Action/Platformer
June 1986 (Nintendo)
This may be the most playable game I’ve gotten to so far. Yes, there were some big titles back in October, but I’m being serious about this. Balloon Fight is definitely the best arcade port we’ve gotten to so far.
The concept is a little weird. Basically you’re playing a cute version of Joust 1. Run into the gremlin dudes from above once to pop their balloon, and twice to make them go away.
In a first for this series, two players can play together. Sure, you could do that in Tennis, but that’s an exercise in futility. And you could play against each other in Baseball, but that’s not the same. The closest might have been the “2 Player” options that were nothing more than forcing people to take turns.
This is a big step that Nintendo is taking. For the first time I can really play with someone. It’s amazing that it took this long considering all of the arcade games that could do it.
But let’s get back to the game at hand. There’s another mode where you try to move across the screen popping green balloons while avoiding what looks like evil, sparkling fireflies that will pop your balloon if you run into them. When I first tried it I was ready to pass it off as something added on because there was space left in the game’s memory. Then I got mad when I died and played again. It was a bit weird at first to go right to left, but this mode is pretty fun too.
Just to make sure you don’t miss it, Balloon Fight = awesome.
- We won’t see Joust until June of 1988, so for fans of that game this will have to do for a a few years. [↩]
Also, the NES Joust was terribly botched, in my opinion. The physics seemed all wacky. So Joust fans are better off sticking to Balloon Fight. Or maybe the Hello Kitty version of Balloon Fight that was released later. I guess Joust fans with allergies to high levels of KAWAII! are sort of screwed.
I’ll have to watch out for that when I get that far. The only time I’ve played joust was on one of the SNES old game banazas. I didn’t really like it then, but I’m pretty sure I never got the concept of hitting from slightly above either.
My sister is a Joust fiend. Like, max-out-the-score-counter type of fiend. I always preferred balloon fight. I think it may have been the song from Balloon Trip that really got me going. Man I love that song.