DISNEY'S ARIEL: THE LITTLE MERMAID (MEGADRIVE/GENESIS)

If, like me, you're in your mid-to-late twenties, here's a fact that might make you realise just how closely the grim spectre of death is hovering at your shoulder; Disney's The Little Mermaid was released in 1989. 1989! I was barely on solid foods by then. Margaret Thatcher was still the Prime Minister, for chrissakes! Anyway, now that you're all feeling the chill wind of a lonely, pointless death blowing through your bones, let's have a look at Blue Sky Innovations take on the world's most famous mermaid: it's the 1992 Genesis / Megadrive under-the-sea-em-up Disney's Ariel: The Little Mermaid.

Mmm, soggy. Now, I've never actually seen The Little Mermaid, mostly due to a self-imposed (and fairly rigourous) no-Disney policy during my childhood. However, I'm fairly certain that the fishy princess (a dauphin, if you will) meets a somewhat less aquatic man-prince, they fall in love, they suffer some hardships but in the end it all works out and they get married and have a big singsong and so forth. Not for Disney the bleeding feet and unrequited love of the original fairytale - they kindly left that sort of dark take on the tales to the graphic novelists and filmmakers of today. So, sweetness and light abound, true love is fought for and eventually won and a crab sings a jaunty song. Except in this game, where it's all underwater action and nary a human to be seen, so get any notions of pixellated romance out of your head right now.

Instead, the plot is that either Ariel or King Triton have been kidnapped by the evil octopus queen Ursula and turned into some kind of green sea-maggot, along with a bunch of bland and unimportant mer-folk. You can play as Ariel or Triton (although there's not much difference between them) and venture out into the wide, deep ocean to save your subjects. I say wide and deep - there's only four stages, so I guess Triton rules a body of water equivalent to... a small lake or something? Whatever, it's hardly the raging Atlantic.
I'm going to ignore Triton and play as Ariel, because I also enjoy wearing tutus and holding tea parties for my stuffed animals. Also, it's not called Disney's Triton: The Somewhat Large Merman, is it?

There's our heroine, no doubt longing for the day when she can live on dry land and wear clothes that aren't made from the shells of bivalve molluscs. She's got quite the quiff going on, too, but there's no time to wonder about that: there's adventure afoot!

The actual gameplay is reminiscent of Ecco the Dolphin, (which TLM actually predates by a year,) in that you swim around the maze-like stages in any direction you like, avoiding enemies and rescuing mermen. That last bit might not have happened in Ecco, but it's been a long time since I played it. To help on her quest, Ariel can defeat enemies by singing at them. She's also got a limited super-shot version of her singing, which I guess just means she sings louder. You can also summon one of three "fish friends" to assist you, but aside from a couple of occasions when one of them can push blocks out of your way, they're pretty useless. Standing in your way are the traditional villains of the deep; sharks, eels, urchins and so on. The pudgy sharks are particularly irritating, and they also bear a disturbing facial resemblance to Rik Mayall:

Weird. Your goal in each stage is to locate all the polyps. Once you've found one, Ariel can sing at it and return it to its original mermanny glory.

So, shout at a worm until it becomes a man. I guess Ariel's some kind of undersea Drill Sergeant. Once you've found all the polyps in a stage (not difficult, given that they're all marked on your map,) a boss appears. In the first stage, Ariel has to face...

...a leering stone face that fires egg yolks at you. To defeat it, swim in front of it and repeatedly press the fire/sing button. Music may tame the savage beast, but it also causes stone demons to explode.
And speaking of music, probably the first thing you'll notice about TLM is the atrocious music. After a passable rendition of "Under the Sea" that plays at the title screen, the music quickly takes a dive into a painful realm of grating synth noise that doesn't seem to contain even the vaguest hint of a melody. What it does contain is one particularly strident synth channel that blats out some hideous noise at irregular intervals, making it sound as though the game is trying to send you a message by Morse code. Maybe it's from Uncle Walt, reminding people to top up the liquid nitrogen in his cryo-containment unit lest he break free of his icy shackles and once again terrorise the world of Man. What I'm saying is, you'd have thought that in a videogame based on a musical, they'd have made some kind of effort to give you a listening experience that isn't likely to make you saw off your own ears.

