Quick Impressions: "Balloon Kid" (Game Boy)

As you know, if you've been following this blog for any amount of time, I have a strong fondness for Balloon Fight. It was a big part of my childhood, and I have many great memories of playing it with friends (it was, for more than half a decade, a constant presence in our day-long gaming marathons) and extracting enjoyment from it in fun and hilarious ways. It brought us together and provided us experiences that were rollicking, entertaining, and filled with good-natured banter, and thus it helped us strengthen our bond and become better friends.

For those reasons, I consider it to be one of the most important games in my gaming history.

So you would think, then, that I would have had an immediate interest in downloading and playing Balloon Kid, its sequel, when I discovered it in the early 2000s.

Sadly I didn't. I chose not to look into Balloon Kid because, I guess, I was too busy focusing on current-generation console games and all of the Castlevania games that were being released during that period. Consequently I probably didn't believe that some old Game Boy game was worthy of my time or attention. So I ignored it.

I didn't see the game in action until the mid-2010s, when it appeared in a video that I was watching (it was either a Balloon Fight-focused retrospective or one of those standard "Overlooked Game Boy Games" YouTube videos). At that moment, I instantly became interested in playing it, and that was the case not just because I was nostalgic for Balloon Fight but also because the idea of Balloon Fight being turned into a side-scrolling action game sounded really cool to me.

"This is a more ideal way to enjoy Balloon Fight's action as a single player," I thought to myself.

Unfortunately, though, I simply never got around to playing the game. At any time, there were always games on my mental list that I considered to be higher-priority.

And honestly, I probably would have put off playing Balloon Kid for at least another decade had a certain event not occurred. I'm of course talking about Nintendo's decision to add the game to its online service and specifically to its Game Boy application. That was what provided me the opportunity and the motivation to finally play the game.

And now that I've spent a few weeks with Balloon Kid and completed it a number of times, I'd like to share my thoughts on the game and tell you whether or not it's a worthy sequel to Balloon Fight.

 I feel that I can't talk about Balloon Kid without first mentioning how visually and aurally charming it is. When I play it, I'm struck by how endearing and enchanting its imagery and music are and how well they do to brighten my mood and make me happy to be playing video games.

Every stage has its own wonderfully unique visual theme, and there's always something delightful or smile-inducing going on in the current environment. In the opening stage, for instance, there's a cityscape background whose buildings are formed from giant pencils, erasers and matchsticks. Another stage is populated with expressive trees that smile at you early on but begin to glare angrily at you as you get close to the stage's boss (perhaps to convey to you that they're upset by his presence). One of them is filled with blimps and onlookers who are there to offer your encouragement. And there's even one in which you enter into an enthusiastic whale and fly through its blubbery innards while trying to avoid making contact with its dozens of sharp teeth.

Sometimes, sadly, it's actually difficult to observe the game's visuals because there's no time or opportunity to do so. In most instances, the action is so hectic or harrowing that you have to remain focused on the action lest you'll risk losing control of the heroine, Alice, or colliding with any enemies that suddenly appeared as you were looking away.

But if you can find time to observe and examine the game's visuals (like in instances when you're standing on solid ground and waiting for the screen to scroll to a certain point), you really should. Because there are a lot of cool and interesting things to see!

Though, it's Balloon Kid's music that I find to be the most appealing part of the package. It's what does the most to absorb you and influence how you feel about the game's visuals and environments and your gameplay experience in general.

The stages' tunes are all delightful variations of Balloon Fight's bonus-game and Balloon Trip-mode theme. They're cheerful, upbeat, and even ominous and mysterious when they need to be, but no matter what forms they take, they're always enlivening and inspiriting and able to infuse you with feelings of happiness and joy.

More than anything, they imbue the game with a powerfully alluring sense of vibrancy and the strongest of feel-good vibes. As I said: They make you feel happy to be playing video games!

In fact, I get happy just thinking about them! Doing so makes want to return to the game just to hear them and absorb their vibes.

