Nintendo is padding out the Switch Online Game Boy app again, this time with two early‑90s curios that are tailor‑made for commute sessions. Balloon Kid and Yoshi are both live now for all NSO subscribers. While a pretty small drop in the grand scheme of the service, both games are bangers with more going on under the hood than their cutesy box art suggests.
Balloon Kid is the 1990 Game Boy follow‑up to Balloon Fight, reimagining that arcade flap‑and‑float movement as a side‑scrolling platformer with an actual story. You play as Alice, chasing after your kid brother Jim after his balloons send him drifting across a series of increasingly hostile landscapes, collecting stray balloons and trying not to pop your own in the process.
The twist is that your “jump” is really just a lift: Alice is constantly fighting gravity, managing her attached balloons, and deciding when to cut them loose for precision platforming. Stages mix horizontal autoscrolling, vertical climbs, and hidden bonus areas, so it ends up feeling like a missing link between arcade score chasers and the more forgiving platformers that would come later on the system.
Yoshi, released in 1991, is billed as the green dinosaur’s first solo outing, but it plays like a puzzle spin‑off rather than a character platformer. Mario stands at the bottom of four columns, swapping them left and right as Goombas, Bloopers, and other Mario enemies tumble down in Tetris‑style stacks.
Your job is to line up matching enemies so they vanish, while also juggling the two halves of Yoshi eggs: catch a bottom shell, then try to land a matching top shell on the same stack to hatch a Yoshi for big points. It starts slow but ramps up as the falling speed increases, turning into a surprisingly tense little score attack.
Nintendo dropping these now also doubles as soft marketing for the upcoming Switch 2 Yoshi game, putting his earliest headliner back in circulation just as the new one heats up.
Source: Nintendo YouTube
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