The second stage is set amongst some sunken pirate ships, inhabited by these charming skeletons. At least, they would be charming if they didn't fill up the whole passage that they occupy. Despite being a mermaid princess, Ariel has all the underwater grace of a cat in a sack, and simply getting her to go where you want can be a bit of a challenge. This is compounded by the awful collision detection that seems to follow no discernable logic: sometimes you'll get stuck on small outcroppings, sometimes you'll sail through them like they're not even there.

The boss? It's a giant shark that vomits smaller sharks at you. Umbrella would be proud.

Stage three take place amongst the ruins of Atlantis, an underwater archeological goldmine that is somewhat tarnished by the fact that it's full of statues that throw discuses at you. You'd think they'd have more respect for a member of the royal family, but a lot of them don't have heads, so what the fuck do they care? They've been dealt a rough hand, they're bound to be angry.

In a shocking twist, I actually think the boss of this stage is pretty cool - at least in concept, if not execution. Several sea-snakes have taken up residence in a statue's head, making it look like Medusa. Fortunately for Ariel, a mermaid's song is fatal to sea-snakes, as it seems to be to pretty much everything in the sea.
Another problem with the gameplay, which becomes particularly apparent here, is that you can't tell if your attacks are hurting the enemies. They don't flash or make a noise or anything, and when you combine that with Ariel's lack of accuracy it can be very difficult to tell if you're making an impact. It sound like a minor thing, but it's much more important than it seems: imagine playing a Mega Man game where your shots pass straight through bad guys with no discernable effect.

The final stage already? Geez, that was quick. Ariel finds herself in an underwater volcano of some sort - admittedly a fascinating place in the real world, but not so much fun when you're trying to navigate them with Ariel The Wonky Mermaid. While the lava blobs are a threat, the real problem is the vast number of sharks that have taken up residence here. Ariel should direct the Chinese restaurant industry over here; there's enough raw material here to make Shark's Fin Soup for everybody in, well, China.
Actually, that raises an unsettling point: what does Ariel, as a mermaid, eat? Fish? That seems in poor taste. It'd be like Prince Charles eating his butlers or something. There's not much else down there, though, and an all-kelp diet is going to get very boring very quickly.

Ursula is the final boss. Yep. She just sort of sits there, when after she's gone to all this trouble you'd expect her to have a better plan than "don't move and fire the occasional magic bolt". As ever, the way to defeat her is to park your chosen mer-creature in front of her face, blast away and hope she drops first. Ursula dies, Ariel's father is returned to his original extravagantly-bearded form and all is well in the undersea kingdom, at least until BP resume their nearby drilling operations.

"Oh ho ho, thank you Ariel, my beloved daughter, for saving me!" said Triton. "Now I'm off to practise my droit de seigneur with the local manatees!"
That's Disney's Ariel: The Little Mermaid. It's pretty bad, as you probably already gathered. I can't really ascribe all the blame for this to the development team, though; I guess there's only so much they could have done with the license, and they had to keep it simple enough for the young 'uns (although that doesn't excuse that goddamn music). If you're a fan of The Little Mermaid, you might get some enjoyment out if it if you keep in mind that it wasn't designed for you - otherwise, if you really want some aquatic Megadrive action, then stick with Ecco the Dolphin.

LIQUID KIDS

Another day, another game with "Kid" in the title. This one's different though, because it doesn't contain any kids and it's actually good. I know, I'm shocked too. So, I present to you Taito's 1990 arcade splash-em-up Liquid Kids!

Also know as Mizubaku Daibouken (Water Bomb Adventure), Liquid Kids is a side-scrolling platformer that carries on Taito's grand tradition of videogames about throwing bubbles at things. But before we get into the gameplay mechanics, what's the story behind these mysterious bubble-related hijinks?

Yes, there is actually a story, related in the kind of strangely-translated English that you should be used to by now.
"Peaceful Woody-Lake. The Fire Devil took Woody-Lake by surprise. Transmitted miraculous power. The savior, "Hipopo" attack the devil."
It may sound like a series of poorly-worded wartime telegrams, but you get the general idea. You control the savior Hipopo, who is a heroic... well, what do you think he is?

Given that he's called Hipopo, it's not much of a surprise to learn he's supposed to be a hippopotamus. He sure doesn't look like a hippo, though; until my feeble mind made the connection between "Hipopo" and "hippo" I though he was supposed to be platypus. I'll admit to being a little disappointed that he isn't a platypus, but I'll let it slide because as videogame heroes go, hippos are hardly common.

