NES box art for Balloon Fight, the cover of NEStalgia episode 24

024 · BALLOON FIGHT

▶ Game info

VerdictEssential

GenreArcade

ReleasedAugust 1986

SeasonSeason 2

DeveloperNintendo Research & Development 1

PublisherNintendo

Ranked #2 in our Top 5 NES Games of 1986 →

July 6, 2018 · 34 min · transcript available

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This Nintendo twist on Joust has been a classic for more than three decades now. Flap your way to your opponents and POP their balloons! For more NEStalgia as well as the show notes for this episode, head over to NEStalgia.com

Our verdict: Essential

Balloon Fight hit the NES in August 1986, after starting life as a 1984 Vs. System arcade game. Satoru Iwata programmed it, Sakamoto designed it, and Gunpei Yokoi supervised. You are a guy with two balloons strapped to you, flapping around a night sky and popping the other balloon riders before they pop you. It began as a Joust clone, and we agreed Balloon Fight is the one more people recognize today.

What makes it essential

Awkward in the right way. Sam's first reaction was that the controls felt strange, but like something you get used to rather than something broken, unlike 10-Yard Fight. Movement is all momentum, with a floaty, icy drift. A tap on A is one flap, while B is a hold-to-rise turbo button, and both feel good once they click. We compared it to Flappy Bird, on controls and difficulty.
A low floor and a high ceiling. Anyone can pick it up, but experts get to do things like snipe enemies before they finish pumping up their balloons, or loop across the wraparound screen and dive in diagonally. Wraparound also bites you: a distant enemy shows up and bonks you, and a small height difference decides who gets popped.
Two-player is the best mode. Two players can pop each other, and you do it by accident constantly while chasing the same enemy. Cooperating usually earns more points than fighting, though two players both near 200,000 still ended up 20,000 points apart.
Nothing else plays like it. Sean's argument: aside from Joust, there are few games like this today, and it is the one NES game we would want on a Switch for a quick round with a friend before a movie starts.
Details. The fish isn't a dice roll. It was programmed to swim back and forth, so wait down there long enough and it gets you. Lightning only chases the player.

Where it's thin

Balloon Trip. The side-scrolling mode is one hit and you're dead, with the same layout every time, so you die at the same spot again and again. It works as flight practice, and if you collect 20 balloons in a row they turn orange and freeze. It ran out of ideas fast for us.
Bare bones. Once you are into it, there is not much more. Joe could see it getting old quickly.

Beyond the game

In the Sakamoto and Iwata story we told, Yokoi would watch them play, say nothing, then list changes, and Iwata would make them in minutes. Iwata later showed off a flawless Balloon Trip run on Game Center CX. The game has been ported and re-released constantly, and the Game Boy sequel Balloon Kid is a platformer with new stages that Sakamoto directed and Yokoi produced.

The bottom line

Essential, though not unanimously. Sean made the case first, and Mike joined him, saying he'd planned to vote it in for days. Sam called it a ton of fun with friends but not essential, and Joe called it a Play it that he wouldn't oppose as Essential, the closest game to it in a long time. We joked this could turn into another Excitebike situation, so we will check back at the end-of-1986 party.

Written from our conversation in this episode.

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Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.

Balloon Fight! You'll need lightning-fast reactions to win this battle in the sky!

And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Sean. I'm Sam. I'm Joe. Joe! Joe remote again, but to no one's concerns. And live via Snapchat. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's true. I mean, I don't even have it on my phone and I know that. Via Snapchat live. Yeah. I never couldn't get on the Snapchat thing. It's all right. Joe's here on it. Yeah, Joe's on it. I'm on it. So that's all we need. Look for me, Joe. Joe, you're in. That's it. He got in really early.

Just search Joe on Snapchat and you got it. Okay. Yeah. Joe plays a lot of retro games on Snapchat. And speaking of retro games, that's what we cover here. Today, we're doing Balloon Fight. Balloon Fight released on the NES in August of 1986, but it was an arcade game first in the Verse system line. It was Verse Balloon Fight released in 1984, programmed by Satoru Iwata. And it was the game developer game developer was Nintendo, but the game designer was Sakamoto, who we've been talking about a lot in this podcast recently.