 I was very pleased to see that there was some variety to Balloon Kid's action. Going in, I thought that the game would be all about simply flying forward and collecting balloons while maneuvering around obstacles. What I saw in those aforementioned videos, which was admittedly a small sampling, led me to believe that its gameplay would be slightly more evolved variation of Balloon Fight's Balloon Trip mode.

And I was OK with that. Because to me, a slightly more evolved Balloon Trip still sounded like a good foundation for a game.

But it turns out that there's actually much more to Balloon Kid! It's not just about collecting balloons and maneuvering around obstacles, no. It has other types of gameplay elements.

To start, it has a platforming element. At specific points (mostly stage sections that contain series of narrow passages), it forces you to release your balloons and rely on your running and jumping abilities to get around. Other times, you can voluntarily release your balloons and do so with the intention of entering into item-containing side paths that only a balloon-less Alice can access.

These segments are among the game's most interesting, and my only disappointment is that there are only a handful of them in the game.

Also, there are boss fights that require you to tactically alternate between flying and platforming modes. It's easy to intuit how do deal with bosses, but actually landing strikes on them can prove to be tricky (mostly because of a certain control issue that I'll talk about in a bit).

Still, though, the boss fights are nice additions, and they do a lot to help Balloon Kid feel like a full-fledged video game.

And I love that the game includes bonus games that are modeled after Balloon Fight's (you can access them by entering into the Game Boy-styled portals that appear at certain points in stages)! They create what I feel is an important connection to the original game. They evoke strong memories of one of its best elements.

It's nice, also, that they're accompanied by a faithful replication of the original bonus-game theme!

My only complaint is that you can't travel through the screen's edges and wrap around to the other side, like you could in Balloon Fight's bonus game. Not being able to do so makes it harder to collect balloons in the later rounds, when the balloons fly upwards at high speeds and often emerge from the far-left and far-right pipes in alteration. Instead you have to try to bounce off the screen's edges and generate enough motion to speedily sail to the screen's opposite side, which is way easier said than done.

Additionally, Balloon Kid has other modes of play: It brings back Balloon Trip, which is more challenging in this game because of the looser and more frenetic flying controls, and it has a VS mode in which two players can compete in a special competition.

I haven't been able to sample the VS mode, because I don't have someone to play the game with, but from what I've researched, it entails traveling through the mode's single autoscrolling stage and trying to win by being the first to either collect the majority of the stage's 10 balloons or pop your opponent's balloons and resultantly knock him or her into a watery death pit (you can also KO yourself by accidentally flying or jumping into a death pit).

It is, from all accounts, a very limited mode and thus not a particularly exciting addition to the game.

 The game's controls work very well, but still I've got an issue with them: They're not one-to-one with Balloon Fight's, to which I'm deeply accustomed. The latter's, to me, represent the flying-combat genre's most perfectly devised controls and momentum physics, and I prefer them to be the standard in these types of games.

The problem is that Balloon Kid's flying controls are much looser and more frenetic than Balloon Fight's, and consequently it's much easier for Alice to get out of control. As I fly along, I always feel as though I'm fighting against my forward momentum and struggling to maintain my current speed and height. And it doesn't help that if I react to an unintended movement with anything more than the slightest amount of button-depression, I wind up rocketing across the screen and entering into a state in which I can't easily reverse my momentum and regain full control over Alice.

The result is that the action feels more harrowing than it should be.

Also, Alice is always moving forward slightly by default, and because the controls are so sensitive, it's difficult to stop her from doing so and attain neutral positioning. This becomes a problem when all you want to do is hover directly above an enemy or a boss character and drop straight down onto it. You'll likely get frustrated as you try to get Alice to hold her position and decide to just give up and drop at an angle and hope that you don't wildly bounce left or right in an unintended way.

I'm not saying that I wasn't able to adjust to the different controls and physics and gain a strong grasp on them, no. I just feel as though I wouldn't have had as much trouble dealing with certain segments and beating the game had the controls and physics worked identically to Balloon Fight's.