So, what was the "miraculous power" that was transmitted to Hipopo? Well, our brave young platypus hippo now has the power to create bubbles of water and throw them at his enemies. You know, like in Bubble Bobble - but also filled with the raging power of Poseidon himself.

Given that the villains are the Fire Devil and his minions, Hipopo has to be feeling pretty pleased with his new power. It'd be a different story if Woody-Lake had been attacked by the Rubber Devil and his legion of raincoat-wearing troops.

The controls are simple and intuitive, with the stick moving Hipopo around and one button making him jump. The other button controls your bubbles; tapping it throws a bubble ahead of you, and you can also charge up your bubble by holding down the button.
Your waterbombs are primarily an offensive weapon; hitting one of the adorable enemies with a balloon will soak them through, and once they're soaked you can walk into them to kick 'em and kill 'em. If your bubble bursts, it also sends a wave of water along the floor, which is useful for taking out enemies as well as some other, less murderous tasks.
So far, so much like Bubble Bobble, but the main difference is that rather than killing all the enemies in a stage to advance, you have to make your way to the exit door. It’s a simple premise with several elements that push it into “damned fine game” territory.

The graphics in Liquid Kids are a big plus. Excellent for their time, they’re big, colourful, cartoony and most of all adorable. As much as I like gore-spattered horror titles like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, I must admit I’m not immune to the technicolour charms of a really cutesy game. Everything looks like a cartoon, with characterful animations and especially adorable enemies that have an almost Kirby vibe to them, possibly with a bit of Moominosity thrown in.
Along with the graphics, the presentation is further enhanced with an excellent soundtrack by Kazuko Umino, who also worked on Pu-Li-Ru-La and was part of Taito’s in-house band Zuntata. Here’s “Ride the Pelican! Everyone Friends!”, the first stage theme.

It’s very nice, and catchier than ebola. Even better than that is “Waltze of Water and Bubble”, the stage two music.

Personally, I think this is downright haunting (but then, I am a sucker for this kind of thing).

Away you go, guiding Hipopo past the various monsters, environmental traps and giant bosses like the mechanical, fire-spitting rabbit pictured above. Another thing LK has going for it is some wonderfully daft boss design, with my personal favourite being this guy:

A dark wizard who jumps around on a spring-loaded camel. Maybe he should team up with the pogoing elephant from Kamen Rider SMR.
Another thing LK does well, and it’s something I really appreciate, is its very well-balanced difficulty curve. Starting off in the not-particularly challenging Woody-Lake, the difficulty gradually increases as Hipopo makes his way through a water kingdom…

…an almost Castlevania-clocktower-esque factory stage, featuring tiny metal knights that try to lance you to death,

...and a pyramid filled with mummies and ghosts which is also home to the mechanical camel.

It’s about now that LK starts offering some real challenge, but thanks to the smoothness of the difficulty curve beforehand you don’t really notice. Thanks to the very generous continue system that starts you almost exactly where you died, LK feels like a challenge but never cheap.
Once you’re out of the pyramid, Hipopo makes his way up a giant tree…

…across the clouds…

…and finally, he arrives in the Fire Devil’s labyrinth.

By the time you get here the sedate pace of the first few stages is all but forgotten, with spikes everywhere and delicate jumping skills required. The Fire Devil himself is an interesting-looking chap who possibly should have some words with his personal stylist.

I know I think of party hats when I hear the words “Fire Devil”. After a while, he ditches his clown outfit and becomes, in the game’s only cheap moment, a ball of fire surrounded by spinning arms.

The trick here is to know that you can hurt him while he’s transforming, so make sure you do as much damage as possible during that period; otherwise, his arms will eventually rotate so fast you won’t be able to get away from them.
Fire Devil suitably doused, Hipopo has rescued all his adorable hippo friends and saved the day with his Super-Soaker style magical powers. Hooray!

This has all just been a long-winded way of trying to tell you that I really like Liquid Kids. To use an overworked phrase, it’s a forgotten gem, forever destined to languish in the shadows of Bubble Bobble. It deserves much more than that, for many reasons: the spot-on gameplay, the graphics and music, the sheer sense of cheerfulness that runs through the whole experience. It’s not perfect, of course; I would have liked there to have been more of the sections that saw you using your water for things other than killing, like growing plants to use as platforms or turning waterwheels, and the final boss is something of a letdown after all the previous weirdness, but overall I can’t recommend Liquid Kids enough for lovers of retro action.
Aside from the arcade release, it was ported to a few consoles like the PC Engine and the Saturn, (and apparently it’s one of the most sought-after Saturn games around,) but if you want to play it now your best bet is to pick up Taito Legends 2 for the PS2/Xbox, which also comes with Growl.

