Balloon Fight / Ice Climber / Exerion / Galaga / Bungeling Bay retrospective | NES Works Gaiden #28 

Balloon Fight is a genuine gem of a release out of those in this video, as is the strangely compelling Raid on Bungling Bay. To think that would go on to be the root tools for SimCity's creation.

what a selection, truly brings me back. all pirate multicart stamples!

Balloon Fight holds a special place in my heart because it was a present I happened to open on Christmas morning before I unwrapped the box containing my NES, so I knew what was coming. As one of the only two NES cartridges I owned at first, I enjoyed playing it extensively and it became a cornerstone of my collection because none of my friends owned it.

Hudson and Namco are definitely still tops as far as third parties coming into 1985. As tops as Easy Lover. Jaleco and Tose enter the picture, both would certainly also help make Famicom what it would become, for better or worse.

great video as always! (though you may want to check the bottom left corner at 5:30)

Now I know where that sound from the Arcade Pit Gameshow comes from! Thanks, Mr. Parish!

I had a really good time with Balloon Fight and Ice Climber. Both had enjoyable 2-player modes, and the 2-player in Ice Climber was hilarious given the collision detection on ledges. Balloon Trip mode in Balloon Fight is top notch to this day. Don’t know how I missed this one.

The lineup of "duplicate it's audio design almost perfectly" with the extra life sound is *chef's kiss*

Arcade Vs. Balloon Fight is a rare and precious treasure. Always play it when you have the chance.

I remember being pleasantly surprised at Exerion back when I first started collecting Famicom heavily. I think it could have been at least moderately successful over here in the US if Jaleco had opted to publish it, even if wouldn't be until 1988.

A fun side bonus of these videos is that I get to see there were music videos for songs that I love (and had no idea a music video existed for!) Tanaka-san's music really never disappointed.

I was just listening to an old Retronauts right before this where you mentioned Phil Collins and here he is again.

Lovely video on a solid set of games! Remember finding some of these while scouring through ROMS years ago. After finishing this vid I went to Bungeling Bay’s Japanese wikipedia page and the comments of Japanese vids of the game to get a more precise estimation of how it was perceived when it released over there. Much like the US release of the game, it appears to have been a victim of circumstance, but in this case the circumstance mainly hurt the game’s reputation rather than its sales. The game got a big advertising push in CoroCoro Comic, which is most popular with elementary kids, obviously leading to many of the players being pretty young even compared to the audiences of other Famicom games. Many of them were confused by the game’s unique controls and lack of direction, and were shocked by its high difficulty. I found plenty of comments by people saying that they despised or were intimidated by how baffling the game was growing up, but most of them noted that they came to change their opinion as they looked back on the game as adults and now appreciate the game as one of the early FC’s most advanced and innovative titles. I saw it compared specifically to Star Luster by a few people, which seems to be another game considered by many to have been released a tad too early for most kids at the time to really understand

I love Ice Climber. Included the controls. A true classic.

4:05 This gave Nintendo a "LEG UP" *(Joust bird tucks in legs and leaps into the air)* for that facsimile of the arcade classic.

0:07 is my favorite Double Dragon song.

Another excellent video!

Always had a fondness for balloon fight, but I always loved joust

The galaga port is really good, I used to play it on NES

can tell you're playing the western version of ice climber since you're not clubbing seals lol

Excellent presentation, thank you very much!

Ah yes, Galaga: Demons of Death was a favorite of mine on the NES, and a strong approximation of the arcade original... only the wimpy sounding explosion of your ship was a disappointment. I don't prefer it to the arcade version, obviously, but it's good enough for those plastic arcade cabinets you see in Wal-Mart. I remember you having a conversation with someone about the Galaga conversions on your Retronauts podcast. He insisted that the Atari 7800 port was superior to the NES game, and I shouted, "No! He's wrong! He's wroooooong!" (I don't know what that accomplished... podcasts are generally not interactive. But still, he was clearly wrong about that.)

0:05 - I love this song.

Bungeling Bay apparently had mic support for its 2-player mode on Famicom, the details of which I don't know (this whole game is over my head tbh). There's actually a bunch of FC games with minor mic features that's pretty much totally undocumented in English. I think Star Soldier is one of them.

