Sky Patrol [Model IA3409]

Sky Patrol © 1982 Imagic

You start the game with a hot air balloon sitting on a launch pad in the middle of a field. You can launch the balloon by filling it with enough hot air, or land it by letting the air out. The amount of hot air in the balloon is directly controlled by how high the burner flame is, and the burner flame is controlled pushing the joystick up and down. The height of the burner flame is shown as a red bar at the bottom of the screen. The green bar displays the amount of fuel for your burner, which is slowly whittled away as you use your burner. Once the fuel has been completely depleted, your balloon can only hover a few feet off the ground and is completely at the mercy of the wind (so don't let this happen). If you find yourself having fuel issues, you give yourself unlimited fuel by putting the left difficulty switch in the B position. The blue bar doesn't appear to be functional, but is probably a distance or damage gauge. Pushing right and left will alternate the display between the gauges and your score.

Although you can control the altitude of your balloon by filling or letting the air out of your balloon, you have no direct control over the direction in which you move. This is where the wind and those little clouds come in. By moving around to different altitudes you can catch different wind currents and thus somewhat control what direction you're going. The direction and speed of the wind currents varies depending on the altitude (there are 9 cloud / wind levels in all), but you can tell which way the wind is blowing by watching which way the clouds drift. Remember that there is a slight delay between when you add or let air out of your balloon and when you change altitude, so plan accordingly.