Ah, it sure is nice to play something I like. Maybe I’d better play something I hate to make up for it. Mortal Kombat on the SNES, anyone?

BONUS: Just a couple of days ago, a very nice piano version of the Stage 3 music appeared on YouTube, courtesy of user "yukimatsuri". And here it is!

TOILET KIDS

Have you ever wondered what kind of fantastical dreams would glide and glimmer through your burning mind if you were given a huge dose of psychoactive drugs and then put to work in a sewage treatment plant? Of course you haven't, you're far too normal and decent for that kind of nonsense. I only ask because I'm pretty goddamn sure that this experiment took place in 1992 in Japan. The test subject's wild delusions were recorded, analysed and eventually turned into a videogame: Media Ring's PC Engine / Turbografx-16 shooter Toilet Kids.

Every time I write that title I feel like I'm being placed on some government watchlist, a feeling that's only going to get stronger as I tell you that the game starts with a small boy going to the toilet in the middle of the night.

Something about his effluent displeases the angry spirits of the porcelain throne. Too much undigested corn, perhaps, or maybe retribution for the kid's refusal to lift the seat. Whatever the reason, a jet of water knocks the young tyke into the bowl... and then you're suddenly playing a vertically-scrolling shooter.

And that's about as much sense as you're going to get out of Toilet Kids, frankly. It's not a game designed to make you think deep questions, or marvel at the advances of entertainment technology, or even to provide a fun and challenging gameplay experience. It's just a long stream of toilet humour in the form of a scrolling shooter. If nothing else, you have to admire it for its single-minded dedication to its theme.

Gameplay wise, it's nothing special. It's basic, even: you've got one button to fire a shot forwards that is effective against enemies in the air. You can charge it up for a larger, spread-pattern attack. There's a button to drop bombs, which you can aim with the reticule that appears in front of you. If you want anything else, tough luck: Toilet Kids doesn't even feature a power-up system (except the occasional screen-clearing smart bomb you can collect), it only has four stages, and the only other gameplay mechanic of note is that if you bomb enough of the golden turds that have been... deposited throughout the game, you get an extra life. If it wasn't for its unusual aesthetic theme, it'd be the shooter equivalent of a supermarket's own-brand budget good. Tesco Value Videogame, if you will.

But it does have a theme, and Toilet Kids' obsession with excreta manifests itself most plainly in the many enemies that are trying to kill you. Not with bullets of rocket or laser swords, but with shit, piss and the odd ball of snot. In the first stage alone there are tortoises with shit for shells, artillery-style toilets that fire surface-to-air crap missiles at you, and farting beetles. However, the most disturbing enemy is pictured above. You see those things on the right? Those are penises. Flying, severed penises that zoom around the sky, trying to kill a child by urinating on them. That is literally something that happens in this game. Not only that, but if you compare them to the size of the player's character these dicks must be three feet long at least. I would feel inadequate, but as long as my tackle isn't flying around like the Red Baron I'm happy.

The stage's mid-boss is three spiders who have the faces of pigs and the fat arse of a plumber rooting around under a sink. The loss of their spinnerettes and their replacement with (presumably) human anuses doesn't seem to bother them any, which shows a pretty goddamn high level of adaptability. I'm not sure I'd be able to cope if my anus suddenly became a silk-generating gland.
Once they're dead, the stage continues on in much the same way. More enemies, more gleaming piles of golden poop and more shit flying around than a food fight at a coprophile's dinner party. This pattern is the same throughout the game, with fairly long levels that include a mid-boss and a final boss.

Stage one's boss is, surprisingly, barely scatological at all. It's a giant, stoned-looking dragonfly with a snout that fires deadly snot bubbles at you. Honestly, it's something of a relief to only be dealing with mucus. When he's defeated, you get a "stage clear" screen, gain an extra life and move on.

I presume stage two is set in Africa: after all, it does include lions, hippos and shit-flinging gorillas. I'll let them off with the gorillas. Gorillas are known for flinging their shit around. It's the second thing people think of when they hear the word "gorilla" after "King Kong". Less well know is the habit that gazelles have of turning around, pointing their disturbingly carefully-rendered backsides into the air and firing three deadly poopballs in a spread pattern. You'd think they'd use it against lions.

