XP Arcade: Liquid Kids
XP Arcade: Liquid Kids
A 32-year-old arcade game that only recently appeared on North American consoles as its own individual release.
This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Taito has a deep library of arcade games, but they didn’t always make their way to consoles, or, if they did, not always internationally. Liquid Kids is one such title that failed to penetrate living rooms abroad: a 1990 arcade title with a worldwide release, it wouldn’t reach North American consoles until 2007, when the compilation Taito Legends 2 released for the Playstation 2, Xbox, and PC — two years after the Xbox’s successor, the Xbox 360, had already hit the market, and in the year following the release of the Playstation 3.
It had plenty of iterations before then, but they were all in Japan. Liquid Kids — or Mizubaku Adventure — had its first console port on the PC Engine in 1992, which kept things mostly the same outside of some graphical downgrades like the removal of parallax scrolling in order to make the transition from arcade to home console. It would receive a port much closer to its arcade original in 1998, this time for the Sega Saturn, as part of the series of Japan-only arcade re-releases that Ving put together for the console. You really can’t go wrong with either of them, outside of the fact they’re in Japanese, but Liquid Kids isn’t exactly a game that requires comprehension of its Japanese text. Anything you need to comprehend, as can so often happen in arcade games, is either in English or acted out by the game’s sprites.
Of course, that fact only matters if you have access to the game, and North Americans did not between 1990 and 2007 unless they happened upon a cabinet in the wild. In the years since then, though, there has been massive improvement on that front. There was Taito Legends 2, as mentioned, which emulated the arcade originals of over 40 Taito titles and included options like changing difficulty, playing in the original aspect ratios, adding scanlines, save states, and so on. In 2021, Liquid Kids released on both the Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch as part of Hamster’s Arcade Archives series, giving it the most exposure it’s ever had — the Playstation 2 might have sold more than any other console, but how many copies of a Taito compilation do you think it moved in 2007 in a post-Playstation 3 world, among too many critics who didn’t seem to understand what a treasure it was?* The answer will not surprise you if you keep that, or how many people just think of Taito as that studio that made Space Invaders decades ago, in mind.
*One of Hardcore Gaming 101’s digests is dedicated entirely to Taito arcade games, and in the introduction, Kurt Kalata pointed out that, “When the Taito Legends 2 compilation disc for the PS2 was released — an embarrassment of riches containing top tier titles like Metal Black and Elevator Action Returns — a big name American video game site basically rated it as (paraphrased), ‘I have never heard of these games. 6/10.’” Needless to say, as someone obsessed with making sure video game’s past remains available and who gets annoyed at critics not appreciating what they have in their hands, this has stuck with me.
And hey, there’s another spot that Liquid Kids is available in North America, though, this is in a far more limited form than the combined power of the Switch and PS4. In 2022, it was included as one of the 40 base games in Taito’s Egret II Mini arcade cabinet, in its Japanese Mizubaku Adventure form. This version also allows for scanlines, save states, and such, but with the added benefit of a built-in arcade stick and buttons that you would need an extra accessory for on the Switch or PS4, if you were going to play it on home consoles arcade-style like God intended.
So, that’s the places where you can play Liquid Kids, and it nearly appeared on additional systems back in the 90s, too. An Amiga version of Liquid Kids was completed, but never released — Ocean Software, known for their successful conversions of arcade games, did the work on Liquid Kids without securing the licensing deal necessary to actually show it off. If you’re curious about checking it out, you can, as it’s all out there now — the completed game was put on the internet when an Amiga fan board reached out to the developers to request access to it. Ocean Software also worked on an Atari ST version of Liquid Kids that was initially expected to come out around the same time as the Amiga conversion, but this, too, was not released. It’s a little wild that magazines were covering these planned ports when Ocean Software still lacked a licensing deal to release them, but hey, it makes for a nifty story all these years later.
As for the game itself, Liquid Kids is an adorable Taito platformer with a sense of humor, plenty of challenge for those looking for it, and an optional simple enough path for those who are not. You play as Hipopo, who is looking to rescue his friends and girlfriend after they’ve been kidnapped by an evil clown slash demon slash wizard. To help him in this goal, he is armed with water bombs, which you can throw rapid fire-like with diminishing returns in damage and area of effect, or charge up by holding down the attack button for maximum damage and post-splash flooding. Against regular enemies, the water bombs act a bit like the bubble from another Taito franchise, Bubble Bobble, as they stun foes by soaking them, allowing you to then bump into them in order to defeat them and score points.
There are some key differences here, though, in that the water simply stuns them, not carries them floating away like in Bubble Bobble, and there are larger enemies you can’t stun but have to overwhelm with water instead, but the way the points work is very Bubble Bobble, in that eliminating multiple stunned enemies at a time results in significant scoring bonuses. And, being an arcade game, points are how you earn enough extra lives to make it through without having to feed additional quarters into the machine. In addition, in Bubble Bobble, only enemies trapped within bubbles could be defeated by Bub and Bob, but Hipopo can bump into one stunned enemy and send them flying into a host of foes coming toward you, taking them all out in one fell high-scoring swoop. It still helps — especially when Hipopo is moving slower — to take the time to stun the enemies still coming at you, however, as you might lose the footrace to the one stunned foe and end up losing a life. Liquid Kids features one-hit deaths, and there are stages with plenty of things trying to deliver that blow to you at once.
