Neither Street Fighter nor Final Fight.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 10/15/20 – 10/18/20
Difficulty: 7/10
My Difficulty: 7/10
My Video: Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight Longplay

Knowing what we know now about video games of the past, if you were to see the name Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight without knowing anything about it, you might get pretty excited.  Street Fighter II and Final Fight are both among the greatest arcade games of their generation, so even under NES limitations, you would be right to expect something great.  Plus, it’s made by Capcom, the same developer for all three!  Well, we didn’t get some glorious NES adaptation of Street Fighter or Final Fight.  What we did get is a futuristic, sci-fi action platformer that ends up one of the more interesting NES titles, for better or worse.

Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight was both developed and published by Capcom.  It first appeared on the Famicom in August 1990 under the slightly different name 2010 Street Fighter.  The game released on the NES just a month later in September 1990.  Of note, this game released after both Street Fighter and Final Fight in arcades, but before Street Fighter II, when the series exploded.  This game also released on 3DS Virtual Console in all regions in 2014 and also on Wii U Virtual Console in Japan and PAL regions in 2014, with an early 2015 release in North America.

In this game, you play the role of Ken, the greatest Street Fighter in the world.  Defeating all the best fighters in the world doesn’t leave Ken satisfied, so he pursues university studies in the field of Cybotics.  Along the way he befriends Troy, and the two of them invent something called cyboplasm.  In proper doses, this makes men very strong, even helping them stay alive long beyond their normal life span.  At the same time, others in society have perfected travel to distant worlds, though Ken has no interest in all that.  Except now he has to, for one day back at the lab, his cyboplasm was stolen and Troy was murdered.  Ken will avenge the death of his partner, having to defeat many super creatures along the way that have taken too much cyboplasm, which causes them to lose their minds.  This journey takes you across five planets with multiple levels each.  Clear all the levels to see the ending and beat this game.

This is a side-scrolling platformer game with rather complex movement and controls.  Ken can perform standard platformer movements.  Use the D-pad to walk around, jump with A, and attack with B.  Ken can cling to walls by moving into them while holding A, then he can press Up or Down to climb the walls.  Press away from the wall and jump to jump away.  He can jump down through certain floors by holding Down and pressing A.  When falling through a floor, if you hold Up you can grab onto the underside of the floor.  Continue to hold Up to pull yourself back up onto the ledge, or you may let go of the D-pad and just hang there.  Later you may press A to jump down from the hanging position.  Ken can perform all sorts of punches and kicks with the B button that throw out some sort of energy for a short distance.  Press B rapidly to do a flurry of quick punches, either facing left or right, or while holding Up.  If you hold either Left or Right, you can mash the B button to perform some longer distance attacks.  These always come in a combo, some of them curve downward or upward slightly.  Eventually they turn into kicks that attack at an upward diagonal before cycling back around to the punches again.  If you hold Down and mash B, you’ll perform the diagonal kick attacks first, then start throwing punches in the same cycle as above.  You definitely want to play around with it to get the feel for how it works and how the attacks move.  One more thing.  If you do a neutral jump straight up, then hold the opposite direction you’re facing, you’ll backflip.  When you are upside down in the backflip, you can attack to fire straight down, which is the only way to do so.

Each planet has multiple stages that are framed as one-on-one combat matches.  You’ll get a screen that say “Target vs. Ken” with an image of the enemy you need to take out in this stage.  The levels themselves can take many different forms.  There are single screen levels, scrolling levels, and autoscrolling levels.  Some areas are simply boss fights, some involve infinitely spawning enemies, and others are stages with a boss fight at the end.  Sometimes the target is just one enemy you need to defeat, and sometimes you have to defeat multiple target enemies to proceed.  The goal of each stage is to open up a portal to the next one.  Defeating the target produces some glowing energy that you touch to collect.  This fills up the Open bar at the bottom of the screen, and when it is completely filled up, the portal to the next level appears.  There is a normal stage timer during regular play that sets itself to 10 seconds whenever the portal is open, so you must move quickly to find the portal and enter in time to proceed.

There are items you can collect to help you power up.  Many stages have rocks that you can destroy, some of them hide powerups.  The most common one looks like a circle with a C in the middle.  This increases your power level half a segment.  Each segment of the power bar makes your attacks go a longer distance, but I’m not sure if attacks are more powerful or not.  I never got to full power at any time, but apparently your stronger shots look like spinning disks at full power.  There are some rare powerups that only appear in certain stages.   One is an orb that attaches to your back and deals damage to enemies that touch it.  Another gives you some sort of slash kick.  When you perform a backflip, your feet do damage to enemies on contact.  There are also some items that enemies drop.  Glowing orbs restore half a bar of health, and large glowing orbs restore two bars of health.  You can also get 1ups but they are uncommon.