The balloon-less/platforming controls and physics have their own quirks.

Alice moves speedily when she's running along the ground, but that's not a problem because she's able to basically stop on a dime. The problem, rather, is her aerial movement: Her jumps are a combination of stiff and floaty, so it's difficult to exert a high degree of control over them or be precise with them.

This is especially true for horizontal jumps, which have different degrees of rigidness to them. The longer a jump is, the less chance you have to halt it and redirect it. So there's little room for error. And there's no room for error in the case of your longest jump, which can't be redirect at all. When you execute it, you have to hope to land in the intended location.

So the jumping controls and physics can cause you major trouble if you don't gain a strong grasp on them.

Keep in mind, though, that the platforming segments are short in length and never very tricky (some individual platforming challenges look as though they require calculated, precise jumps, but they can likely be easily cleared with simple maximum-distance horizontal jumps), so it's likely that you'll be able to adequately deal with them even if you don't have a particularly strong grasp on the controls and physics.

 Balloon Kid's difficulty is, for the most part, handled very well: It progresses in a natural- and appropriate-feeling way, and though it reaches high levels at certain points, it never becomes overwhelming. Also, the game hands out a lot of extra lives (stages frequently contain one or more 1up icons, and you can otherwise obtain extra lives by collecting 100 balloons and completing bonus games), so you'll be able to survive for long periods of time and most importantly find plenty of opportunity to observe stage layouts and plan how to traverse troublesome segments.

In general, Balloon Kid is a really challenging game, but it doesn't attain that status because of how difficult its later stages get, no. It does so, rather, because it has a small handful of very rough segments that will wipe you out if you don't know how to handle them.

The most infamous of these segments is found in Stage 7, the cave, near the stage's end portion. In this segment, you have to descend down a 45-degree passage and do so while avoiding falling stalactites, which kill you in one hit. To successfully clear this segment, you have to fly down in a very particular motion while moving at just the right speed. It's hard to discover and execute the required combination of movement qualities, and if you're unable to do so, you could wind up dumping all of your lives and continues (you only get two of these) and coming away with the feeling that this segment is just plain unfair.

If you're going to be forced to replay the game from the start, it'll probably be this particular segment that puts you in that position.

Really, how you perform is contingent on whether or not you possess any Balloon Fight (or Joust) skills and understand the nuances of this game type's controls and physics. If you do, you'll have a head start and an easier time maneuvering your way around stages and their obstacles. But if you don't, it might take you a while to fully acclimate yourself to the game's style of movement. And if you fail to do so to an adequate degree, you'll probably wind up having a very rough, very stressful experience.

 Overall, I'm really impressed with Balloon Kid. It's a very good, very well-put-together action game, and it has a high degree of replayability.

Admittedly it loses some of its replayability because of how stressful its action gets at times (this game can do a number on your heart). And it doesn't help that the screen scrolls really slowly in the early stages, which becomes a problem when you're in a position in which you've just Game Overed, in frustrating fashion, and all you desire to do is quickly get back to the stage that did you in. That process can be physically and mentally fatiguing, and you may not care to undergo it more than one or two times.

But at the same time, the game's other elements--particularly its wonderfully enchanting visuals and music--will probably be so appealing to you that you'll want to continue playing, anyway, just to immerse yourself in them.

They're that alluring.

Some will probably say that Balloon Kid is "short" at only 8 stages, but I would disagree with them and argue that its length is ideal. Games are at their best when they make their point and end when the time is right, and Balloon Kid absolutely does that. It ends right at the point in which it feels as though it has done just about everything that it could with its particular formula. It ends right before the point in which it would have been necessary for it to start recycling ideas and becoming repetitive.

So I say that Balloon Kid's length is exactly what it needs to be.

And it is a portable game, after all. It was designed to provide entertainment in a bite-sized, short-yet-satisfying manner, and that's what it does. Its ability to do so is what makes it such a highly replayable game.

