Collection essentials #37: Balloon Fight (NES)

 

One of the early NES games (as you can tell from the pixel-style cartridge art), Balloon Fight was one of the best games in the console’s early lineup, and to me the console’s whole library in general.

Balloon Fight appears to be based on an earlier arcade game called Joust. Like in Joust, the idea is to fly in the air and attack your opponents by hitting them from above before they do the same to you. Your flying character is a dude with one or two balloons strapped to his back, and he flaps his arms to gain altitude or steer himself. The tricky part is getting used to the momentum-based physics. You can’t just stop or go at the drop of a hat, so it’s an adjustment and a challenge to pilot well. There are obstacles that complicate things, too. Flying balls of thunder are out to get you, and flippers suspended in midair can send you in an unwanted direction.

Balloon Fight can be played with two players on a team (though you may want to compete in the sense that you’re playing to see who gets the higher score). There’s also a fun alternate mode called “Balloon Trip” where you fly in an endless sky of lightning balls trying to survive as long as you can and score as many points as you can. Currently my high score is 232,600 for the main game and 226,020 for Balloon Trip.

I first heard about Balloon Fight thanks to Super Smash Bros. Melee as a kid, since it features a song from the game, a trophy of the game’s main character and the game’s flipper as a usable item in combat. And then, not long later when I later got Animal Crossing, I was delighted to find out that you can acquire and play Balloon Fight in it, and that was my first time actually playing the game. And I liked it a lot! I think it was probably my most-played NES game acquirable in Animal Crossing.

While it didn’t spawn a long-running series and isn’t one of Nintendo’s most famous games, Balloon Fight is still a unique and wonderful game that’s timelessly fun. A no-brainer essential to the collection.

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