Balloon Fight (NES) Review

When I started collecting NES games again, I decided to go for

all of the Black Box games.  Many of which, I never got around to playing when

they were new.  While it was obvious to me that I was going to enjoy Popeye and 

a few of the others, this one took me by surprise.

Development started on this game in 1983, which first appeared as a Nintendo

VS. System arcade machine in 1984.  The game found it’s way home on the

Famicom in Japan a year later, and the NES in North America in the summer of

1986.  It was the first game programmed for Nintendo by Satoru Iwata, a man 

who later went on to become the President and CEO of Nintendo.  As I’m sure 

many of you already know Iwata passed away just last weekend.  I couldn’t think 

of a better way to pay homage to such a brilliant and innovative man than to 

simply give the best review of one of his games I possibly could.  

On first inspection, Balloon fight appears to be a take off of a classic arcade 

title Joust.  A number of people bring it up in reviews.  But this game puts its

own spin on things, and the result is a colorful game with a fun, quirky 

personality.

Being a very early Nintendo home title, the presentation is very simple, but

that doesn’t detract form the game at all.  Like many of these “Black Box” era

games, the music was composed by Hip Tanaka, who is also known for the

music in Metroid, Kid Icarus, Earthbound and Super Mario Land on the 

Game Boy.  Here he created a few fun and memorable tunes, most notably

the Balloon Trip theme.

The gameplay is extremely simple, you control your character in the air by 

repeated taps of the A button.  Rapid taps will cause your character to ascend, 

slow taps will cause you to hover.  You attack by bumping into your enemies, 

and popping their balloons, all while defending your balloons.  One hit drops 

your opponents to the ground, a second will send them falling to their doom,

if you or your opponents fall too close to the water, you run the risk of getting

eaten by a giant fish monster.  Freaky.

The main game is available to play in both one- and two-player modes, it’s

actually one of the earliest simultaneous 2-player games on the home console

for Nintendo.  Not unlike with Joust, you can play the two-player mode 

cooperatively in order to clear the stages, or you can play competitively and

try to take the other player out, making this either a very fun, or very frustrating

game to play with a friend.  There is also a third game type called Balloon Trip,

in which you attempt to navigate as far as you can through a field of lighting 

sparks.  Something about the Balloon trip kind of reminds me of Flappy Bird,

just 29 years before Flappy Bird was a thing.  I’m not good at either Balloon

trip or Flappy Bird, so can’t say much about it.

There’s something about this kind of game, this type of classic arcade-style

single-screen action.  It’s simple, easy to figure out how to play, and even if

you don’t do so well your first try, you do a little better on your next go.  Keep

going and you get a little better still.  This kind of gameplay is what made

Mario Bros, or Pac-Man and many other games of the early 80’s so much

fun and so addictive.  

I can’t say that this game is perfection, but if you’re into classic arcade-style

games and want something different, give this one a go.  The original NES cart 

will set you back $15-20 retail on the used market, but naturally it is available 

on virtual console for the Wii, Wii U and 3DS, among other places.