Wrecking Crew, Donkey Kong Jr. Those are two that we talked about him being responsible for. Obviously, now he's much more well known for Metroid. But those are two other games that he made. But this game, because of its 1984 roots, kind of comes like sandwiched in between Donkey Kong Jr. and Wrecking Crew. So this is the first game where you have like two really big Nintendo names that you'll constantly be hearing again. Iwata and Sakamoto both working on this game.

And Gunpei Yokoi, who we've talked about a lot too, he's kind of like in charge of all of these games. You know, he just like watches over them. So you have like, you know, if Miyamoto is making Super Mario Brothers or Donkey Kong, you know, or Sakamoto is making Balloon Fight. Yokoi is the guy who's like really, you know, making sure that they're doing a good job. Good old Gunpei. Yeah. Good old Gunpei before they gave him the boot after the virtual boy. They're like, what is this? But we're not there yet. That's like 1994.

Anybody have any thoughts about that so far? I feel like I've been talking a lot. Well, you know what? None of us really know as much about the actual history of of these games. So you're doing us a service. Yeah. I mean, I'll make this brief.

Basically, the funny story here between Sakamoto and Iwata is like Yokoi would come down, play the game in front of both of them. Just be, you know, not a single word was said. He'd just get up and then he would say all of his thoughts and leave and just expect for, you know, it's going to take them a couple of days to make these changes. But Iwata is like a programming genius. You know, he knows how to program and he knows the NES hardware specifically. He programmed certain changes for that. They asked for in the game in just minutes, you know, and that was like unheard. Like Yokoi was able to be in the room, watch Iwata make the changes and put put them out on a new version for him to test. That's ridiculous. It's crazy.

And then the other thing I learned from this, this is all from a developer interview with Sakamoto during a like Nintendo. It was like during an Iwata asks, essentially, where like they have interviews. Iwata used to do them with each person who made the games when they were going over these past Nintendo games. Really cool. I hope Nintendo continues that, even though Iwata is no longer with us. I hope somebody interviews these guys. It's the only way we're going to find out. Like Nintendo doesn't publish books on like how they do these things.

That'd be cool. Where are we getting all these really weird, like ambiguous quotes from? And that's the problem. Yeah. Those ambiguous quotes come from like game magazines in like the late 90s or early 2000s. So those come from like the early 90s and the 2000s. And what's funny about that is like, I don't know why they're able to like feel so much more comfortable talking to their boss about these games when he's asking them questions. But all of a sudden they'll go to like US Gamer and they'll be like, we like to make athletic games.

Anybody who runs them. It makes sense. It's like it's more of like an internal thing where you feel more comfortable. Like your boss will censor anything that needs to be censored. Right. As opposed to you being a representative of the company. And the brand. Right. So Sakamoto also talked about with Iwata, like how did the how did the fish come into play? And the interesting here that I learned is not that the the fish and balloon fight, it's not waiting for you at all times when you're at the water.

You want to actually programmed it to swim back and forth. And that's why when you go down at certain points into the water, it doesn't eat you. It's actually it is swimming down and you don't know you might get lucky. You might not. Wow. If you wait down there long enough, though, you're going to get swallowed. I thought it was just like a probability roll. That's exactly what I thought, too. Yeah. But we should probably start talking about the game, though, because some people might be like, what fish? What fish? This is a game about balloons.

So what is the game? What is the game? I'm glad you asked. The game is balloon fight. No, I should not be the one talking about this. Sean, come on. Let's do. How about before we even talk about the game? Let's do some first impressions.

Sean, why don't you kick us off? Hey, I really enjoyed balloon fight. I like the way that you moved around. It's not just a left is left, right is right thing. It's all about momentum and moving on like a vertical axis instead of like an axe. I had a lot of fun with it. Nice. Sam? Yeah.

Immediately, it felt awkward to me, but not in a way that's like 10 yard fight awkward or anything like that. It was awkward in a way that I can tell this is something that you just have to get used to and then you get good at, which I thought was really cool. Cool. Because there aren't so far, I feel like there haven't been a lot of games that we've played that really like feel like that in the basic physics of it. Gotcha. I feel like a lot of games, if they start feeling awkward, it's because they're awkward.

