Portugues
Balloon Master
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About the game
Balloon Master is a flying game with one idea: the world scrolls past at its own pace, and all you decide is how high you are. Keep the balloon in the gap between whatever sticks up from below and whatever hangs from above. The burner lifts you; when you let go, you sink. It is a bit like a flapping-bird game, only slower and calmer.
There are six worlds, each with its own look, music and dangers. You start over the rooftops of London and its towers and storm clouds. Then come a pirate cove where ships and a fort fire cannonballs along arcs (the smoke gives you a warning) and a kraken slaps the water, a long thunderstorm without fuel pickups where a huge lizard head rises out of the clouds, a cave full of stalactites, bats and erupting lava, the low gravity of the Moon with its UFOs, and finally a dense city skyline with blimps, UFOs and two giant monsters. The monsters are never fought. They are just very big obstacles.
The burner burns fuel, so the tank matters. Fuel barrels stand on the ground, and you fish for them by lowering a rope with a hook for up to three seconds. Hook one and the tank is refilled; fuel left at the finish line turns into bonus points. You have three lives, and each crash sends you back to the last checkpoint, at one third and two thirds of the level, with a full tank. A wind gauge shows how fast the world is moving, and the wind changes by itself every few seconds. The levels are fixed and not random, and the authors say they checked that every gap can be flown through.
Playing it here
This is a homebrew game made for the Master System: a new game by an independent group, not a commercial release. It runs here in Gearsystem, a Master System emulator compiled to WebAssembly. Click Play, then press Z at the title screen. If you leave the title screen alone for a few seconds, the game flies a level by itself as a demonstration.
F2 saves the full state of the emulator in this browser and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too.
Controls
| Key | Master System button | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Z or Up arrow | Button 1 | burner (the balloon rises); also starts and continues the game |
| X | Button 2 | lower the rope and hook (up to three seconds, then it is pulled in) |
| F2 / F4 | — | save / load the emulator state |
A few things worth knowing
Tap, do not hold. Short bursts keep the balloon steady; holding the burner down burns fuel and sends you into the ceiling.
Watch the wind gauge. The small "W" bar under your lives shows the current speed of the world, and "WIND UP" or "WIND DOWN" flashes when it changes.
Read the warning signs. Cannonballs, boulders and fire come in arcs, and smoke or sparks always show up first, so every shot can be dodged.
Use the countdown. After Game Over there is a continue countdown from 9; press Z before it runs out to try the level again with three lives.
Credits and licence
Balloon Master is a project of RCD (Retro Computer Dresden e.V.) and contributors, released in October 2026. It is free software under the MIT licence, and the project states that all of its graphics, music and sounds were made for it. It was built with SDCC and the devkitSMS library by sverx (public domain, with the SDCC exception for the start-up code). The licence texts are linked from this page, and the source code is in the authors' repository on GitHub.