99 NAMCO BALLOONS GO BY
99 Namco balloons floating in the summer sky.
Panic bells, it's "Red Alert", there's something here from somewhere else
The war machine springs to life, opens up one eager eye focusing it on the sky
The 99 Namco balloons go by.
The Arcade Archives library is full of surprises. While most of the times are vintage classics and obscure, yet good games, there's also obscure games that it was better to leave them as is, which means "Forgotten" like Pac & Pal and Dig Dug II, and this time we have another obscure and not so successful title: King & Balloon.
The premise of the game is simple: You have to take down the balloons which will try to capture the king. To do that you're given a cannon carried by two Crossbowmen with the same fire rate as the Galaxip from Galaxian: 1 player bullet on the screen. Back then, firing rate remained as basic as that. Balloons appear in a group of 42 of them, 4 less than the enemies in Galaxian, leaving the high score value enemies on the very top, and the lesser ones on the bottom line. Throughout the game, you'll see three balloons merging into a larger one. This effect lasts as they descend because when it hits the ground it will split into three balloons. But you can destroy the big balloon by shooting it thrice. Each bullet will shrink the balloon as it lose one of the components that merged with it, awarding you bonus points for that. The "death mechanics" were changed from what we've learned on Galaxian (and any other shmup you've played). Getting hit by enemy fire or colliding with a balloon will destroy your cannon, but unlike Galaxian, it won't deduce your death from the life stock. On this game, your lives are spare Kings, which you can lose if a balloon captures him and goes away before you can take it down. To put it simple, you can die as much as you want as long as the King is safe on the ground. Your enemies move in a similar way to the Galaxians as they dive towards you, but rather than buzzing around, they make this go down, then a soft ascension and resume dropping before finally touching the ground. When a Balloon picks the King and there's many of them, the remaining ones will regroup to the formation and when you take the one with the King, they will remain as sitting ducks until the King lands safe-and-sound and then they will resume their attacks. The duration of this effect depends on how high was the King when the balloon was destroyed, so it requires some mastery of the game and having enough time and cleared space to perform a very high rescue in order to take as many defenseless balloons as possible.
Score value from left to right
Line 1: Merged Balloon Score Values.
Lines 2 to 5: Stationary > Diving > King in Tow
Namco re-took the scoring format of Galaxian and updated it by adding the extra values of a higher score when a balloon has captured your King and when they're merged into a larger balloon. I've already told you that 3 balloons can merge into a large one and take three hits before going down, but giving you a larger bonus right? Well, this concept is exploited quite well by using different colored balloons.
Type 1: Red thick stripes, thin white stripes with White basket. This one carries the highest score value of the group. Grants you 500 for the first hit, 1,000 points for the second, and 1,500 for the third.
Type 2: Orange thick stripes, thin yellow stripes with Yellow basket. Score Value: 400->600->1,000
Type 3: Yellow thick stripes, thin orange stripes with Orange basket. Score Value: 300->500->700
Type 4: White thick stripes, thin red stripes with Red basket. Score Value: 200->300->500, carries the lowest value of the game.
Graphically, it looks pretty weak for a Namco game, especially if we compare it with their previous work Galaxian. While we can see how the Crossbowmen walk as they carry the cannon, it is hard to tell what's the King's supposed to be as it looks like a fat frog with a crown. The balloon sprites look very simplistic and almost Atari 2600-like while the large balloons are the ones who take the details, even for a basic level they're recognizable as balloons. The game makes a turn on the sci-fi premise of the game as it ditches Galaxian's Sci-Fi scenario for a Medieval one involving castles, the Crossbowmen and of course, the King, which was a novelty for the time as it broke the dominant Sci-Fi setting of most games.. The sound department recycles all the sound effects from Galaxian as it reuses the Galaxian hardware, the only difference is that you have a "game start" fanfare which is a bit larger than Galaxian's.