Levels are often short, though, some do grow in scope and complexity as the game goes on — stage 4 is a real highlight, as it takes what you’ve learned to that point and tests you on it. Others are sometimes even shorter than what you faced early on, but with the difficulty ramped all the way up — one late-game level is basically just two or three screens’ width, but all but the very end of those screens has you trying to avoid being insta-killed by fireballs endlessly raining down from the sky in numbers high enough that it’s not enough to just dodge, you also have to throw water bombs at them as you move… while also avoiding and putting out the spreading fires that form once a fireball hits the ground. There is an easier mode — normal, really — that you can choose by selecting the left door upon completion of each stage. This brings you to the standard version of the next stage, while the door on the right brings you to the tougher one. This trend was, for some cruel reason, reversed for the game’s final stage, but even the hard version isn’t that rough when playing a console or PC re-release of the game, since adding in extra credits now takes a button press instead of money. Still, your high score can suffer, if that’s what you’re aiming to set — as is standard, a Game Over means your score is reset to zero.
The boss fights have some of the greater challenge in the game, and are often fun to figure out how to survive. Most of the foes you face are smaller sprites, similar in size to Hipopo, but bosses are either massive or larger than normal and numerous, too, like the giant clown head with demon horns that spits fire at you while three smaller full-bodied clowns float beneath you, firing their own projectiles upward. The boss fights have invisible checkpoints in the arcade version of Liquid Kids, so, if you die mid-fight, you’ll return to it with a significant chunk of the boss’ health already missing. This helps, but it’s worth remembering, too, that you probably died because the boss took on a new and more difficult form with more intense attacks, or targeted chasing of Hipopo, that you are just diving right back into because of these checkpoints.
This kind of ease of play is featured all over — Hipopo might die in a single hit, but he returns from death exactly where you failed, and with the screen cleared of the enemies you were just sharing it with. Even coming back from a Game Over places you right back where you were, or damn close to it — the mid-boss in stage 7-2, for example, is one you have to complete in a single go, so it pushes you right outside of its start each time you die. Otherwise, though, you just pick up from where you left off, with a moment to breathe because the screen is cleared of foes or the boss has to do their entrance again, even with their lessened health.
I mentioned Hipopo’s slow speed earlier, so let’s get back to that. The base version of Hipopo, which you control at the start of the game as well as after every death, moves very slowly, and fires off weaker water bombs. By collecting the various upgrades in the game, however — trains to boost speed, boots to keep Hipopo’s footing in streams of water, pig faces that actually slow Hipopo back down but also give you 1,000 points for collecting them, water guns and pumps to increase the strength and range of your arcing water bombs — you can turn Hipopo into a watery force of nature. Defeating a boss is certainly possible after dying without ever bordering on unfair, but it’s much harder to manage even with the health checkpoints, since you’re weaker the second time around than the first sans your upgrades.
One thing you need to watch out for in Liquid Kids is that there is a time limit in stages, but it’s not shown on screen. The music changes to become more frantic when you’re running low on time, though, so you’ll be aware something is up: the time limit wouldn’t normally matter, since stages tend to be short and not overly complicated, but if you’re taking the time to find all the hidden rooms and warps in the game, it’s easy to let time slip away from you. Warp points are found by hitting specific spaces — not necessarily ones that are obvious — with water bombs. These send you off to some bonus/challenge rooms to rack up some additional points, and can dump you off in an area you otherwise wouldn’t be able to reach afterward.
Something that sticks out with Liquid Kids is the care put into the protagonist and his animations. There are various death animations, depending on how Hipopo goes down: a spear stuck in his head causes a different animation than being burned, which are both different from simply being touched by an enemy, which itself varies from being stabbed by spikes or squashed. It’s extra effort to design something this way, instead of just having the same animation for every death a la the original Super Mario Bros. on the NES, but said effort is worth it, for sure. It’s the kind of extra effort to squeeze everything possible out of the hardware that made platformers like Kirby’s Adventure stand out in the same era, and that extra bit was needed in a space that was filling up with more and more cute platformers by the day.
It also adds to the humor of it all, which a game based on a little creature throwing water bombs at evil kidnapping clowns certainly needs to deliver. The Game Over screen sees Hipopo being humorously tormented, bounced on by a foe again and again as the Continue? clock winds down. If you’re playing an English version of the game, you’ll see he’s regularly tricked or made to look like a fool in the dialogue, with art to illustrate the moments for you if you’re playing a Japanese release of Liquid Kids instead.
It’s fun to play, adorable to look at, and with the kind of catchy and enjoyable soundtrack you expect from a Taito game, too. Liquid Kids might not have been easily found outside of Japan for the better part of three decades, but anyone with a Switch or Playstation 4 — just two of the best-selling consoles ever — is able to grab it for $8 these days. And if you’ve got one of those systems and a fondness for arcade-style platformers, you absolutely should plunk down the $8 on this oft-hidden gem.
This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter.