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Toilet Kids
TurboGrafx-16
It’s Poop!
3/5 stars
In 1992, Media Rings published “Toilet Kids” (“TK”) in Japan, a game which… failed to take the world by storm. Japanese gamers have a cultural phenomenon known as “kuso-ge” which literally means “shit game.” While “TK” doesn’t typically appear on canonical lists of kuso-ge, it certainly fits the paradigm – literally; it’s a SHMUP about poop.
Presentation
“TK,” as a TurboGrafx-16 game, looks the way one would expect. Compared side-by-side with an 8-bit NES game, it looks quite fantastic, with a nice color pallet and a decent pixel count. Compared side-by-side with a 16-bit SNES game, it looks rather flat and lacking in both layers and fine details. Regardless of its platform’s technical restrictions, the actual design that went into making the scatological universe of “TK” is fairly impressive.
In the world of “TK,” everything poops… or pees, or farts, or has chronic halitosis… or is made from poop. The projectiles in the game are almost always little brown pellets of poop, and when they aren’t, they are yellow globules of urine or yellow clouds of stench. I can’t complain that the projectiles are hard to see, as they have plenty of contrast with the environments. Pigs, flies, turtles, frogs, biplanes with naked asses, stand-up toilets that are literal bomb-sites, a reindeer, skunks, lions, gorillas, hippos, crabs, constipated fish that strain to push gigantic logs out of their buttholes: You name it, in “TK” it wants to poop on you. There are even things that I think are wobbly, uncircumcised penises, but that I desperately hope are just beige sombreros, which launch urine projectiles (yeah, probably dicks).
This outrageous enemy design extends to the boss battles, where the player will be pitted against a helicopter with a butt for a cockpit (don’t read anything into that), a whale with turds for eyes, and a middle-eastern djinn wearing a turban made from poop, to name a few. As crude and tasteless as they are, I can’t help but admire the audacity behind these character designs.
The environments themselves are mostly blasé, with generic forest, river, and underwater stages. The last stage, however, is quite creative, with a desert ruins and hieroglyphics theme. It is also important to point out that every stage is filled with decorative poop: Huge coils of it are scattered liberally all over the game world.
The soundtrack is nothing to write home about. Each of the stages and bosses does have a different accompanying tune, but in general, they’re all so similar-sounding that it’s hard to differentiate them. Plus they’re all kind of repetitive and not particularly catchy.
Story
Most SHMUPs have little to no storytelling, and “TK” isn’t all that different in this respect. However, it does feature an evocative and wordless introductory cutscene as well as a slightly-less-wordless and evocative prologue that do more to set the stage for abject absurdity than most games that don’t take themselves seriously.
“TK” opens with a nameless, club-footed boy with a tragic case of dinosaur toes walking into the bathroom in the middle of the night to take a dump. No sooner does he drop trou and place ass on porcelain than a geyser of water erupts from the commode, launching him into the air and, somehow, into another dimension of excrement.
In the process of his dimensional travels, his old toilet from home seemingly develops supernatural abilities, allowing the boy to fly through the air whilst riding it, as well as fire sanitizing projectiles at this alien world’s foul inhabitants. Only by confronting a character I shall call the ‘Poop Genie’ can the boy liberate a set of fresh drawers and a supply of toilet paper that will allow him to return home.
“TK” fully embraces its basis in toilet humor and runs with it. Call me immature, if you want, but I find it difficult to stop giggling at scatological humor – so long as it stays ‘silly’ and doesn’t slip over into ‘gross’ (as, for example, the TV show “South Park” is prone to do). “TK” is successful in remaining silly and ridiculous. Other critics may scoff at it and claim to be above it, but poop and fart jokes are nearly universal across cultures for a reason, and “TK” actually made me want to keep playing to see how much more ridiculous it would get by the end. Most SHMUPs don’t even try.
Gameplay
“TK” is an incredibly basic and simple vertical-scrolling SHMUP. The player has a bird’s-eye view of the kid riding his flying toilet, and the screen automatically pushes the player’s viewpoint upward at a constant clip. The player can move in 8 directions (including diagonals) and fire both a standard projectile that hits airborne enemies or bombs that hit earthbound enemies. The main projectile can also be charged like the Mega Buster in the ‘Mega Man’ series to fire off a larger projectile that follows a serpentine path (medium charge) or a shotgun-like spread of large projectiles that will usually do a good job of clearing the entire screen (full charge). Bombs are also used to collect the Golden Poops that litter the game’s stages, which can eventually lead to extra lives.
“TK” is incredibly short by SHMUP standards, with only four stages, each of which contains a mini-boss and a boss. It’s also noticeably easier than most serious SHMUPs, with significant segments of each stage that are devoid of enemies to give the player some breathing room. The game can be cleared easily in a half-hour or less. Personally, I found the short length and non-ball-busting gameplay to be a breath of fresh air (no pun intended) when most newer SHMUPs have slanted more and more toward the ‘Bullet Hell’ variety. “TK” does have rather limited lives and limited continues, with 5 lives per continue and 3 continues maximum. Losing a life doesn’t cause the player to lose any progress, but losing all lives boots the player back to the title screen, where the continue option is rather unintuitively placed. “TK” also features multiple difficulty levels (Easy, Normal, and the oddly-named Heavy) and, unlike most SHMUPs, defaults to ‘Easy.’
The power-up system, or rather the lack thereof, is the most disappointing aspect of “TK’s” gameplay. I’d be much happier with a short, easy SHMUP if it also had some cool, flashy power-ups, but this game doesn’t. The kid can pick up something that looks like a sushi roll, but I couldn’t figure out what it did, while the other handful of power-ups are stationary things within the stage itself, such as a temporary turret that shoots potpourri projectiles all around the screen for a short time, or a star that instantly clears the screen of enemies.
Overall
Aside from its embrace of scatological humor, the only really noteworthy thing about “Toilet Kids” is its utter mediocrity. It doesn’t really excel in any area, other than being silly and filled with poop jokes, but at the same time, it isn’t egregiously bad or unplayable by any means either. Pretentious ‘games-as-art’ folks will hate it, while those who enjoy potty humor will love it, both for exactly the same reasons.
Presentation: 3.5/5
Story: 3/5
Gameplay: 2.5/5
Overall (not an average): 3/5
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