This was one that starts off awkward and then you get used to it and it gets really fun. Sweet. Joe? Yeah, I agree with Sam there. It was interesting to see like the physics were kind of like your generic ice physics, but like even worse in a good way, though. You know, it felt frantic, but in a challenging and good way. Cool. So this isn't my first time playing Balloon Fight. I've played it before, but it's funny playing it now in 2018.

My first impression was actually thinking like, there's a lot like Flappy Bird. You know, does anybody know what I'm talking about? That mobile game that you play as the bird and you tap to keep it up? It's funny that like, you know, people must roll their eyes at a comment like that because this game is so much before Flappy Bird. But it just, you know, the controls made me feel like that. And I'm glad that there's so much more to do in this game than there was in Flappy Bird. I think just because of how much more there was to do, I didn't even think to make that comparison. Yeah. Though I will say, you know, the controls and the difficulty are about the same between the two. That's true. So let's talk about the objective of this game real fast.

For the one player mode, basically, you're a guy with two balloons strapped to you. You have to pop the other enemies balloons before they pop yours. You get two. So if someone pops one balloon, you still have one more. However, the challenge increases because now you don't fly as fast or as well, I guess you could say, because your left and right momentum kind of drags down a little more. But, you know, you're flying in like a weird space with like certain floaty platforms. It's not really clear where this game takes place. Does anybody have any guesses on that? Like some kind of future Earth? The sky. I don't know.

Specifically at night. Yeah. At night. Specifically. Like this game couldn't possibly take place during the day. Yeah. How does anybody see anything? That's why you bump into each other so much. That's true. Yeah. And then there's just those random spinners all around the place that are just floating. So this is some kind of future. I like those spinners, though. Yeah. The future where only people get around by balloons.

I want to live in that future. Yeah. That sounds pleasant. It's like Waterworld just with air. Except for when you fall from the sky. You know what? Never mind. Sean, you were talking about the controls, though. You know, like the momentum and stuff like that. Do you want to go into a little more detail about that?

Yeah. So basically, your means of locomotion are you don't go up unless you press A or B and you just sort of flap your arms and that'll give you a little bit of a boost up. And you can hold the button down and you'll actually start to move up a lot more or you can just tap it and be a little bit more precise. Right. And that's for B and A. So like B, you can hold down on and A, you have to like tap to keep alive. Yeah. A, you'll just flap one time. Yeah. And I think that's kind of cool that they included both ways. B is kind of like your turbo button. You know, before that ever existed, you used them to pay extra for a controller that would do turbo. But they usually don't want.

Yeah. You would put that as like a default button in this. That's kind of cool. And also, this is another game where you can, you know, scroll over to the other side of the screen. Another wraparound game. That trips you up way more in this game than other games that we've played, I think. But now it does screw you up, but it also can also be very convenient for certain stages where... Yeah, but when you're not expecting an enemy, you think like, oh, that guy is all the way on the other side of the screen. I don't have to worry about him.

Then he comes over and bonks you in the head. Yeah. It's another one of those. I sometimes notice the opposite where I was, I would be like, I would be going for someone an enemy on the other side by wrapping around and I would like grossly misjudge our height differences until I got to his side of the screen and I was like, oh, he's above me. Yeah. And I think that's it. That's a really tough thing is knowing like whether they're going to pop your balloon or not when you're very close to them, because sometimes it's just the smallest difference of height between the two of you where you wind up getting popped instead of them. It's definitely a spatial awareness skill that you have to develop while playing this game.

Joe, what did you think of like the difficulty of the game overall? I mean, as far as just one player, it was, you know, it ramped up with each level. To be totally honest, I didn't get too far as far, you know, I'm trying to think of what round I got to. I think I got into the past like three bonus rounds. I don't remember how many, how frequently the bonus rounds come up, but I mean, it didn't it never got like so crazy difficult. It I was confused as to when the the sea monster eats you, which is interesting that it was actually programmed to to swim around. But yeah, I mean, I'm sure we'll get into it later, but I thought it got a lot more challenging when you add another player.

