- Game: Balloon Fight
- Release Date (North America): August 1986
- Developer: Nintendo R&D1
- Genre: Arcade
As a personal tribute and way to honor Satoru Iwata, I thought I would try out Balloon Fight. Even though the late Nintendo president was a businessman, he worked on the development of many games for nearly 20 years before he became head of the company. One of those games was Balloon Fight, an arcade game ported to the Famicom/NES.
Downloading Balloon Fight for the 3DS may not have been the best idea. The game’s sprites are unusually small, and the constant need to mash the A and B buttons, as well as moving around the screen with the D-pad, brought the 3DS hardware’s relative boxiness to my attention more than I would have liked.
On the plus side, I found out that the Virtual Console game supports download play, which I tried out as soon as I convinced my niece to join in. The game’s primary mode, balloon fight, can be played alone or with one other person simultaneously. In case you don’t know, it all boils down to staying airborne and protecting your own balloons while trying to pop the enemies’ balloons for points. In two-player mode, you can certainly attack your human partner’s balloons and even earn points that way, but my niece and I decided to play in a more cooperative fashion to see how far we could get.
I admit I’m not a huge fan of the arcade game setup. Even in my best balloon fight run, I don’t believe I reached the game’s final level (there is one, right?). Points are cool and all, but I prefer to feel like I’m making progress in other ways; starting over at the beginning of a game repeatedly doesn’t appeal to me much.
Balloon Fight‘s other primary mode, balloon trip, follows the same pattern of shooting for a high score and starting over and over again to reach it. In this mode, however, there are no enemy AI, just obstacles that become continually more difficult to dodge.
The two modes feel pretty distinct from one another, which is a big plus for Balloon Fight. But playing the balloon fight mode with a friend turned out to be the best time I had with the game. Balloon Fight isn’t overly famous, but it’s fun in its own right, and definitely worth a shot for anyone looking to play a game that Satoru Iwata was directly involved in.
Up Next on Retro Redux…
I still need to write something on Zelda II: The Adventure of Link! After that, well, you’ll just have to wait and see, I guess; no vote today!
