, tough and with multiple parts. The saw blades don't seem to hurt you, but he pumps out enemies, and shoots flames once both parts have been removed, which is the bigger issue. It's actually a lot easier than I thought, and requires using all three levels of the area.

Egyptian section, basically tricks and traps. The new enemies are kind of clever, there's a conch shell that, if you move into it, will turn into a deadlier version of itself. Then there's the annoying enemy, a reaper-looking dude with a grabber. He grabs you, and you're not dead, but you'll wish you were. He moves you into a different level. Sometimes it's just back a few places, other times it's a nasty repeating loop.

I actually really liked this section, except, it's also where the game ended for me. See, there are a lot of clever tricks here, which isn't surprising considering how much it screwed you over. No, the problem is that at one point, the game had a spring, which functions much like you'd expect one to function, except it just isn't enough to reach the next platform. What is? Dunno, but no matter what I do I can't seem to get up it.

Despite my issues, I did enjoy it. It's well-polished, but perhaps too much so at times. It seems oddly Amiga-ish at times, pretty sure they used a real human whistling in one of the music tracks, which in the west would be a tell-tale sign of .mod music around this time.

I don't have any reason to show this, I just like how goofy it is.

Weapons:

I can't help but like, despite the game basically forcing you to use a grenade weapon exclusively, as a crutch. It shouldn't work, but it does. 2/10

Enemies:

There's a wide variety, ranging from an interesting challenge, to just hammer them with your water balls. 4/10

Non-Enemies:

None.

Levels:

For as far as I could reach, there's some clever tricks going on. Each stage has it's own gimmicks and tricks, keeping each one unique in both design and looks. Also, there are little side stages you can find my watering the right spot, I only found two and entered one, not sure if there's much point to it. 4/10

Player Agency:

Outside of rare power-ups, you move incredibly slowly with such a bizarre jump arc. When serious enemies come around, any positives the rest of the game had more are more than ruined when you have seemingly no chance of escape, that is, outside of quarters. 1/10

Interactivity:

Feels like just guessing where to hit with the massive amount of water you get rather than any conscious thought. 1/10

Atmosphere:

Feels like the world you get in an intro cutscene before the villain turns all the cute animals into demons, yet it's also the after effect of that. 4/10

Graphics:

Cutesy, well-animated and generally nice to see. Sometimes feels a bit too bright and cheerful that it hurts my eyes though. 7/10

Story:

Vague Engrish, not very exciting plot. 1/10

Sound/Music:

A bit too soft-spoken, to fit the vibe of the game. Some are nice, but it felt like no matter how high I brought up the volume I was hearing it through a pair of tin cans. 3/10

That's 27, not bad for an arcade platformer.

Almost universally this game seems to have met with praise, which I sort of understand. There's a port of this to the PC Engine, which is probably inferior in many ways, and ports to the Switch and PS4, which are from those kinds of allegedly arcade perfect ports that every company these days brags about.

Next week, we'll probably see Space Gun, maybe Rejection. This week has had some very time-consuming problems, and next week there'll be more. I try to keep things to every Sunday, but I hope my readers will forgive me if the next post is on a Monday.