Yeah. And I do think something interesting there that you mentioned about the fish, too, is like I really like that the fish can eat them as well. Yeah. It's kind of weird that the lightning bolt, though, and that is just in case that's unclear. There there's these clouds in the sky, too, that if you're on the screen long enough, they'll form like a lightning strike and then a like little ball of lightning, which would not be terrifying in real life.

A ball of lightning just tracked you down. But it only attacks you. It doesn't attack the enemies. And I thought that that was like weird that like other things affect the enemies like the flippers and the fish, but that the electricity doesn't. It's just another one of their their their hurry up. Yeah. It's kind of like the flames in Mario Brothers. As soon as you said, it's kind of like I was like, he's going to mention the flames because it's like, I don't know why. But like that was something we played a lot. Me and you played Mario Brothers.

And I think we always felt like we were doing fine until the fireballs show up. Right. I don't think I even realized that the lightning was based on how long you were on the screen. I just thought it just was random. Maybe I just spent a lot of time on the screen and didn't realize it. Well, it is random. It won't. It's not. I don't think it's set on a timer, but it won't show up in the first like 30 seconds of your of your balloon fight. So it's not like every 10 seconds or anything.

No, no. No. One thing I liked, speaking of just how long we spent on each phase or stage, is if you have the precision and you are ready when the actual game begins, you can kind of snipe everybody before they can even get off the ground. It's the coolest feeling in the world that they have to pump their balloons up, but you're ready. And especially in some of the later ones, they do make some pretty cool patterns that

after playing it enough times, you can kind of figure out like, oh, it'd be great if I went like across the screen as a wraparound, got up really high and then went down diagonally. Like, you know, it's really advanced thinking that you're not going to figure out your first time. But it's cool. There's like layers to it. Exactly. And they came up with those kind of structures as opposed to just being like, no, later on, there's just no way to get anybody. It's very satisfying. So it gives incentive for more advanced players, which is cool.

Yeah. I think that's the one thing I've noticed about this game is that it even though it's it's not necessarily so beginner friendly, it's not impossible to learn. It's kind of like something that I feel like anybody could pick up and play. But to Sam's point, you know, the better you get at this game, it's one of those like expert rewarding games, kind of like some of the other arcade games that we've talked about here on the show. I think like Kung Fu is another big one of that, that like it's really challenging to get into. But once you kind of figure out the dynamics of the stage or, you know, in balloon fights case, once you figure out like the enemy patterns and how they attack and stuff, I don't

think that like, you know, an expert has too much trouble getting through like the beginner rounds. Yeah. But I also think that there isn't too much trouble. I think maybe your first couple lives you'll lose really quickly. But I think once you just get a hang of a little bit of the controls, I think that you can you can enjoy the game just as much. I don't think it's like Kung Fu where you're going to die in the first level 15 times before you get to the second floor. Right. Um, I think it's more of like a guitar, like where it's, it's got a low barrier of entry, but a really high ceiling. You know what I mean? Yeah.

And I think one place where we see that most is in Balloon Trip. Yeah. That is the game C. We'll go back to the one player game in a bit when we talk about two player, but I thought we should talk about Balloon Trip because it's another one player version of the game. Essentially, this is a side scrolling game where the screen keeps moving, but you have to collect just the balloons. There's no real enemies or anything except for the lightning bolts, which are sometimes static, sometimes moving patterns.

But the balloons are the only thing you have to collect. And there's like a rank thing up at the top right that says like rank 50 and then counts down. Anybody know what that's about? I have no idea. The 40 something imaginary players that you're playing with. Yeah. It's like, yeah, they're way ahead of you. Yeah. They're way ahead of you.

Joe, did you play Balloon Trip? Yeah. I was my one, I guess, complaint about it. Maybe I'm just being a baby is that you only get one life. So I felt like I felt like you have to start from scratch after that one life. So I felt like I never got to get that far. So I guess it's a set up to get good at it. No, I mean, you get hit once. You start with two balloons, but you get hit once and you're dead, which is weird because they're all lightning bolts. Yeah.