While the graphics are the weakest part of the game, the major innovation of King & Balloon was the inclusion of voiced lines for the King. Since Taito's Stratovox/Speak & Rescue, having "A game that speaks" was the new frontier of gaming back then, and obviously Namco wasn't planning to be left behind, being King & Balloon the company's entry in that concept. Everytime a balloon picks him up he will yell "Help!", saving him will say "Thank you" and when he leaves the screen he will say "Bye Bye!". Curiously, the "Bye Bye!" line sounds weird for a captured King rather than yelling "Nooooo!" or something like that, not to mention the way he says it sounds like if he was happy from being picked up as if he was planning his own abduction in order to escape from the castle or something.
Game Plan's marquee was one of the best parts of the game.
After taking a look to the gameplay and graphics, any gamer would jump to the conclusion that, for a Namco videogame, King & Balloon feels more like a cheap arcade bootleg made by obscure arcade companies looking for quick profits predating the smash hits. Companies such as GL who made the Pac-Man clone Piranha. If it wasn't for the "namco" on the score table, anyone would easily think "This is a bootleg of Galaxian".Seanbaby wrote:It's like when cereal designers rerelease Lucky Charms with a new shape of oat-blobs and name it after the latest cartoon. It doesn't take a third grade degree to spot that Spider-Man cereal is just Chex with some Lucky Charms marshmallows. That's not a cereal about Spider-Man. That's a mess on the floor of the cereal factory. It's tragic.
While most of Namco's first arcade titles were distributed by Midway (Galaxian for example), the distributor of King & Balloon was a quite obscure company since we're talking Game Plan Inc. ("GPI" for short) which also released Tank Battalion. Game Plan changed the pitch of the music. While the japanese Namco release has the game starting fanfare in an A-flat minor tone, the Game Plan version is on G-flat minor. The voice samples of the international release reduced the japanese accent of the King so he now says "Help" rather than "Helpu" (although it sounds more like "Helpo"). Game Plan's release also made a cool marquee artwork with an Iron Man-esque Crossbowman with a cannon ready to take a stand against the incoming balloon swarm.
This obscurity and bootleg-esque look and feel also affected the homeporting of this game, limiting it to the japanese exclusive MSX and years later on the PlayStation as part of Namco Museum Encore, the PSP on Namco Museum Battle Collection, XBOX360's Namco Museum Virtual Arcade and the Nintendo Wii on Namco Museum Megamix, being the PSP version the first overseas console port of the game, followed by the Arcade Archives release in 2023. Like most of Namco's Arcade Archives entries, this one only features the japanese version of the game, but carries trophies that will require you to even use save states to obtain, mostly the 50,000 point gold trophy as the balloons are very aggressive on stage 8, making the game and keeping the king safe much more harder than usual.
KING & CURIOSITIES
- First Namco title with voice samples.
- The Arcade Archives release of King & Balloon is the sixth overall port of the game and fifth Arcade-Perfect port.
- King & Balloon was the first Namco's title distributed by Game Plan.
- Game Plan's promotional flyer wrongly spells balloons as "Ballons" in the line "Ballons which capture kings".
- According to Game Plan, all the audio is in the game's software.
- The "Stationary-Diving" score format would be later re-used in Galaga.
- The King makes a cameo appearance in the Nintendo 3DS port of Super Smash Bros. as part of Pac-Man's "Namco Roulette".
- In Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation the Emmerian military launched a series of (failed) attempts to liberate Gracemeria known as "King & Balloon Operations".
- It is possible that the Golden King statue of Emmeria might be another reference to the yellow King sprite of the game.
- The game also appeared in an episode of the US TV sitcom Growing Pains.
Hope I don't have to deal with B-Tier missions again for a long time.
While having innovations in the concept of having voices in the game, the overall aspects of King & Balloon are step back compared with Galaxian considering how Namco was making better graphics in other games at the point that if I was Namco, I'd rather updated Galaxian or gave the voice stuff to Galaga rather than releasing a B-Tier-esque clone of an arcade smash hit. To put it simple, this was "New amazing features in the wrong game". But the voice feature would be further exploited on a later (and much better) shmup: Bosconian.
Unless you're a fan of Namco or obscure arcade oddities, you might give King & Balloon a try, but for me, this game says "Bye Bye!" just like the King as he goes away.
Looks like Eda was disappointed with this game.