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Very fun game. My son digs it too. And the Balloon Fight level on Smash Bros. on the Switch is my daughter’s favorite.

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That Balloon Fight level on Smash is pretty great, I agree.

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Solid game, and one that I owned from close to the beginning -- surprised how harsh your Questicle review was. I think it may be the first truly good 2-player NES game (I love Baseball but am reluctant to call it "truly good"). Even if it faded some compared to later, better 2-player games, I recall friends and I occasionally popping it in until the end of the NES lifespan.

Without that second player, the standard 1-player mode is fairly blah. But ah, Balloon Trip. I introduced a friend to Balloon Trip around 2015 and he became briefly obsessed with it (he was looking for difficult, classic arcade-style challenges). So I know that it's not just nostalgia. I could imagine Balloon Trip as an arcade game that released in the early 80s and that was remembered as a classic to this day, but buried as mode #3 within a lesser-known early NES title, it's still kind of a hidden gem. It's one of those things that I can just mindlessly jump into whenever I have a few minutes on my Switch and end up getting surprisingly engaged. I only wish that the size of the hitboxes were more obvious.

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Baseball is truly so bad it’s incredible.

I love Balloon Fight and it is objectively the better of the two games, but I’ve had so many hilarious (dare I say, majestic) times playing 2 player Baseball.

Not that 2P Balloon Fight is any slouch, and you’ll certainly have more people willing to play Balloon Fight with you over Baseball.

Balloon Trip is eternal. If Nintendo chose to expand the experience a little bit, it would make for an amazing mobile game.

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