It's kind of cool, though, because it goes back into that expert rewarding thing. And this is sort of like a training program for the rest of the game. Like if you don't want to, if you feel like you're not good enough for the rest of the game, but you just want to focus on flying better, which will make you better at the game, then you can just jump into this one. Right. Yeah. And to your point, too, about like the expert thing, it's like in Balloon Trip, it's always the same layout, too.

So one thing that was funny is I was watching something of Iwata playing the game when he's the president of Nintendo of America years later on like a Game Center CX thing that's like a show in Japan.

And, you know, they ask him like, oh, when was the last time you played this game? And he was like, I play this game pretty often. And then he goes into Balloon Trip mode and he like has like the perfect pattern of like going through this thing and like starts going up, dips down low, comes back up. He knows where the fish is going to be. It's really funny to watch that happen. And that's what I imagine an expert playing like.

Now, does anybody know what happens if you collect 20 balloons in Balloon Trip in a row without missing any? No. Good. No. I'm glad no one knew because it's a very hard thing to pull off. Personally, I'll just be honest. I have not been able to do it myself. It's very hard to get 20 balloons in a row while dodging all those lightning bolts and also like, you know, not missing any at the same time.

So what happens is if you do magic like 20, the balloons turn orange and they kind of freeze for a second. So you're able to collect like a bunch of them before the stage continues. Oh, OK, cool. I think it's like a neat little thing. It kind of reminds me of how pinball after like doing a certain task, the board would change colors. That's another thing that he want to program. So it seemed like he just had a flair for like, do these funny things and I'll change the colors of the game. He likes colors.

Well, you know how simple they are, Sean. We were talking about that earlier in the interviews. They're like, I like colors. Yeah. They're like, we wanted to make a game that was about colors. Colors are good. They never said that in an interview. I just want to put that out there.

Any other thoughts on Balloon Trip? No. Oh, OK. Yeah. It was fine. Go ahead, Joe. Sorry. I was just going to say it was pretty much like once you play it for a couple of minutes, you kind of have the idea of it. Yeah. This was a mode that I tried for a while. Like I was like, oh, there's like a thing here, like a pattern I can figure out. I really want to get those orange balloons just to see what it's like. I wound up having to watch a video.

But it doesn't feel as rewarding as getting a higher score in the one player mode because it's the same thing over and over again. I found myself keep dying at the same points. And it has like that frustration value. You're just like, OK, again, again, again. But after a while, I was just like, I think I've seen this. Yeah. You know, like if there was maybe some different kind of variety, like each stage was randomly generated or later on enemies got added or the fish started like hopping out and trying to swallow you.

Like, I feel like that stuff would be cool. But there wasn't enough going on. It was just more like, you know, dodging the lightning bolts was the only thing. It's going right back to Flappy Bird. And this is like this mode is the Flappy Bird mode. Right. That's pretty accurate, actually. It almost just feels like like you could you would just use this as like you're playing this game with a friend and you have like five more minutes. You're like, let's see who can get farther because you're probably not going to be in unless you're really good at it. It's not going to take that long before one of you dies. Right. And speaking of friends, that was a great segue for the two player mode. I love friends.

I'm keeping that in. I don't know. I'll put that under the music. I love friends. What are friends? Did anybody play this with two players? I think we all did this time, didn't we? Yeah. OK, Joe, you take us through. You know, you're always the guy with the most amount of friends who plays these games. This time I actually played it just honest. I played it single player mostly. And then just before we recorded, I was like, I should see what this is like with two players. So I played very recently.

And it's it's definitely better as a two player experience, I think, because it's a little more, you know, you can screw each other over. You're trying to get it's the same thing. You're just trying to get more points than the other person. But you can also pop each other's balloons now. So the floaty controls combined with like the frantic nature of it all makes it kind of an interesting competitive, competitive experience. And even when you're not trying to be competitive, you still run that risk of popping your, you know, your friend's balloon.

Like you're not trying to do it, but, you know, you're both trying to go after this enemy. And then all of a sudden it's like you pop their balloon and it's like, oh, well, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. Yeah. Damn it, Mike. Mike and I played a couple of times and that seemed to be the case for most of it is, I mean, a lot of times it's just beneficial to for both of you to not screw each other over. I would say I would agree with that and I would say even more so in this game, we talked about this in Mario Brothers where Sean was not having it.