Structurally, each planet has some sort of theme.  Planet 1 is mostly cityscapes, Planet 2 is jungle-like with lots of vines, Planet 3 is the desert planet, Planet 4 is the water planet, and Planet 5 is pretty much a space station.  Not all levels in each planet strictly follow the theme, but for the most part they make sense.  In between each planet are cutscenes that advance the story, showing where Ken is off to next, that sort of thing.

This is a pretty challenging game for a variety of reasons.  Most enemies and traps take one bar of damage out of the starting five.  Your health carries over from stage to stage, so you’ll often lose lives just from having low health to start a new area.  Health pickups from enemies seem to happen every four kills, which doesn’t help any in pure one-on-one fights.  When you die, you lose your entire power bar.  This is the main reason why I never was able to see what full power was like.  There are no mid-stage checkpoints in the game, and that includes the gauntlet in the final level.  The only aspects in your favor are that you get a health refill at the start of each planet, sub areas stay cleared when you move through the portals, and you get infinite continues.  

This was my first time clearing this game, though I have played it before.  This was a rental way back in the day, and it is the only time I remember playing it up to now.  I seem to remember the final stage, though I’m probably getting my memories crossed up as that would be quite a feat for me as a rental.  I saw the AVGN review of the game a few years back, that’s probably the most of what I remember about this game.  I would consider this game a tad obscure, but it is relatively common from a collector perspective.  This was a $5-$10 game for quite a long time, and I see now it has crept up to around $15 for a loose cart.

This is the type of game that I can sit and grind out a victory in a few hours, depending on length and difficulty.  Street Fighter 2010 took me close to four hours to beat, over two nights.  The first night I worked on it for a couple of hours and got to the final planet before turning it off for the night.  I beat the game the next stream.  It took me about an hour to reach the final stage, then a full hour just to finish off the game.  That last area is no joke.  You have to clear three past bosses, one of those a double fight, and then the final boss, all on one life.  This is the only level where the timer is a major issue as well.  Thankfully I managed it.  As of this writing, it has been over 9 months since I beat the game for this blog.  I ended up replaying the game last week just to refresh myself, and I beat the game in about an hour and a half this time.  I’m honestly surprised I didn’t lose much skill on this.  It’s pretty hard to go back and beat old games that I haven’t touched in some time.  Maybe now I’ll be serious about getting caught up on these writings!

Street Fighter 2010 is a difficult, complex action game that’s not for everyone, but it is a technical showpiece for the console for sure.  The graphics in this game are really good looking.  There’s lots of detail in the backgrounds and enemy sprites, and good animations too.  There’s plenty of variety here as well.  Some levels scroll fluidly in all directions, and there is some split scrolling in some of the boss fights that can be tricky to pull off well on the console.  One autoscroller level drifts in an unorthodox pattern, similar to the airships in Super Mario Bros. 3.  The music is top notch, certainly with some of Capcom’s best composers hard at work.  The controls, while they let you accomplish a lot of moves, can get in the way of the action sometimes.  Clinging to walls, hanging off ledges, and swinging around pillars takes a fine touch, while those same obstacles can get in the way of you trying to avoid enemy attacks.  This is a game that is just as much about mastery of the player character as mastery of the levels and boss designs.  This game is often overlooked as far as Capcom games go, and I think in part that is because it is not as accessible as other games of this style.  And let’s be honest, naming it Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight was not the best choice.  This game is derided just off the name, but there’s a quality experience here if you can wrap your head around it.

Float up, up, and away in this exciting balloon busting Black Box game!

To Beat: Pass Phase 12 in the main game and get Rank 1 in Balloon Trip
To Complete: Roll the score (1,000,000 points) in the main game and get Rank 1 in Balloon Trip
My Goal: Complete the game
What I Did: Completed the game with scores of 1,194,750 and 28,260
Played: 3/29/16 – 3/30/16
Difficulty: 3/10
My Difficulty: 2/10

Arcade style games such as Balloon Fight pose some interesting questions around what it means to beat the game. On a game that has no ending, how do you determine when you’ve played enough of the game to consider it done? Similar to my dilemma with Tetris, the answer is not always clean cut but I believe a line can be drawn. In this blog I will outline my thoughts as well as cover a very fun black box NES title.

