Balloon Bomber (Arcade)

Taito’s Space Invaders is no doubt their most famous game, and if you see their game Balloon Bomber, it would be easy to mistake it for the testing ground for some of the ideas featured in it. However, despite both being shooters where you fire up at foes that get speedier when you defeat some of their number, the simpler Balloon Bomber actually came out two years after the much more successful and beloved Space Invaders. Perhaps it was an attempt to shake up the formula a little bit to make lightning strike twice, but Balloon Bomber certainly feels like the game whose ideas had to be refined into something more successful rather than the follow-up that doesn’t recapture the appeal of its progenitor.

In Balloon Bomber, you play as a little cannon able to move left and right across a colored bit of ground. You can only have one shot out at a time but can fire them as quickly as they disappear, your goal being to shoot down an unusual bombing campaign unfolding up above. Every round of play sees a plane swooping in to signal the start of a new wave of bombs, but these bombs are carried by balloons, making them swing back and forth precariously as they drift off to the side. Six of these bomb-carrying balloons are dropped at once, floating in a tidy line, but the explosives dangling from them are held on by a thin string that causes them to rock back and forth. If you shoot the bomb, that takes out the problem and grants you some points, but hit the balloon instead and the bomb will begin dropping downwards at speed. If you’re a crack shot you can still shoot that falling explosive before it hits the ground, but if you don’t, you’ll see where the danger in Balloon Bomber lies.

 

That bit of colored ground your cannon is set atop is destructible, and any time a bomb from a balloon hits it, a crater will be made. The crater cannot be crossed by your cannon under any conditions, the only way to fill them back up actually being to die since that refreshes the entire area. You do have a few lives and can earn an extra, but if you don’t deal with the bombs properly, you’ll find your available moving space diminishing. Bomb-bearing balloons don’t even necessarily need to be shot to cause trouble, because beyond their visible payload, they can potentially drop an additional bomb to cause you trouble. The explosions are also much larger than they appear, meaning even if you just barely dodge the bomb itself, the blast from it hitting the ground can take you out, something that becomes increasingly more likely as you run out of space to even flee. A bomb can drop in a space where you can’t even shoot it, meaning if the craters get out of control, you’re on borrowed time, left hoping the random explosives don’t end your run.

When Balloon Bomber begins, the first wave of balloons flies pretty high in the sky, but each time you take out a set of six, the next group will be a row lower. This can mean, later on, that some will drop bombs right as they appear and possibly instantly kill you in a way you couldn’t have prevented, but before then, the low flying balloons are actually to your benefit. When they’re flying high, you need to time your shots more intelligently. The swinging bombs on a string move in a predictable pattern, making them actually rather easy to shoot when they start getting lower in the sky. The balloons and swinging bombs do speed up after you’ve shot a few down, but the last balloon can be blasted with impunity since its bomb won’t have time to land before the next round starts. The timing on attacks is actually perhaps a bit too easy and since even a miss can be recovered from if you shoot down the falling payload, Balloon Bomber doesn’t feel like it’s asking enough out of the player. The gradually destroyed ground is more likely to come from the balloon drops you simply can’t reach in time, and there is a little extra touch of peril eventually introduced. The plane that initially drops the balloons can eventually make extra passes, dropping three bombs all at once that won’t break the ground but do threaten your cannon’s safety. This can again let the balloons’ random drops destroy some ground when you can’t stop them safely, but it does feel like Balloon Bomber generally needed more danger and this seems like it could have been the start of some good ideas to pressure you beyond the occasionally impossible to prevent crater creation.

 

Balloon Bomber is a score-focused shooter but not likely to last too long because of those moments where you can’t do much about the ways the bombs drop. Amusingly, if you do make it a decent length in, the game will briefly pause play to swallow the playfield in red before leaving you with a rather underwhelming celebratory message like “GOOD” or “VERY FINE”. The music accompanying it is a little jaunty at least and the music speeding up when the balloons also get a speed increase is a nice touch, but there are some details on Balloon Bomber that seem a little inconsistent. I’ve seen a few versions of the game floating around, Balloon Bomber sometimes having a plain blue or black background, other times clouds are present in the sky for either coloration, and I’ve even seen a variation with a detailed illustrated background mean to look like a set of hills despite the still plain sprites over top them. The sound effects and music can even be different, right down to some variants having Space Invaders sound effects. This may be because the game was offered as a conversion for Space Invaders cabinets and in a few different cabinet formats, but since Japanese flyers advertising the game used the blue background with clouds look, that feels like it might be the intended look… despite Taito Legends 2 on PlayStation 2 reproducing the game with a black background instead. It’s a confusing bit of history for an underloved game that seems to have been an overall poor idea on carrying Space Invaders’s ideas into another situation, but it does make it a little more interesting than the bomb bombardment that feels like it’s too tipped towards unfairly killing you rather than seeing how far you can get on your own skill.

THE VERDICT: Balloon Bomber can’t compete with its big brother Space Invaders because its less engaging action was further complicated by failure sometimes feeling outside your control. The bomb dropping balloons are at once too predictable and too random, their flight patterns making it a little too easy to land your shots even when they speed up but their random extra bomb drops sometimes happen in ways that thin your available movement space with you having had no way to prevent it. Balloon Bomber’s shooting is already a bit too basic, especially since that plane that should be complicating it flies by too rarely, but the core action being boring certainly isn’t helped by deaths often feeling unfair.

 

And so, I give Balloon Bomber for arcade machines…

A BAD rating. While Balloon Bomber could have done with less restraint with the passing plane dropping its three bombs that don’t often pose a risk to the ground, it does seem to at least have a decent degree of caution in how often the balloons drop extra explosives. There are some egregious moments like a low-flying balloon dropping one right as the action starts and instantly killing you, but more likely, you’ll find the bomb drops that you don’t cause do give you some time to react or might happen in an area you can’t reach thanks to the existing craters. It doesn’t feel targeted, but its random nature can sometimes go awry, and in a game where there aren’t enough other strong threats, it becomes the most memorable danger you’ll likely see. The bombs beneath the balloons swing back and forth in a way that makes them often a bit too easy to target, it still requiring a bit of skill and a good eye at least, but it’s also not going to evolve in anyway besides that brief speed-up as the round is wrapping up. Even if you slip up, the game gives you a chance to prevent the falling bomb from causing trouble, which does feel like a nice bit of control over your situation when having ground break can sometimes essentially make it so you’re just waiting for the inevitable bomb you can do nothing about. If the bombs only damaged the amount of space they look like they should impact the game might better avoid the deaths that feel unfair, but what Balloon Bomber really feels like it needs is more danger and leniency in equal measure. A way to repair the ground besides dying could couple well with a more hectic game space, but instead you’re just shooting down lower and lower rows of targets while sometimes having to shrug and accept you can’t do anything about certain bombs. It’s not quite Missile Command which is a deliberately futile game about protecting ground targets, but even that gives you more aiming control so you can think more about your shots for a more engaging experience.

 

Balloon Bomber doesn’t often seem to be acknowledged by its creators at Taito, rarely appearing in retro compilations and the like, and few fans seem to exist for it, making it hard to verify how the game is even meant to look. It does, ultimately, feel like a weak attempt to rearrange some of the ideas that work in Space Invaders, but parts that were changed ended up not feeling congruous. The level of danger is slightly under your control if you land your shots right but also completely random at other times, a formula for some inevitable frustration since playing right can still lead to bad luck keeping you from getting the high score. It’s perhaps not too odd Balloon Bomber is hardly even treated as a footnote in arcade history, but it is an interesting window into what a company might try after hitting it big with a breakthrough hit like Space Invaders.