 I liked Balloon Kid the first time that I played through it, but I was, admittedly, a little annoyed with it at the end (specifically because I had to replay the entire game after dying to the final boss). Though, I had a higher opinion of the game after a second play-through in which I performed significantly better (though, I still had a little trouble with the aforementioned cave segment).

And in the end, I came away with the feeling that Balloon Kid was a very good game that was worth replaying regularly. And that feeling only intensified after each of my subsequent play-throughs.

So yeah--I really like this game!

Also, Balloon Kid does especially well to help me scratch my Balloon Fight itch, which I'm never able to really do because the original's single-player mode isn't able to offer me the type of stimulating action that I'm looking for. It's a game that allows me to enjoy Balloon Fight's action in an exciting, satisfying way. And that's another big reason why it's so appealing to me.

Balloon Kid just works very well as a concept, and I enthusiastically recommend it to anyone who's a big fan of Balloon Fight or Joust. I recommend it to everyone else, too, but I advise those of you who are new to this sub-genre to practice playing either of the latter games before picking up Balloon Kid, because the specialized skill-set that you'll attain by doing so will help to start understanding and enjoying this game immediately.

Balloon Kid is a fine little action game, and I'm happy to have played it. Its fun and interesting, creative, and charming as hell, and I'm sure that I'm going to extract a lot more enjoyment from it in the future--especially in the summer months, which will, I'm certain, feel like the perfect time to be playing such an exuberant, inspiriting game.

Quick Impressions: "Fester's Quest" (NES)

So here we have another game with which I was fated to do battle: Fester's Quest for the NES.

Our encounter was a long time coming.

My history with this game began way back in 1990, when it came into my possession in a way that I don't remember (my guess is that either my brother or I bought it on a whim). All I can say is that my experience with it didn't go well. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, even after reading the manual, and I struggled to advance through the game's underground sections because it was impossible to fire higher-powered weapons in narrow passages and I couldn't mash fast enough to take out all of the self-replicating slimes and bullet-sponge frogs.

I couldn't make any progress, and after failing repeatedly for about a half hour or so, I switched off the game in frustration and decided to abandon it and never go near it again.

Ever since then, my exposure to Fester's Quest has been limited to passively watching YouTube personalities and Twitch streamers play through it. And I have to see: Seeing others struggle with this game certainly didn't inspire me to play it. Rather, it only served to reinforce my belief that this was a game that I desperately needed to avoid (for the sake of my own sanity).

But by the end of 2025, something had changed: My "Games to Play" list had dried up (as I mentioned in my Game Boy Double Dragon piece), and I was looking to fill the void with any games that I could find. I was especially interested in finding games that could challenge me in a way that modern games couldn't.

That's when the little voice in my head whispered to me the name "Fester's Quest" and subsequently inferred that I was avoiding the game because I was a coward. "You're scared of this game, aren't you?" it continued to ask me in a needling manner.

And in truth, I was. I imagined that playing through this game would cause me nothing but pain and misery, and I wasn't looking to endure a challenge that entailed not trying to overcome obstacles but instead trying to overcome a game's high number of anger- and frustration-inducing shortcomings.

But the fact of the matter was that the gauntlet had been thrown down and I'm not someone who will run from a challenge. So I decided that it was time for me to face my fear and finally attempt to beat Fester's Quest.

And now that I've done so, I'd like to share with you all of the thoughts that popped into my head during my hours-long experience with the game.

 First I have to talk about Fester's Quest's reputation, which, I've found, is well-earned.

Now, I'm sure that you fine folks have seen plenty of reviews and videos that complain about this game's flaws, and honestly, I don't have any personal complaints to add to the list. But what I can do is give context to the game's bad design choices and explain how they're all very much deliberate and intended to suit the developers' goal.

The truth is that Fester's Quest isn't labyrinthine in nature, as you'd expect from a game that was made using Blaster Master's engine. It's instead entirely linear, and its quest is basically a straight line to the end. There are three or four divergent paths along the way, sure, but none of them lead anywhere; each of them is simply an elaborate dead end. And if you do ever break from the path, it's only because you need to move two or three screens over and obtain an item from a nearby house.