Balloon Fight was originally developed as the arcade title Vs. Balloon Fight released in 1984. It was developed by Nintendo’s SRD division. Later in January 1985 it was released on the Famicom and that port was developed by HAL Laboratories. Balloon Fight came out in the US in August 1986 and in Europe in 1987. All versions of the game were published by Nintendo.

There was a sequel called Balloon Kid that was released on Game Boy in the US in October 1990 and Europe in January 1991. It is a side scrolling platformer game instead of a single screen arcade style game. It was later released on Famicom in March 1992 rebranded as Hello Kitty World. The game is more or less identical to the Game Boy game but with Hello Kitty and other Sanrio characters in place of the original characters. Japan would later receive Balloon Kid in the form of Balloon Fight GB for the Game Boy Color in 2000.

Balloon Fight is a single-screen platform action game. You control a balloon fighter who takes flight by flapping his arms and using balloons above his head to take flight. The object of the game is to eliminate all the other balloon fighters on the screen by popping their balloons and subsequently knocking them out. The game plays very similar to the arcade classic Joust by Williams Electronics released in 1982. By ramming into the other enemies’ balloons they will float down and you can bop their parachute to remove them from play. If the enemy lands on solid ground you can still ram into them to take them out, but wait too long and they will reinflate their balloons and attack you more aggressively. The enemies can knock out your balloons as well but you are able to take an extra hit. You start with two balloons and the enemy can knock out one of them leaving you with just one. Flying with only one balloon is more difficult because you need to flap longer to gain momentum. One more hit and you will lose the other balloon and go falling to your death.

There are three different versions of the enemy balloon fighter that you can distinguish by the color of the balloons they carry. The pink balloon fighter is the weakest, the green balloon fighter is stronger, and the white balloon fighter is the most difficult one. More points are awarded for defeating the stronger enemies. There are other obstacles to contend with too. Each stage has water at the bottom that contains a big fish. Swim too closely to the water and the fish will pop up and eat you up. This can also play to your advantage with the enemies can be eaten too. When you knock out an enemy a bubble will emerge and float up from the water that you can pop for bonus points. Some of the later levels contain stationary spinning bumpers that will launch one of the fighters away upon contact. There are also clouds in the background that will periodically generate a lightning bolt that launches a spark. These sparks are tiny but deadly to the touch for the player and they bounce off the platforms and the sides of the screen until they hit either the player or the water at the bottom. The sparks act as a “hurry up” mechanic that appear continuously when playing the same level for a little while, and they appear quite early in later stages.

There are 12 unique level layouts in Balloon Fight. Once Level 12 has been completed the game continues on to Level 13 but it loops back to the Level 4 layout. You can keep playing for as long as you can handle and the game will keep looping through Levels 4-12. You start the game with three lives and that is all you get for the entire game. There are no continues and no way to earn extra lives. Getting a high score in this game is a test of endurance and careful control.

After every three stages there is a bonus round. Here there are no enemies and balloons float up out of four background pipes. You pop the balloons for points and if you can pop all 20 balloons in the stage you are rewarded with a large point bonus. The bonus stage layout is the same but there are three different difficulties each with a different color balloon that floats at increasing speeds. If you play for a long time you will see the fastest balloons every round. The order in which the balloons emerge from the pipes is completely random so you will be on your toes trying to pop them all. Another benefit to the bonus stage is that it will set you back to having both balloons if one was lost earlier.

The controls for Balloon Fight are simple but they take time to master. You press A to flap your arms and you can repeatedly press A to fly higher and higher. Alternately, hold B to auto flap. Balloon Fight is very momentum based and each flap will slightly adjust your velocity. Turning around is challenging because each flap also lifts you up as well as nudging you horizontally. Especially when the sparks are bouncing around with multiple enemies on screen it is really important to be in control of your fighter or you won’t last long.

Balloon Fight can be played in two-player simultaneous mode. Work together with a partner to clear the screen of enemies, or you can attack each other if you want. I believe in the bonus room it is safe to attack each other without losing a life. I’m sure it’s a blast to play this way but I’ve never had the chance to play two-player mode.

