Balloon Kid

In 1-player mode, the gameplay is an arrangement of the Balloon Trip mode of Balloon Fight, where the screen automatically scrolls toward the left, while the player controls Alice who uses two balloons to float into the air with. To make her float in the air, the player must press (and sometimes hold) the A button to make her wave her arms to hover upward. Alice also has the ability to remove her balloons and walk on the ground, as well as jumping. If both of her balloons are popped or removed, and if she lands safely, she can inflate two new balloons and fly again.

The object of this mode is to travel from the beginning to the end while collecting balloons left by Alice's brother, Jim, along the way. The player must also prevent Alice from bumping into enemies that are attempting to pop her balloons, push her or kill her altogether. Some enemies, such as Balloon Birds, came from Balloon Fight. The giant fish that eats anyone who flies too close to the water also came from Balloon Fight.

Balloon Kid takes place in a small part of an unnamed, Earth-like world. The only city in this part of the world is a town known as Pencilvania, a little town with pencil-shaped skyscrapers. Other places in this part of the world are these unnamed locations in order of appearance: a forest, an ocean with a giant whale, an icy mountain, and an industrial building. The first place a player starts from is a small house in a rural part of Pencilvania.

There lived a brother and sister who loved to play with balloons. Alice and her younger brother, Jim, would spend endless days filling the skies with their balloons.

Balloon Kid was designed by Yoshio Sakamoto and developed by Nintendo in co-operation with the external company Pax Softnica. It was first published in North America in February, and finally in Europe on September 28. As such, it is one of the few first-party Nintendo games that were not published in Japan, until Nintendo licensed it to Sanrio's subsidiary Character Soft for reprogramming and publishing it to the Family Computer as Hello Kitty World in Japan on March 27, 1992, while Balloon Kid was remade for Game Boy Color and released in Japan on July 31, 2000. According to Hitoshi Yamagami, director of Balloon Fight GB, the Game Boy Color version was developed due to demand for a Balloon Fight sequel and that the success of Game Boy Gallery made them consider making an updated version of Balloon Kid for the Japanese market. Both Balloon Kid and Balloon Fight GB were later re-released in their original regions as part of the Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console lineup, but "VS Mode" became incompatible.

IGN editor Lucas M. Thomas called the game "a solid little adventure game" that stood out to him because of its improvements over the gameplay of the original Balloon Trip mode of Balloon Fight. Although he found it to be "not mind-blowing, but it is fun and adds a bit of tension to things", he thought that Balloon Kid is "a nice little lost sequel from yesteryear that is pleasant to play through again for just three bucks". Mean Machines rated the game 51%, describing it as "full of promise", then adding that the repetitive gameplay and low difficulty caused the game to become boring.

They added that while the premise was interesting, they couldn't "help thinking that this is a mediocre game". Author Jeff Rovin in the book How to Win at Game Boy Games noted the gameplay as "novel" if repetitive after the second stage of the game, adding that regardless the game was entertaining for all ages, and "a worthy addition to the Game Boy library", grading the game B.