He's like, no, you got to kill each other in this game. It's all about the points. In this game, the points are king still, but I think you get more points when you keep your second player alive and you help each other than you would ever get on your own. Because also when you divide and conquer. You'll get more points, but you like you still run the risk of like, and I did this and I was playing with you. So I knew that you kept getting more, but like I was trying to be I was trying to be cooperative for once. Yeah. So you're still running that risk of falling behind.

Yeah. While someone else gets. And yeah, that does happen. I think even though we were both doing pretty good, we were both at 200,000 and you were still like, you know, it was like when I had 220, you had 200, you know? So it's like even though we thought we were close, it was a 20,000 point difference. Quite the difference. And I didn't mean to brag about that. I'm talking about it because we're talking about the multiplayer section.

All right. So we talked about two player. We talked about balloon trip. Anybody know about balloon kid? Is that your character? You know, you could maybe say that, but I'm not saying that balloon kid is actually like the Game Boy sequel to this game. Oh, and what's interesting about that, I wouldn't even think to bring it up really, because there's been other Game Boy ports of the games that we played on NES so far, like baseball and stuff like that. But game balloon kid is interesting because it's not a port. It's a sequel. And it's actually like a platform adventure game.

But you still have balloons tied to your body. You still have balloons tied to your body. There are stages and levels, like totally different, totally new. And you're collecting balloons still. But there's like platforming challenges and you have to like, you know, complete a mission. You know, there's a there's an actual like structure to the game. That sounds cool. And yeah, it's very interesting. Is it an Nevada game? It's somehow ringing a bell to me like I don't I don't know this game, but it's when you're the way you're describing it. I feel like I've seen it or played it before.

I can't think of what I think if you if you saw it, you would you would you would probably recognize it because even though it's not like a big game in their catalog and stuff like that, I think it is thought of fondly by people who are a fan of the balloon fight franchise, because personally, I think that's like a really cool like next step for that game is not to just like add more elements to the arcade mode. Kind of like what we were talking about with Mario Brothers. Yeah, like another if they made a how they make a new Super Mario Brothers, they made a new Mario Brothers. What would it be if they made a new a modern day balloon fight? What would you add? I think the joke is always just it's an open world balloon fight.

But I think like it'd be like the beginning of, well, you know, like Fortnite or something or players unknown battleground where you're all jumping from the plane. But it just you just stay there. Just stay in the air.

So it's like a battle royale game, but in the sky and you have to keep pressing the button to stay. For like 40 minutes. Yeah. What's funny is that we don't have to we don't have to answer that question necessarily because I think they took the next logical step with it with this platforming game. I think definitely like even a 3D platformer with the balloon, the balloon fight model would be like a cool thing to do. Yeah, I think not. I think there are. I'm just trying to figure out what I'm thinking of it. And I think there are a lot of games that have that as a mini game.

Like, I feel like there's something with a Pikachu and balloons where you do that or in Kingdom Hearts. Flying Pikachu. Is that a thing? It was flying Pikachu. Flying Pikachu is a thing where it's just Pikachu with two balloons tied to her. It's a Pokemon Snap. Well, is there anything else? No, no, no. Well, I mean, like, you know, it's also like a thing that they just. It's like a card. Yeah, it's a card. It's been done. It's a Pokemon thing. That's what I'm thinking of. I knew I was thinking. And I think it's in Pokemon Yellow. Not to make this a Pokemon podcast, but. Okay, so interesting, interesting thing here. Since Joe axed it earlier, I took the time to look it up.

It's Sakamoto Joint, Balloon Kid. Wow. He did. He was the director on it. And Yokoi was the producer. So they really, you know, I will say this. When Iwata mentioned that he had been playing this game for years and stuff like that, that's probably like the honest truth. Because Nintendo does feel fondly about this game, too. More so than a lot of their arcade games. And this being, you know, brought to the NES, it also gets its own Game Boy game. It gets so many ports. It's got character in this game. Yeah, it's got that really weird kind of. Oh, yeah, this is like an awkward seeming, but there's more to it. Nintendo game.