Finally there is another game mode called Balloon Trip. This is an endless scrolling level scattered with sparks that send you to your doom. You only get one life in this mode. The game scrolls to the left starting with a short pre-defined level layout. Past that the level consists of random sparks that slowly move around. This is purely about surviving the obstacles and lasting as long as you can. You slowly but continuously rack up points just by staying alive, but there are also random balloons to collect for points. Occasionally a bubble will rise out of the water below and popping it freezes the screen for a short time so you can get yourself in good position to survive. The big fish is hiding in the water as well so it’s important to stay high. If you can collect a bunch of balloons in a row without losing any off the screen scroll, then you get a nice point bonus as well as advancing all balloons to the next level of balloon that awards more points. There are three different balloon colors just the same as the bonus round in the main game. There is also a ranking system that compares your score against the top 50 scores so you can see how you stack up. There’s no way to see the top scores and they reset when the game does, but it is there to kind of track your progress when you play.

Balloon Fight is a game that I have always found interest in but took me a long time to find a way to play. My first experience with the game may have been on an emulator back in the 90’s. I know I unlocked it as one of the NES games you can play within Animal Crossing on GameCube and that was one of my most played games there. Later I would buy it on Wii Virtual Console. However I didn’t own an actual cartridge of it even though I had collected many NES games early on. My local store got a copy for $10 and I bought it the first time I saw it. The only other copy I’ve seen was a really beat up, filthy copy for about the same price and I passed on it.

I have played the main game before most recently in 2014 as part of the NA weekly contest. I scored 1,239,250 which was good for 4th place that week. I’ve sunk a bit of time into Balloon Trip but I can’t remember if I have ever gotten Rank #1 in that mode. The score to achieve isn’t all that high so it’s very possible that I’ve met that before as well.

Even though there are only 12 unique levels in the game, I much prefer to keep going until I reach the point of highest difficulty. Unfortunately for Balloon Fight there isn’t any information I could find on how the game ramps up in difficulty. From my experience, it seems that the enemies themselves do not get more aggressive or faster, and the level layouts seem to maintain the same mix of enemies every time. What I did notice is that in later loops, the enemies initially inflate their balloons quicker so that they are airborne sooner. It did seem that I reached a point where that timeframe didn’t go any faster but I can’t be 100% sure. So, in lieu of playing to the unknown point of max difficulty, I decided to aim for maxing out the score. The counter is only six digits and after 999,950 it rolls over back to zero and starts over. I felt a little bit bad about not finishing all the difficulties of Operation Wolf last time so I decided to go a little deeper with Balloon Fight than I would normally.

I was able to max out the score in my 7th attempt over two nights of play. The first night I played three attempts maxing out around 700K. I then tried Balloon Trip and I beat the high score with Rank #1 on my very first attempt. However, I missed my shot at taking the picture so I had to try again. I don’t remember how many more tries I needed but it wasn’t very many. The next night on the main game I nearly rolled the score on my fourth overall attempt but I ended just short at 970K. I had missed a perfect on a couple of the bonus levels and one of those would have bumped my score over the million mark. The next two attempts were not nearly as good but on the seventh and final attempt I surpassed a million points on my last life. I finished with a score of 1,194,750 on Phase 54 and I didn’t miss a single balloon in any of the bonus rounds. Here was when I went back to check my personal best score and I saw that I was just short of surpassing that mark. However, for the purposes of this blog, Balloon Fight is now checked off the list!

I base my difficulty rankings on what it takes to simply beat the game, and in this case it makes sense to say it’s beaten whenever the levels start looping again. Since Balloon Trip is never ending, beating the top score is the most logical landmark. Considering all that, this is a pretty easy game once you get used to the controls. Balloon Trip seems harder than the regular game but since each run can be so short it’s just a matter of time before an attempt is good enough to take top honors. I beat both modes on my first try and I only kept playing to max out the score on the main mode.

I mentioned before that the NES version of Balloon Fight was developed by HAL Laboratories, but it was specifically programmed by the late Satoru Iwata. He was developing Balloon Fight alongside the team creating the arcade version, and when they compared versions they noticed that the NES game controlled better than the arcade game. Mr. Iwata explained to the other team he accomplished this by saving the tenth’s place of the character position instead of rounding it off to the nearest integer. To actually locate the character on screen requires ignoring the decimal places, but by keeping that data in the movement calculations it leads to much smoother looking movement of the characters on screen.

Balloon Fight is a simple but well executed and fun early NES title. I think it is one of the better black box titles as it is fun to pick up and play while providing long play for more experienced players. The control is very well done and the graphics are simple but clear. The only negative graphically I find is that it is tough to distinguish between the pink balloon enemies and the white balloon enemies. The sound is very basic as well since it is limited mostly to the sound effects driven by events in the game play. There is a nice tune in the Balloon Trip mode which I find pretty catchy. This game is enjoyable to play and that’s what really matters.