Balloon Kid (Game Boy) Playthrough
210A playthrough of Nintendo's 1990 action game for the Nintendo Game Boy, Balloon Kid.
In this video I play all the way through the Single Play mode. Then, at 36:54, I play the Balloon Trip mode until I get a game over.
Balloon Kid was the direct sequel to the 1986 NES game Balloon Fight (https://youtu.be/i9cp4tlrGYY), and it was a collaborative effort between Nintendo's internal R&D1 team and Pax Softnica, led by Mr. Yoshio Sakamoto, the dude behind the Metroid series. It was initially a western-only release, though Sanrio reskinned the game for a Famicom port released in 1992 under the name Hello Kitty World. An enhanced Super Game Boy/Game Boy Color version of the original game eventually showed up in Japan in 2000 as Balloon Fight GB.
Balloon Kid's gameplay is based on Balloon Fight's Balloon Trip mode, but things have been spiced up a bit. The adventure begins when a little boy named Jim is swept away by the wind while holding onto a bunch of balloons. Alice, his big sister, sees this happen and decides that it would be appropriate to follow after him. And so, weaving her way through a veritable gauntlet of anti-balloon obstacles and hazards, Alice combs the skies of eight auto-scrolling stages in search of Jim.
Alice can hold up to two balloons at a time, and she loses one each time she gets hit. She dies if she takes too many hits or falls into a hazard below, but she can pump up more balloons if she can make her way to solid ground, and she can also intentionally let go of her balloons if she needs to quickly get out of the way of something.
There are Game Boy-shaped doors that she can enter to play bonus rounds, and every so often she'll encounter a bosses that she can take out by jumping on their heads.
The additions Balloon Kid makes to Balloon Fight's mechanics are welcome and make it feel much more modern than its predecessor. It's a much easier game overall - it'll only take a few attempts to clear the main game for most people - but it's fun for the short while that it lasts.
*Recorded in Retroarch using the DMG shader to mimic the look of the original Gameboy screen.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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