I don't know about actually spending points on the stuff.. maybe you just get to choose one of the power ups every n points. And you can accumulate that number. Say it is every 50,000 points, then once you hit 100,000 you could use any power up you wanted two times (not necessarily the same one). Otherwise what would be the point of ever using them? You finally get that score and it drops dramatically because you bought a power up... kinda makes the score and all the work you put into it pointless (no pun intended). Just a thought... but it was a fun few minutes game!

Cheers
-Scott

My thoughts:
-interface and controls are unintuitive
-Goal/end game condition was not obvious
-Able to get an effectively infinite number of points easily once you get to the pin option (just let ~4 balloons fill up, and pop all others that show up). Maybe you should increase the rate of creation of balloons as game goes on?

Just a quick thought that would improve the graphics quality by a ton, turn on antialiasing, it would help if you are drawing the balloons using the drawOval function in java.awt.Graphics. Do the following to turn on antialiasing in your paint method.

Graphics2D g2d = (Graphics2D)g;
g2d.setRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_ANTIALIASING, RenderingHints.VALUE_ANTIALIAS_ON);

Then whenever you use the "g2d" object to draw primitives it performs antialiasing operations to give you smooth appearing primitives.

Other than that, I'm still playing around with it but it seems like an interesting concept so far.

Yowza! Thanks for the tip!