Hot Air is a game where you use your mouse cursor as a fan to guide a hot air balloon to the end of a level. There are optional stars to collect which unlock bonus levels, but the player has to be both careful and precise, for any wall, floor, or obstacle pops the balloon in one hit, forcing the player to restart the whole level. It seems simple enough, but it’s… deceptively difficult, without much of a curve to ease the player in. While the first level mostly functions as a tutorial — only having to make sure you don’t ram yourself into the walls trying to collect the star — the second level is absolutely brutal, requiring incredibly precise timing and understanding of how the game handles momentum should the player want to beat it, let alone collect all the stars. The third level, pictured here, eases up considerably, but getting the bonus star then requires you to effectively go through the level three times without making a single mistake. With levels four and five, I was… pretty quickly humbled, and I realized that what I thought might be a quick pitstop and a gentle easing into this whole “beat every Nitrome game” project was actually going to require serious effort and time on my part if I wanted to go through with it.

…Or not. Because when I reached level six, and got immediately walled without even escaping the beginning area, I was like “okay this is ridiculous how am I meant to do this?” I looked up a video walkthrough, and then found out… I was dealing with pretty severe lag. There seems to be an issue with the emulated version I'm using where you can't fly smoothly nor can you reach your intended full speed… while obstacles, such as the rising lava in level five, or the opening and closing mouth of level six, are not bound by these same issues. This requires the player to be reflexive and precise in their movements, yet robs them of the tools to make that possible. I tried to see whether level six was still beatable despite those constraints (like level five, in particular, was) but to no avail: I just was not able to pass the first of the levels' many obstacles, let alone collect any of the stars. It's a shame, because I was genuinely enjoying the challenge up to a point, not to mention how frustrating it felt to have to give up on the very first game of the project, but I guess there's not much of an option. I actually came back to this a few months later and played it directly on Flash Player to see whether I could do it there, only to find... the exact same problem: your character for some reason moves way slower than they should, they can't build up the speed to get past obstacles. Maybe if the promised HTML5 port for this fixes that problem, I could pull the pin out of this, but, uh, given the general quality of the HTML5 ports I played I'm not especially holding out hope. I think the balloon has burst, by this point.