The good news: Nintendo of America added the should-have-been-a-classic GameBoy title,
Balloon Kid, to the 3DS eShop earlier today.
The bad news: They added the pea-soup-green version of the game rather than the superior, colorized one that hit Japan's eShop a few weeks ago.
Granted, the colorized update of the game, called
Balloon Fight GB, was a rather limited, Japan-only release--and we all know how Nintendo of America feels about those (I mean, just look at all of the import-only games that have been added to the Wii's Virtual Console service in the last few years)--but that's not much of an excuse when you realize the bulk of
Balloon Fight GB is in English. (The title and map screens are the only ones that feature any Japanese.)
All that said, at least they're giving us access to some version of
this pint-sized platformer, which was produced, in part, by Gunpei Yokoi and Yoshio Sakamoto. (Also, the peerless Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka composed the game's perky soundtrack.)
See also: '
I'll bet you can't guess which game I bought in the place of Xenoblade Chronicles' and '
Speaking of Balloon Kid ...'
6 comments:
Nintendo it's too jealous about theirs game, like every japanese are jealous of theirs products. They will never do things equal all over the world and this is really sad to know...
I don't know about the jealousy part of your comment, Pix3l, but I agree that Nintendo seemingly will never do things the same in every region. Oh, well :(
Hooray! This has rocketed to the top of my downloadable title list.
Great! And it's just $2.99, right? Seems like a great deal to me. Oh, man, I can't wait until I get a 3DS :)
Is the the official Japanese cover art? Because that is some damn sweet art.
Well, kind of, Drew. You see, the original, green-and-black version we got here in the US (and in Europe) wasn't released in Japan. The colorized version was all that got (boo hoo, right?), although they didn't get it until much, much later. (2000, I think?) Also, it wasn't released physically, on a cart -- it was released via Nintendo's 'Nintendo Power' download service, which allowed gamers to buy blank GameBoy and Super Fami carts into various stores and download games onto them. Balloon Fight GB was one of these games, and a larger version of the image I used in this post was that game's digital cover art. Make sense? Anyway, yes, it is pretty damn sweet, isn't it? :)
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