Right. And I think, like, they're really proud of what they were able to accomplish with the controls and stuff like that, too. That they brought it to e-reader. They brought it, you know, there was an e-reader version. It's on Animal Crossing for Nintendo GameCube. It's on every version of Virtual Console. Like, this is just a game that continues to get different versions. And I think even the Famicom disk system got, like, multiple different versions of this game.

That's all great. And I really do think that this is a charming game. But we haven't even mentioned that this started out as just a clone. Like, it's a clone of Joust, right? Right. Which is funny because that's another arcade game. Yeah. So, I mean, we're lauding it. And I think that it's justified. But I just think it's funny that we haven't even mentioned that game. No, you're right. And I think, like, that is, like, the differential here is that, like, Donkey Kong is a huge arcade game. That's its own thing. Yeah. There's no game like Donkey Kong before it. This is kind of weird because Joust isn't necessarily the most popular arcade game. And I think in the grand scheme of not arcade games, but just the grand scheme of video gaming,

Balloon Fight might now be more recognizable than Joust. Yeah. So, it's funny to think of it that way. But I think, like, in the arcade, I think Joust pops more than Balloon Fight. Because I've seen Joust cabinets. Right. I've never seen the real shit. Yeah. The verse system cabinets in general, since we've been talking about them, I'll just go over that really quickly. They're not the prettiest looking cabinets.

They didn't really put that Nintendo flair that they would develop into their consoles and boxes for games and stuff like that that they wound up doing. The verse system, it's usually just, like, a blue cabinet with some decal stuff on the side. I see. The ones that got, like, the special treatment are the ones that aren't under the verse system name. Like, Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong, The Young Junior. Like, those are their own standalone arcade games before they develop the verse system line. And those are beautiful cabinets. I mean, like, whenever you see a Donkey Kong cabinet, that pops out not just from sound, but also from the visuals.

All right, guys. So, I think we've exhausted what we can talk about Balloon Fight here. I will just say that I enjoy this game. And since we were talking about high scores in some of the other games, I topped out at about 343,000 in this one. And I felt really good about that. Now, what was your single player? Oh, thank you for bringing that up, Sean. You couldn't let me have my moment. Couldn't. Moment in the sky. You could have argued that had I played that well in single player, I could have seen a 500 or 600,000 point game.

But no, in single player, I don't think I made it even above 200,000. I don't really remember. I think it was right around, like, probably 160, 170 was my best. Okay. But you're still overachieving. Still. Well, you know what? I will say this. This is similar to how, like, I played a lot of golf. Yeah. I played a lot of Balloon Fight. I really like this game. And, speaking of talking about whether we like or dislike this game, it's time for The Essential Games List.

All right, guys. We took a quick break there to listen to Sam's music. This is The Essential Games List. And if you're unfamiliar, go listen to some other episodes. No, I'm joking. Seriously, listen to some of the other episodes. The Essential Games List is where we kind of determine, like, you know, you got all these games out today and your backlog is getting bigger and bigger. But, hey, there's these games on the NES. Are they any good? Are they essential even? We're going to talk about that. But we're not talking about if they were good then. That's kind of like history has decided if these games were good back then. We're deciding if they're still good today. So, with that in mind, Sean, Balloon Fight.

Sean needs a moment. Yeah, he had a tough time earlier. So, we'll move over to Sam. Sam, Balloon Fight. What'd you think? Would you still play it today? Balloon Fight. I think that it is a solid game. I think that it's a fun game. It's a fun game, you know, with people, like, with friends. It's great. I think that it's a game that has lots of layers that you don't usually see. But it's still not, like, I wouldn't say it's essential. I think that it's a ton of fun. More if you have friends to play with, it's a ton of fun. But, no, it's not essential.

Okay. This is just something I've noticed. I love when you know that we like a game. Like, we would recommend it. We wouldn't say it's essential. When we do the whole praise thing and then say, but. Yeah. Yeah, because I can't just be like, oh, no, it's not essential. You know, I feel like I'd be a jerk if I did that. Right, right. Because it is fun. And you can tell there's a lot of love put into this game. Yep. Joe? I can't imagine someone picking up this game and not liking it. It is kind of like what Sam said. It is really fun.

