Liquid Kids is one of the best arcade platform video games released originally for the arcades in 1990 by Taito. The first conversion of the game was the NEC PC Engine's, developed in 1992 and it was followed by a Commodore Amiga conversion made by Ocean Software. Some years later the game was also released for the Sega Saturn game console.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY You control a tapir called Hipopo and begin your quest to find your kidnapped girlfriend and rescue her from some evil foes. The way is pretty hard and the action quite tense, as you have to fight against a large number of creatures each time. Hipopo is armed with water bombs that can be thrown at enemies to soak and do some damage to them them. Once soaked, the enemies can then be kicked and destroyed forever. However, if you leave some creatures alive (soaked), they will soon dry out and recover, attacking you again. Each stage of the game features moving platforms, collapsible floors, boats and water-wheels thus requiring some nice skills from you to go further.
GRAPHICS / SOUND The PC-Engine's version produces great visuals with colorful backdrops (much like the original arcade game). The sprites move smoothly on-screen and act fast, which makes the gameplay particularly fun! Liquid Kids' sound is good too, offering all the original in-game musics plus some nice, arcadey sounds effects (based of course on the system's hardware).
Screenshots
Sounds
Intro/Menu music:
In-game music sample:
Gameplay sample
Hardware information
PC-Engine / TurboGrafx-16 / TurboDuo
CPU: HuC6280 8bit at 3.6MHz MEMORY: 8KB RAM GRAPHICS: Dual 16-bit GPUs (HuC6260 Video Color Encoder, HuC6270A Video Display Controller), 64KB VRAM, 482 colors at once out of 512, 64 hardware sprites, Supports: 256 x 256 to 320x256 flicker free interlaced screen resolution. A 512x256 mode is possible through fiddling with registers, but not SOUND: Capable of generating clear digitized sounds and harmonized music. Use of "Turbo Booster" add-on, could generate stereo sound.