Ice Climber has terribly broken hitboxes, causing you to fall through platform all the damn time! I don't know why anyone thinks it's a classic.

9:10 Sounds like you're referencing a specific rumor here. What game did Tose maybe shadow-develop?

The screen curl returns in the Galaga footage but thanks to the black star field it’s less obtrusive.

Hm. Just now realizing that Ice Climber also uses a similar jump sound effect as Mario. (Also realized this year that the Vs. Ice Climber has a longer stage tune than the Famicom/NES)

Ice Climber is a mystical game for me. I have very strong (some might say formative) memories of playing it on my Dendy, although I never owned a copy. Must have been a friend's cartridge, but who that friend was, I have no idea. For some reason I love this game, weird jumps and all. As others pointed out, I cannot but notice it is not the Famicom version with the seals, the one I know and love from Chinese bootlegs. :D

Another word, on the NES' scrolling-- I would argue that the hardware scrolling on the NES is the most important feature on the console. Other home systems had hardware scrolling, I can personally vouch that the Commodore 64 had it, but many of them required moving whole screens' worth of data during a single frame to present a solid frame rate. The NES had 2K of memory devoted to maintaining a whole second screen's worth of tiles that could be scrolled into freely. This allowed the system to be a lot less obsessive about maintaining the data entering the screen. The player's motion wouldn't suddenly require the whole screen be refreshed in a single frame, instead, it could spend multiple frames preparing the data in the area outside of the visible region. Speaking from my own programming days, I really wish the C64's vaunted VIC-II chip had support for this kind of scrolling, it'd have made scrolling games there a lot easier to develop. (much later, hackers discovered a way to kind of support it, but at the cost of causing portions of the system's RAM to lose data! it's a long story)

Ice Climber may or may not be based on the Game & Watch title Climber, which can be found in G&W Gallery 4. Ice Climber is definitely clunky, and Climber is only 30% less clunky by virtue of differing physics.

What a game(s), what a channel!! Oo lord

Iwata's floaty flight code for Balloon Fight was later reused for SMB1's swimming mechanics.

I've actually always liked Ice Climber. The controls don't bother me either and just see it as part of the challenge.

So how does NES works Gaiden differ from NES Works? Is it just a more up to date refresher on previously covered titles? Newly researched information? In any case, love the channel, what an amazing and vastly underrated resource of knowledge and entertainment

Cool videos man

My favorite fact about Balloon Fight is that the arcade version, Vs. Balloon Fight, has more music, including an extended version of the classic "Balloon Trip" theme: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-xoFQqmzEMHY.html

Exerion should have been released in the USA in the first place. 😀👍🎮

While I'd agree that Galaga is a perfect game in its own context - I might even argue the best game of the golden age - I thought Galaga '88 was pretty successful at adding to the concept. I was surprised how good that game was when I finally got around to playing it.

I really had no idea what I was supposed to do in Raid on Bungling Bay.

I have over 60 hours logged in Balloon Fight on NES Online, and I regret nothing. Balloon Fight friggin rules

Will this series continue on past the start of NES Works, or do you intend to keep hacking at the Famicom library indefinitely (as your will, time and effort allows)? Great stuff as usual. I really appreciate the proper contextualization of games that seemed somewhat out of place/time on NES.

Balloon Fight rules.

3:10 I mean it's cool and all, but associate Balloon Trip more with the Game Boy release since I never played Balloon Fight on the nes.

I'd have put a Content Warning in somewhere. I wasn't expecting that Phil Collins.

can someone tell me if having one balloon in Balloon fight makes you fly worse than having 2?

Tose! Woooooooooo!

Oh god Exerion makes me seasick

Until seeing this video I had no idea that the singer duetting with Phil Collins on Easy Lover was a man. Jeremy is offering me helpful trivia even outside the topic of videogames!

Time for the real question. What’s more annoying, jaleco upside down boxes on famicom or their company name only on the end of their nes carts?

Phil Collins is da man

I like to imagine what a sequel to Ice Climber would have been like on the Super Nintendo, or the N64. The original game is weird but it has something.