So this game isn't a large-scale Metroid-like action-adventure that you have to spend days or even weeks exploring, no. Rather, it's a largely straightforward top-down shoot-'em-up that can be realistically beaten in about an hour and half to two hours in a first play-through.

The designers were very much aware of this fact, so they implemented a bunch of punitive game elements and nasty mechanics and did whatever they could to stop you from being able to beat the game quickly and thus discover that there really wasn't that much to it.

Each design choice was made to meet that aim:

• They made the game's passages narrow so that your shots wouldn't fit within them and you'd struggle to hit enemies and consequently have to constantly backtrack and take forever to advance.
• They programmed the enemies to be damage-sponges so that you couldn't destroy them without backing up and causing more of them to spawn.
• They included weapon-downgrade icons to severely hamper your ability to deal with enemies and otherwise to clog up narrow paths with unwanted items and force you to have to stop and wait ten seconds for each icon to despawn.
• They refrained from implementing diagonal movement because they knew that doing so would allow you to more effectively engage with enemies and more easily slip by them.
• They gave bosses a ridiculous amount of hit points so that the battles would drag on forever and there'd be more time for you to screw up and die.
• And they place you back at the game's starting point whenever you Game Over so that you're forced to spend 10-15 minutes slowly and wearily re-traversing the same dozen or so unnecessarily long, tediously designed underground areas.

And it's all intended to waste as much time as possible and make you feel as though the game is way longer than it actually is.

If you know what to do, you can beat this game in about 40 minutes, and you'll be at it for that long only because of the absurd amount of time it takes to farm for weapon upgrades and work your way around the damage sponge-enemies. Really. it'd be a 20-minute game if it were designed reasonably and in a way that respected the player's time.

All of the game's terrible design choices make sense when they're viewed in this context.

 For those reasons, I had a very frustrating first experience with the game. I died a number of times and consequently wasted hours re-traversing the same spaces, and because those spans were so intensely boring, I spent them complaining about the game in my head and wondering what I'd say about it if I ever wrote about it on this blog (which I didn't think I was actually going to do).

And in the end, I was left feeling really sour. I was pissed at the game for how annoying it was, and I was glad to be done with it.

The problem is that I wasn't done with it.

I returned to it the next day because I felt bad about how I beat it. Specifically I felt guilty about the way in which I cleared the last one-third of the final area: Because I was low on potions and health (and I forgot that I had nooses), I was worried that I wouldn't be able to deal with the upcoming enemies, which I assumed to be the area's strongest, so I resorted to intentionally spawning three bouncing eyeballs and keeping them onscreen, behind me, as I advanced. This, I knew, would keep the game at its object-limit and prevent any other enemies from spawning.

I did that all the way till the end.

But because I felt that using such a tactic tainted my victory (even after I tried to justify it by framing it as a fair response to the game's "unreasonable design decisions"), I went back and beat the game in a wholly legitimate manner. Doing so allowed me to feel more satisfied with my performance.

And I'm surprised to find myself saying that I actually felt more positive about the game than I did during my first play-through.

I'll have more to say about this later on.

 What's sad about Fester's Quest is that it has a lot of good qualities but can't help but waste them. Take what it does visually, for example: It's a nice-looking game, but it doesn't leave you feeling that way because of how unvaried its environments are. It ultimately comes off as mundane-looking because it only has four environment types, and two of them comprise 90% of the game's world.

The labyrinthine first-person 3D areas, which are found within gray buildings, are visually interesting, yeah, but they're confusing in presentation and largely empty (the only 3D area that contains anything of value is the first one, which hides a health-extension power-up in one of its dead ends). They, like so many of the game's other areas, only exist to waste your time and create situations in which it takes way longer than it should to get to the next destination.

