Balloon Fight (NES)

Balloon Fight
Developer: Nintendo R&D1 Publisher: Nintendo Platforms: NES, Arcade (PlayChoice-10) Released in JP: January 22, 1985 Released in US: June 1986 Released in EU: March 12, 1987 This game has unused graphics. This game has unused sounds. This game has regional differences. This game has a bugs page This game has a Data Crystal page

Balloon Fight is a fairly early NES title, notably worked on by Satoru Iwata.

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Bugs

Unused Graphics

Since the graphics were directly copied from Vs. Balloon Fight, some leftover graphics exist.

In Vs. Balloon Fight, the last balloon that would float out of the pipes would carry a small card with the word "END" printed onto it. It also had an animation for turning when it came out of the pipe. The graphics remain, but it is not used anywhere in the game.

The arcade version also had large white clouds that appeared in the background of each level. They only served as decoration, and unlike the gray clouds they will never shoot out lightning. The tiles appear in the same place as they were in the graphics table of Vs. Balloon Fight, but they have some minor differences aesthetically. What is much more interesting about this cloud is that the exact same graphics appear in many early screenshots of Vs. Balloon Fight. This likely means that the graphics were copied over from Vs. Balloon Fight at some point before the cloud was redrawn, although probably some time after the screenshots were taken, since some other graphics from the screenshots (such as a strange rocket-like object) are not present in either final version.

The tile used to create the ceiling at the top of every stage in the arcade version is present, but is not used in the NES version. This was used in the arcade version because the level scrolled vertically, though it has no use in this version because the screen doesn't scroll, and it would only limit the level height even further.

Spread throughout the graphics table are a large number of crossed-out tiles. It should be noted that the placement of these tiles is only in place of graphics from Vs. Balloon Fight that would be unused anyway, such as the graphics for the arrow which would fly onscreen if you stayed on a level too long, the ground tiles for the mid-stage scoreboard, and the extra IUP- and IIUP tiles that were later shortened to just I- and II-, due to the fact that there is no longer any way to gain an extra life.

Within the font there are also unused characters, including a comma, a period and comma combined into one tile, a question mark, an asterisk (used in some games for the game mode selection icon), and an underscore. These might have simply been left in by the developers in case they needed them, or possibly because the font was copied over from another game.

Unused Audio

An unknown sound effect.

Regional Differences

PAL Conversion

Most aspects of Balloon Fight were completely unchanged for the PAL release. Music runs sluggishly and at the wrong pitch and physics are slower simply because no attempt was made to change these things. However, they did update two values in the NMI handling code to adjust the timing of the scrolling shear effect for the Balloon Trip mode HUD. NTSC versions wait for 4,845 CPU cycles, and the PAL version waits for 9,071 CPU cycles. Coincidentally, a minor visual glitch on this seam that appears on the NTSC version does not appear in the PAL version. Despite the PAL version waiting for longer, it still ends up placing the seam earlier in the frame and it is fully obscured by the solid black background.

Japan Bugfixes

To do: Was the US version actually built before the JP version, like the below text seems to suggest? It was released after the JP version.

The Japanese version of the game fixes the "Rank 47 Glitch" by moving several sound-related variables to a normally empty portion of memory, instead of having them overlap with the invisible Balloon Trip leaderboard. This also fixes an overlap which meant that the game treats every reset as "cold." This allows high scores to be kept between resets in the Japanese version.