A more modest addition to Hamster's Arcade Archives range this week, with the gentle, wafting arrival of Taito's highly explosive Balloon Bomber, landing on console platforms tomorrow, October 1.

Released in 1980, Balloon Bomber is among the earliest of Taito's arcade output, as the developer ventured into the burgeoning world of what they're calling "Video. Games." Balloon Bomber tasks the player with halting an antagonistic force approaching from the top of the screen, a genre which was basically the Dark Souls of '75-'83.

https://www.arcadearchives.com/en/title/aca-430/

Manning an anti-aircraft gun, players must shoot a storm of bombs dropped from the undercarriage of some unmentionable air squadron. Fortunately, the bombs are attached to balloons, so the enemy has been good enough to offer their target a sporting chance. Shoot out the bombs and the day is saved. Hit the balloons, however, and the bomb will plummet to earth at a faster rate.

As this was surely the enemy's intended goal, one questions why balloons were attached to begin with.

Balloon Bomber never received a home port, so this formative arcade release is a bit of an outlier when compared to its contemporaries, such as Space Invaders, Pac-Man, and Missile Command. Sadly, there has been no £450 Ballon Bomber watch as of this writing.

Whether that means that it's worth £6 of your hard-earned cash is a conversation between you and your wallet. But for classic arcade completionists, Balloon Bomber launches October 1 on PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch platforms.