Arcade Archives: King & Balloon (Review)

Back in January, I reviewed King & Balloon, which is my personal favorite Namco shooter. Sorry Galaga and Galaxian fans. Not only was King & Balloon one of the best games to emerge in the wake of Space Invaders, but it was one of THE most underrated games of the Golden Age of Arcades. Well, a couple weeks ago, Hamster gave it a solo release as part of their Arcade Archives franchise. Everything I said about the game in my original review still applies, but Arcade Archives offers a few extra features for the $7.99 price tag. It also allows players to enjoy the game on their Nintendo Switch. Which might be the best feature of all, but I’ll get to that. First, go click that link and read my original review. Especially since I’m going to ignore the gameplay mechanics here and talk about the package.

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Like EVERY Arcade Archives release, there’s two competitive modes: “hi-score” and “caravan.” Caravan runs on a five minute timer that starts as soon as the enemies spawn for the first time. Hi-score just goes on until you die. Both have strict rules that forbid pausing the game. If you do, game over. You don’t get to upload your score, even if you were kicking ass and taking names. I’ve never understood the ordering there. Shouldn’t you take their names down BEFORE you kick their ass? Personally, I’d be a lot less inclined to give a person who just kicked me in the ass my name. I’d want THEIR name. You know.. for the lawsuit for damaging my beautiful, bony ass. Anyway, pause and you have to start over. There’s no gameplay options for these two modes (however, autofire and any adjustments to the screen you make in the standard mode will be applied here) but there’s also no cheating. You can’t say that about the standard mode. See my review of Arcade Archives: Pinball for more details on that, but needless to say, they don’t make note if you used save states or not in the high scores.

Mind you, everything I love about King & Balloon is still here, and the five minute timer in Caravan further adds to the deceptively complex strategy. You’re best served to avoid this type of swarming attack and allow the balloons to Megazord–together. They score A LOT MORE points when they do.

You also get the option to run the game at the “original speed” but I really couldn’t notice a difference. The real reason to buy King & Balloon as part of the Arcade Archives series is if you own a Nintendo Switch and want an authentic Golden Age of Arcades release that works perfect as a portable game. King & Balloon is wonderful for short play sessions. It provides the type of thrilling, white-knuckle gallery shooting that would be jammed-up today with loud visuals and too much downtime, and it’s challenging enough that you’d be lucky to last ten minutes. That makes it ideal for handheld devices, as far as forty-three year old coin-ops go. It’s still beyond ridiculous that only three Namco Museums have ever included it, one of which never came out in America and one of which was the weird à la carte Namco Museum on Xbox back in the day. But, King & Balloon finally has a chance now to be appreciated as its own thing. Sure, I wish the game had more sophisticated scoring. Perhaps one that rewards players for consecutive made shots. But, I still adore this charming little gallery shooter. It’s one gaming tragedy that now has a legit shot a happy ending.

Arcade Archives: King & Balloon is Chick-Approved

King & Balloon was developed by Namco
Published by Hamster
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation Store

$7.99 was full of hot air in the making of this review.