Vs. Balloon Fight

Engage the enemies and burst their balloons before losing your own balloons or getting eaten by the giant fish.

The control is basically the same as Joust. A and B are both used to "flap" and, by repeated pressing, lift you into the air. The object is to ram an enemy while your are on a higher level than him. This will pop his balloon, forcing him to resort to his parachute. If he manages to land, he will eventually inflate a new balloon and take to the sky again if enough time passes. If you hit the enemy on the ground or break his parachute, you finish off the enemy. You clear a stage by defeating all the enemies.

You start each life with two balloons. If an enemy hits you from above, you lose one of those balloons (as well as a little flying ability). If you lose both balloons, get hit by lightning, or drop too low to the water where the fish can bite you, you will lose a life. Apart from lightning, enemies, and the fish, bubbles will occasionally rise up. You can pop them for points.

Each level is three screens tall and scrolls as you ascend and descend. Every so often, there is a bonus stage where balloons will rise out of the pipes. Fly into them to pop them and go for a perfect score.

Though the enemies are immune to lightning, they are not immune to the fish. If you can lure an enemy near the water, the fish will try to snap it up. This also holds for those floating down on parachutes.

The Vs. DualSystem can be in one of two different cabinet configurations. The western style is a double wide stand-up cabinet that basically looks like two traditional cabinets side by side but at an angle to prevent peeking. The eastern style is a sit-down model with the screens and player controls on opposing sides. Regardless of the configuration, all player-start buttons are located on the player one side of the machine.

All Vs. games can be converted by swapping the ROMs, daughter boards, or other custom chips on the board. The Vs. DualSystem architecture allows two games, serving two separate monitors, to be played from the same board.

The vs. Dualsystem uses a single board but effectively runs two separate units. There are two Nintendo 2A03 processors on board. The 2A03 is a modified M6502 with a built-in 5-channel PSG. Each CPU runs one of the screens and they communicate between each other when in two-player mode. There are two banks of DIP switches whose roles may vary from game to game. For Vs. Balloon Fight, they simply determine difficulty and number of lives.