At some point a bit into my very early childhood my parents had enough of me asking to play the NES or Genesis on our one TV we had in the living room, so they got me a Game Boy and three games to play with. Two of them are incredibly obvious ones that pretty much everyone had, Super Mario Land and Tetris. The third one though? This damn varmint right here.

Balloon Kid is the sequel to Balloon Fight and attempts to turn it into a full-fledged auto-scrolling adventure rather than an arcade-style Joust ripoff game. The excuse plot of your little brother blowing up too many balloons and getting swept up by the wind is flimsy, but oddly somehow works well. I feel like there's something to simpler plots like this. Like villains out to dominate the planet, or something trying to destroy Earth? Couldn't care less about that stuff. If I can't help this little girl save her brother though I'm gonna lose sleep over it.

Something about those backgrounds just really drew me in too, like why does the city have buildings resembling pencils and matchsticks? Well, apparently it's because the place is called "Pencilvania", it's dumb as shit but I like it. You also get to fly into a whale's mouth and do an entire stage in there for some reason, I assume her brother went in there earlier? That would explain the balloons you pick up along the way actually! They're not just there randomly, your brother in distress is constantly dropping them! I also like this boss who's just an evil snowman who telekinetically throws his bucket hat at you.

I feel most people who play this game now would probably hate the Balloon Fight mechanics like Alice bouncing off shit like a pinball, but otherwise I think it's pretty fun. It's got a pretty good difficulty curve too, the first half is relatively easy and the second half gets pretty damn challenging, though the final stage in the factory can get hellish with it's OHKOs, but thankfully checkpoints are very nice in this one.

However I think I probably wouldn't have gotten as attached to this game if the music didn't stick with me as much as it did. I wanna say the first stage theme here was among the first that really stuck with me as a kid, at the very least after the Kraid's Lair theme from Metroid. It makes sense since both were made by the same person.

Mr. "Hip" Tanaka thank you very much for your contributions to our childhoods.