Liquid Kids, originally titled Mizubaku Daibouken (meaning "Water Bomb Big Adventure"), is one of Taito's cutesy platform games from the late 80s/early 90s, one that did not get the same recognition and appreciation of Bubble Bobble, but that still shows their ability in creating an appealing title for all ages.

The story, in this kind of game, is nothing special: cartoon critter Hipopo, his girlfriend Tamasun and the others were living peacefully in Woody Lake until, as the intro states, the clownish Fire Demon took them by surprise and kidnapped most of them. Hipopo goes to the rescue thanks to a magical artifact that arms him with water bombs, and that's pretty much it.

While not exactly an original plot, the story of Liquid Kids shares a lot with Taito's previous arcade platformer, The NewZealand Story: outsider kidnaps cute creature's relatives/friends scattering them everywhere, keeps the hero's girlfriend for himself, hero needs to find the cages and free the friends... not only that: this game also shares the enemies' habit to come out of portals appearing from nowhere, and secret warps can be found by hitting particular spaces of the levels with our weapon. These details, and other ones like the games sharing the same interface font, brought many people to consider Liquid Kids a "spiritual successor" of the above title, which never received a real sequel (the bad Nintendo DS remake can be ignored).

Luckily for Hipopo, the levels are much straighter than the ones of TNZS and in general the game's approach is much mellower and less frantic. It's also quite a bit easier, but later stages have all the usual platformer challenges such as spikes, crumbling floors, traps and the enemies still come out of nowhere in large numbers. One factor for this change of pace is Hipopo's weapon, water bombs, far less fast and precise than Tiki's arrows and laser beams. The water bombs travel in an arc, bounce, and if they or the resulting water stream touch enemies, these won't be killed, but frozen in place for a while, allowing Hipopo to push them against walls, or each other to make big score chains (5 or more enemies in a row gives you a random special bonus). Basically, the bombs are a cross between Bubble Bobble's water bubbles and the snowballs from Snow Bros., a platformer by Toaplan that was released in the arcades the same year.

Water bombs are more versatile than usual platforming game weapons, since they are used for various purposes such as putting out fires, letting flowers grow to use them as platforms, making some watermills and similar contraptions move, and so on. They also need to be charged by keeping the button pressed: if you mash it Hipopo will shoot smaller and smaller bombs and also at a diminishing rate. Our hero needs to get water-related items such as buckets, pumps and water guns to improve the bombs' range, rate and dimension, again much like Snow Bros' snowballs. It's pretty much imperative, since they are the only weapon you will ever get.

Another reason for the game's relaxed pace is Hipopo's speed, unfortunately very slow and even slower when you swim on water. He can get faster by picking up the train icon (and not the boots icon, which, unlike every other game, prevents Hipopo from getting dragged by watery platforms and his own water streams), but this is counter-balanced by the piggy icons which, other than giving 1000 points, only reduce walking speed again. Also, whenever you lose a life, your speed and weapon status is reset, making Hipopo an easy target especially during the battles with bosses, who can pull some mean tricks when about to be defeated. However taking too many speed-up bonuses in a row can make Hipopo harder to control, so sometimes piggies are needed to keep his speed in check.

Every time you beat a boss two doors open and you have to choose, a possible reference to Taito's Darius series where you had to choose a branching path after every stage. One of these takes Hipopo to a harder first stage of the next area, but it's just for those who want a greater challenge, since there's no better reward at all for beating them. Usually the harder path is on the right, but that gets reversed for the final stage, making for an especially nasty surprise if someone assumes that things would always be the same.

The graphics are pretty good and help convey the cutesy, relaxed feeling of the title. The settings are mostly the typical platformer areas from the 90s, including a factory full of hazards, an Egyptian stage with many tricks and traps and the evil dark castle at the end, all drawn in a "fairy tale" kind of way but without the surrealism and "anything goes" quality that The NewZealand Story had, going for more internal consistency. A cool effect for the time was the passage from morning to dusk in the stages set outside, with the colors of backgrounds and platforms changing to represent the passage of time, a very nice visual that gets comically sped up if you happen to find a warp that brings you directly to the boss' lair.

