Balloon Kid

What do you do with an arcade classic that stands on a single brilliant idea? At Nintendo they decided to dissolve it into an entirely different genre — and out came Balloon Kid, one of those endearingly underrated titles that are easy to forget in the history of the Game Boy.

Balloon Kid is a sequel to the arcade Balloon Fight, but whereas the original was a static arena, here it's a side-scrolling platformer in full swing. You play as a girl named Alice, who floats on a pair of balloons and must fly through levels packed with enemies and obstacles. The magic — and the nerve-racking tension — lies in the fact that the balloons are fragile: as soon as one pops, the controls and flight change fundamentally, and if you lose both, you're in serious trouble. Movement, then, is not about solid ground beneath your feet as in an ordinary platformer, but about constant balancing in the air.

It is precisely the flight physics that set Balloon Kid apart from the crowd. Instead of jumping, here you deal with floating, descending, and momentum, which gives the game a nimble, faintly dance-like rhythm. You have to think more three-dimensionally than in a classic platformer — when to gain altitude, when to let yourself drop below an obstacle, when to slip through a gap. The controls are sensitive and reward the player who learns to work with momentum.

The game also spices up its core mechanic with small but clever ideas. At certain moments you can voluntarily give up the balloons and set out on foot, briefly returning to solid ground and a different mode of movement, so the game alternates between aerial and terrestrial passages. What could have been a monotonous flying one-note thus gains a shifting rhythm and forces you to switch between two distinct control schemes. Add to that a brisk pace and colorfully designed environments, and you get a platformer with more ideas than you'd expect from a sequel to an old arcade game.

There is also a piece of interesting history around the game. On the Game Boy it never officially came out in Japan — Japanese players hardly knew it in that form at the time; it reached them more by a roundabout route via the Famicom version and later via the color remake for the Game Boy Color. That makes Balloon Kid one of those titles that had a bit of bad luck with distribution and remained outside the main spotlight, though it deserved better.

The studio Pax Softnica worked on the development alongside Nintendo, and the result is cute, nimble, and unexpectedly distinctive. It is a game that takes a simple premise and mines a fresh experience from it — exactly the kind of pocket title you discover late and wonder why nobody talks about it more.

Why play: A cute flying platformer with distinctive balloon physics — an underrated gem that offers fresh movement beyond the usual platforming clichés.