The controls and it being a two-player game makes it, like, a good game when you have company over. But, overall. Yeah. Overall, I think one thing we didn't really mention was that it is, once you kind of get into it, it is kind of bare bones. It doesn't, I can see it getting old fast. So, yeah. I mean, it's definitely a play it, in my opinion. But I wouldn't vote for it to be essential.

Okay. Sean, you ready for us? I'm ready for you. Let me hear it. See, I'm trying to think of the other games that we've played so far and how often I'm ever going to play those again. And a lot of them are never. Yeah. And I think about Balloon Fight. And I think about what kind of games are like Balloon Fight now. And there aren't that many. Like, there's Joust. Mm-hmm. In terms of just the way that you play. And that's also a very old game. I would say that I think this is an essential game. Okay. For the NES, yes. Sean, there was one thing that you focused in on there that I was definitely going to say, so I'm going to say it again.

There is not another game like this today. Like, this is a game that you can still play and has not been, like, reiterated a thousand times. I think it is good old-fashioned fun that I think you could pick up and play today. In fact, this is the kind of game that makes me wish there was virtual console on Switch, even though we all know how easy it is to get a Raspberry Pi and play these games.

I would love to have this game on Switch so that I could easily just break out the Joy-Cons, play with a second player right then and there anywhere in the world. Like, you know, a game like baseball or a game like even we were talking earlier about Kung Fu, those games don't really make me crave virtual console on Switch because I'm like, oh, well, you know, I can play those, you know.

This is a game where I would want to have, like, oh, hey, I have Balloon Fight on me. You want to get, like, a quick round in before this movie starts? Like, that's weird and, like, sounds like a Nintendo commercial. But that's kind of, like, how I use my Switch. Like, I use it in, like, rare moments where I'm like, hey, I just happen to have this out and you want to play it now? I'm not a guy who, like, plays his Switch too much in his alone time. I like to play it with friends. Yeah. You know, so this is a game where I was like, oh, I kind of wish this was on the Switch and this would be a great use of it.

That said, obviously, that means that I think that this game is still worth playing today. And I'm going to put it on the Essential Games list. It's on the Essential Games list. So it is an Essential game. Yeah. And that's, you know, what's funny is I knew I was going to vote at Essential days ago. But it's good that I finally was getting somebody else on board for it too. Joe, how do you feel about it being Essential? I actually, I still stand by, you know, my opinion. But it's not one where I'm opposed to it being Essential. I mean, this is the closest one for me to being Essential that we had in a long time.

So I'd like to say it's not, but it doesn't upset me that it is because it's a good game. That's really cool. And so, yeah, I think, you know, this is a fun way. And who knows, you know, we will talk about this at the end of 86. This could wind up being an Excitebike situation where we're just really jazzed about this game right now, but then the end of 86 party comes up and I'm like, I haven't played this game since. So I don't know if I actually liked it. The Excitebike incident. But I do think that that's all the time we have for this episode of Nostalgia. Join us next time for Gumshoe. And be sure to play it yourself if you have a CRT.

For more Nostalgia, please subscribe to our podcast wherever you listen. And be sure to check out NostalgiaCast.com. That's N-E-S-T-A-L-G-I-A-C-A-S-T dot com. There you'll find links to the show and show notes as well as our other platforms such as Twitch, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. Thank you so much for your support of Nostalgia. We thank you for spending time with us. I'm Michael Esposito. You can find me on at Esposito Film on Twitter. And I'll talk to you soon.

I had a lot of fun with Balloon Shot.

Balloon Shot. People really will think this game is about balloons. I had a lot of fight with Balloon Shot. You're a clown in a garage and people are coming up and ordering different colored balloons and you have to make sure you have an inventory. Alright, that'll make it out of the fucking shit. That's in the post-show. What are you doing? You're a mess. Do you want me to restart the whole episode? No. I will stay my piece. You start with a 10-yard fight.