Our hero and his enemies are typical cute, rotund Taito creations, short on animation frames but rich in personality, with a special mention for the goofy end-stage bosses including the final one, a demon that looks more like a wizard clown. Several enemies, being the Fire Devil's minions, are related to fire, such as living bombs and flying venus flytraps that spit fire, but the majority is just random creatures not always related to the theme of the level, including splitting amoebas and mechanical ducks that swallow your water bombs. The people to be rescued are far more varied than the identical kiwis from The NewZealand Story and go from kids to old men, from hicks to nobles. Even the time-out enemy is bizarre: a green-haired clown in a checkered dress with a scythe (The Grim Joker, maybe?). We get it, Taito: clowns are evil.

One funny thing to note is how often Hipopo is played for a fool in the game: the intro sequence has a random image of him selected from his dying animations (crushed, electrocuted, burned...), one intermission has him find Tamasun only for her being replaced with an enemy without him even noticing, and the continue screen countdown has the seconds ticking in unison with a bomb enemy bouncing on Hipopo's head, who then explodes when the screen fades to black if you didn't insert any coin. A strange way to inject some personality in him, but it's still endearing.

Liquid Kids in the end is another example of Taito's mastery in the platform game genre: maybe it's a bit by-the-books, without some memorable inventions, and the water bombs are a bit cumbersome for a weapon, but it's still fun, engaging, pleasant to the eye and ear, and carefully constructed for newbies and experts alike.

Ports

Unlike Taito's earlier platformers, Liquid Kids did not receive the same plethora of ports, in fact at the time only one was produced, the one for PC Engine in 1992. And unlike the TNZS one, it resembles closely the arcade original. Sure, the effect of time passing was removed, there are simpler backgrounds without parallax, but the stages are nearly identical, the physics of the water bombs has been faithfully represented and the warps are all there, with some nice little difference such as the Tiki homage. The tunes are also very similar to the original ones, accounting for the HuCards' lesser memory (the boss theme sounds like it came out of DuckTales for the NES, not that this would be a bad thing). There is no intro cinematic but brief cutscenes at the beginning of every level showing Hipopo following some enemies from that level.

There is one blatant difference though: the possibility of choosing the level after the boss is present only in the even-numbered levels, while the others only have one choice, the easier one of the two. In general the game has been made easier, with enemies that go down in fewer hits and are less aggressive (for example the rock golems in the pyramid no longer throw their boulders in an arc but straight ahead, thus much easier to avoid). The bosses however have been made tougher, simply by having the battles restart from scratch if you lose them, and this is aggravating in the case of bosses who have more than one form (the fourth and the final one who unsurprisingly are the hardest ones).

Eight years after the game appeared in the arcades, a perfect port was made for the Sega Saturn by Ving, the same company that handled the arcade-perfect port of The NewZealand Story on the FM Towns. The game was also part of 2006's Taito Legends 2 for PlayStation 2, XBOX and Windows

In 2003, however, the Amiga community suddenly discovered that Liquid Kids was indeed converted for their system, only it was never officially released and was buried into their developers' hard disks. The French branch of Ocean Software, founded in 1986 and responsible for some pretty good coin-op conversions such as Operation Wolf and Dragon Ninja, planned in 1991 to make conversions of Taito games, but Ocean UK never was able to secure the rights of those.

So Liquid Kids for Amiga was finished but nobody knew, until a member of the English Amiga Board forum was able to contact the devs and arranged for the title to be released. (Curiously, the only other finished but unreleased game by Ocean France was Snow Bros. It seems that these two titles have to be related somehow...) The tunes are completely different, the fifth level (giant tree area) is missing, but all in all it is a very good conversion, with a few bugs (nothing game-breaking though) and some added touches, like a bonus at the end of every stage related to the number of points bonuses collected.

Links:
The Brothers Duomazov Review of Liquid Kids for PC Engine, once again comparing it to The NewZealand Story.
Codetapper's Amiga Retro Site Interview with Marc Djan of Ocean France about the unreleased Amiga games.
English Amiga Board The page of the EAB thread where the discovery of Liquid Kids Amiga is detailed.