Also, there are huge turds covered in flies everywhere, a feature that has been strangely absent from any nature documentary I've ever seen.

Midboss time, and I think the developers reached the peak of their insanity here. It's a helicopter with a human ass and legs grafted on to the front. I'd like to have been in the meeting when that was proposed: "Yeah, a human ass. No, no, just stuck on the front. Because then, yeah, it can attack with rockets and farts at the same time!"

The main boss is poor old Ganesha, pulled away from his godly duties to help destroy this poor kid. According to Wikipedia, Ganesha is revered as "the Remover of Obstacles", which seems fitting for a game about clearing out your alimentary canal.

Stage three is an underwater kingdom filled with crabs with butts and the world's worst mermaids: in a rare case of Japan removing tentacles from something, they're squid on the top and human in the leg region. Luckily, there are no flying penises for the crabs to latch on to in this stage.

The mid-boss is a submarine made from a Japanese squat toilet. Yawn, how very gauche.

A special mention goes to these little fish. Like real fish, they poop in long strands; unlike real fish crap these bars then travel slowly down the screen, acting as obstacles and taking several hits to destroy. Strangely, these fish are the only enemies that seem to be having any kind of difficulty in producing their weaponised crap. Maybe they should put in a call to Ganesha.

The boss is a purple whale with two perfectly-coiled dumps for eyes. He is also extremely happy, you know, just like things with shit where their eyes should be aren't.

The final stage has an Egyptian theme, and once again I'm basing this on the local fauna. You don't get camels with shit for humps in Sweden, now do you? Oh, and all the pyramids. They're covered in shit, too. Everything is. Toilet Kids is clearly the work of a sick mind. When I was a kid I enjoyed a good poop joke as much as anyone, and I'll still laugh at them today, but even at my most immature I'd have found this constant barrage of faeces tiresome.

There's also some interesting relics of an ancient shit-based civilisation, like this statue of a mysterious man. He's got what looks like some Arabic written on his loincloth, so if anyone knows if that text actually says anything, please send me a translation at vgjunk(at)hotmail.co.uk. EDIT: shockingly enough, it apparently says "toilet". Thanks to elieattie for that!

"I pronounce you... Pharaoh Poopankhamun! Unless you're female, in which case it's Cleocraptra."

We're nearing the end as the final mid-boss appears. It's a pair of fish, once again made of Japanese toilets. At least these guys are sort of cute, and considering they appear right before the final boss they're pretty easy to defeat, too.

And here is the final boss, the Great King of Unpy. No, I have no idea why he's called that. What I do know is that he represents a sudden and violent difficulty spike that makes this battle feel like bullshit, appropriately enough. He constantly drops exploding shitbombs as well as firing lighting from his navel, and to make matters worse you can only hurt him with the short-ranged bomb attack. Still, it could have been worse: I was expecting some kind of giant prolapsed anus that attacked with powerful streams of diarrhoea, so I am at least glad to have been spared that. If you managed to defeat him, then congratulations, you've completed Toilet Kids.

The God of Underpants (no, really) shows up in the ending and explains that he had been trapped by King Unpy. Now that you've freed him, he can grant you the power of underpants, freeing you from the tyranny of diapers and allowing you to grow up. Then, Underpants God tells you that you'll meet again, setting the scene for a sequel set eighty years hence and based around geriatric incontinence.
This would seem to suggest that Toilet Kids was designed as some kind of aid to potty training. If that is the case, then it backfired pretty fucking spectacularly. The only two things that kids are going to take away from this is that sitting on the big-boy toilet can see you getting sucked into a nightmarish otherworld where you're attacked by flying penises, and that the slightest physical contact with any faecal matter will result in your instant death.

The PC Engine is home to a lot of a shooters with a wide variety of strange themes - for instance, I wrote about Hana Taaka Daka?! a while back, and that game is all about testicles (and Freddy Kreuger), but I think Toilet Kids is the weirdest of the lot. The scatological theme is a great example of the differences between Japanese and Western attitudes to this kind of thing: the only comparable game in the west that I can think of off the top of my head is Boogerman, and that most certainly did not feature flying dicks. The sad truth is that for all its weirdness, Toilet Kids just isn't that good a game. It's not terrible, but really the only thing that's above average is the music. In the end it's an interesting entry in the long, long list of bizarre videogames, as well as a great example of how not to potty train children, but as something to actually play it's not really worth your time.