It
impresses me that so many people don’t realize that there is
a
sequel to Balloon Fight, especially considering that Balloon Fight is
remains one of the most popular NES launch titles aside from Super
Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt. I never even heard of Balloon Kid myself
until I happened run across a passing mention of it in a Wikipedia
article about the Game Boy.
Having come out about a year after the Game Boy’s launch, I
view
Balloon Kid as an attempt by Nintendo to create a game with a uniquely
“Game Boy” flavor while carrying over a concept
most NES
owners were already familiar with.
Rather than a mere port of it’s NES predecessor, Balloon Kid
is a
full fledged sequel, not only including everything it’s
predecessor had (to an extent), but adding a complete side scrolling
platform adventure, something completely absent from Balloon Fight.
The
nameless Balloon Fighter has been replaced with a young girl named
Alice who is on a quest to rescue her brother who floated away on a
bushel of helium balloons. Just like in Balloon Fight, your character
starts out with two balloons which she floats on by tapping the A
Button.
Touching enemies and spikes will pop your balloons, but unlike the
previous game, losing both balloons doesn’t equate to instant
death, and Alice will instead just fall from the sky, hopefully onto a
platform from which the player can re-inflate their balloons by rapidly
tapping Down on the D-Pad. There are even some sections which demand
you release your balloons and hoof it for a while.
Other elements carried
over from
Balloon Fight are the auto scrolling right-to-left levels, several
enemies and obstacles, musical motifs, and the balloon
catching bonus rounds.
Unlike
Super Mario Land, this game’s adventure mode can not be
beaten
quickly, even with experience, because the game scrolls at
it’s
own pace, and thusly, speed depends purely on now frequently or not you
get killed.
Speaking of Super Mario Land, these games share the classic Game Boy
“pause beep” when you press the Start Button.
The endless obstacle course mode from Balloon Fight is also accessible
from the main menu and works great as a “quick
play” option
if you want to play on the go but don’t have time to get into
adventure mode.
There is also a two player mode which I assume plays something like the
two player mode on the original Balloon Fight, but I’ve never
had
a chance to try it out due to not having a friend with Balloon Kid, an
original Game Boy, and an original Game Link Cable.
Though Balloon Kid isn’t an extraordinary platformer by any
means, the game honestly does feel like the creators cared about what
they were making, and when I play it I get the impression that the
developers created this game with the mentality of proving that the
Game Boy was a “serious” gaming machine and not
just a toy
like the Game and Watch series was.
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