The game's bosses are cooler-looking than Blaster Master's, but sadly they're nowhere near as varied as the latter's. They're all pretty similar in how they operate: They simply walk back and forth and regularly stop to fire projectiles in predictable ways. Fester's gunshots barely hurt them, and you can't hope to beat them merely by abusing health and invisibility potions, so you have no choice but to tactically assault them with missiles (which feel as though they were included only because someone on the design team realized, late in the game's development, that it was near-impossible to defeat the majority of bosses with Fester's normal weapons) and hope that enough of them connect (in most instances, a number of them fly around aimlessly before despawning or otherwise chase after the bosses' projectiles).

The final boss (the alien ship computer), conversely, is a joke. The room that it inhabits has safe spots in its corners, and you can pretty much trivialize the fight by standing in a corner and launching missiles at the boss' core. I'm not going to complain about that, though, because I feel, after gauging the boss' attacks, that the battle would be nightmarish if it forced you into a position in which you had to dodge the screen-filling projectiles and somehow find space to execute your attacks.

The boss battles represent the best part of the game, but still, they could have been much better. Had the designers given the bosses unique movement-patterns and cut their HP-totals in half, the battles with them would have been more exciting and ideal in length and thus very satisfying.

It's the same story with the game's music: It's great, as you would expect SunSoft music to be, and it's jamming every step of the way, even when its ominously toned, but there simply isn't enough of it. During your adventure, you mostly hear the same two tunes in alteration, and after a while, these tunes become as repetitive as the environments, and likewise they become mundane and lose their ability to keep you engaged.

Still, they're absolutely high-tier 8-bit video-game tunes. It's just too bad that they're wasted on Fester's Quest. They deserve to be in a better game.

 The game's difficulty is, as it's purported to be, pretty high. But really, once you know where to go and where all of the items are located, the difficulty reduces significantly. The challenge, then, boils down to two specific elements: the later boss battles and the final area, which can be a terror if you don't have upgraded weapons, more than two health units, and an ample amount of health potions, invisibility potions, and Lurch-summoning nooses (which act as screen-nukes).

But if you come into any of them fully equipped, you'll have a good chance of enduring whatever's thrown at you.

And I have to say: It's nice that the game replenishes your health and fully restocks your items after you defeat a boss. It's a shockingly generous act from a game that's otherwise always trying to punish you or put you at a deficit.

 Honestly, Fester's Quest isn't as bad as I thought it would be. Coming in from Blaster Master, I assumed that it would be incredibly labyrinthine and confusing because of how unvaried its environmental design is. It really isn't. Instead it's, as I said, highly linear and pretty straightforward.

It's more playable than I thought it'd be, and actually, to my great surprise, it has some moments when it's enjoyable. It's too bad that it doesn't work well as a game, overall, because I can definitely the potential that it had. If it didn't have all of the stated design issues, its linearity could have actually worked in its favor. It could have been used as the basis for a more-fitting formula: stage-by-stage action.

The designers could have dropped the majority of the underground areas, many of which are obviously there simply to pad out the game's length, and expanded upon the overworld and 3D areas and break them into individual stages. This approach would have allowed them to make a short-and-sweet top-down action game in the vein of Jakal or the company's own Gremlins 2: The New Batch.

Instead they gave us a cruelly designed, highly repetitive shoot-'em-up that's basically a collection of Blaster Master's worst parts. Why they did so, I don't know. It could have been that they lacked ambition or resources, or maybe they were up against a tight deadline.

The actual reason will probably remain a mystery.

The only thing that we can say for sure is that SunSoft's efforts resulted in a game that's way under par for a company that was producing multiple classics at that particular point in time (the late-80s/early-90s period). It's a game that's only memorable to us because of how torturously designed it is and how much it tormented us.

Still, it's not a terrible game. I mean, I would never say that it's a good game or that I really enjoy playing it, no, but I can tell you that it's really not, as it's purported to be, one of the worst video games ever made. What it is, rather, is a disappointingly middling action game that intentionally sabotages itself too much to be enjoyable for more than a few minutes at a time. And that's too bad because it had the ingredients necessary to actually be a solidly designed, fun-to-play action game.

For whatever reason, though, its creators weren't interested in getting it to that place.