Fart Attack 2

The gas is back, and this time it has brought friends. Ten levels, ten Big Stinkers, and an ending: beat the tenth and the air is clear at last.

Everything you knew from the first game still works. Beans fill your fart meter, fizzy pop fills your burp meter, farts fire backwards and push you forwards, and burps fire forwards and knock things out of the air. What’s changed is everything around it. Fart Attack was a 1984 Spectrum game. Fart Attack 2 is what the same team might have made four years later, on a better machine.

THE TEN BIG STINKERS

Each level ends with a boss, and each one needs a different approach.

1. King Snotty (The High Street) - the giant nose from the first game, slower and kinder this time. He stomps about, sneezes bogeys, and jumps to send shockwaves along the ground.
2. Lady Lavender (The Perfume Counter) - an air freshener, so farts bounce off her. Jump and burp. More fizzy pop drops during her fight.
3. Sir Sproutalot (The Allotment) - bounces about and drops baby sprouts when he’s hit.
4. Gobby Gus (The Bus Stop) - a big head with a bigger mouth. He spits in threes along the ground at head height, and now and then he lobs one high.
5. Lord Phlegm (The Waiting Room) - floats overhead and coughs up globs of phlegm. They don’t hurt, but where they land they leave a sticky puddle. Walk through one and you wade, and you can barely jump.
6. Captain Capsaicin (The Curry House) - a chilli with a temper. He hops at you, and when he lands he breathes fire along the floor. Jump the flames, because burps can’t put them out.
7. Heartburn Harry (The Midnight Feast) - a heart on fire. He hangs over you, and then the floor glows where columns of flame are about to burst up out of it. Move when you see the glow.
8. Queen Reflux (The Morning After) - a stomach in a crown. She fountains acid up into the air, and every so often it rains acid across the whole screen. Burps clear the drops.
9. Colonel Cork (The Bathroom Queue) - bunged up, and nothing gets through. Burps just bounce off him, so it’s farts only, and more beans drop to help. He strains, shakes, and then fires corks.
10. The Runs (The Last Dash) - the final boss, bouncing all over the screen and spattering everything it lands near. Get it below half health and it speeds up, and its landings start sending out shockwaves.

NEW NUISANCES

As the levels go on, new enemies join the ones from the first game. Gobs of spit float across the middle of the screen from level four. Hopping chillies bounce in high from level six. From level eight, acid bubbles rise up out of the ground, wherever they like.

TIPS

• Know what can be burped. A burp knocks bogeys, spit, phlegm globs, acid, corks and spatter out of the air. It does nothing to shockwaves, flames on the floor, fire columns or phlegm puddles. Those you have to jump or walk away from.
• Watch the floor in Harry’s fight. The glow comes before the fire. Three columns go up at once: one where you’re standing and one either side.
• Save beans for the Colonel. He’s the only boss that ignores burps, and he has more health than anyone except The Runs.
• Fart to get over things. A fart in mid-air lifts you higher. It’s the way over a boss walking straight at you.
• Chain your kills. A combo multiplies every kill that comes soon after the last one, and a fart cloud that catches three things at once is worth far more than three separate shots.
• Lives carry a bonus. Beating a boss gives you an extra life, up to five, and every life you have left when you beat The Runs is worth 5,000 points.

BEHIND THE GAME

Fart Attack 2 runs on the first game’s engine, moved on to the late 1980s, the era of the Spectrum 128 and the Amstrad CPC.

The sound is the biggest change. The first game played its music on the Spectrum’s beeper: one square wave, one note at a time. The sequel’s music is written for three channels, the way the AY sound chip in those later machines did it. There’s a lead line with vibrato and a volume envelope, a bass line, and drums made from shaped noise. The boss fights have a tune of their own, in a minor key. The sound effects decay rather than cutting off, and there are new farts and burps among the old ones.

The graphics move on too. The palette keeps the Spectrum’s fifteen colours and adds a row of in-between shades, such as skin, brown, orange, pink and greys, with none of the Spectrum’s colour clash. Every sprite is outlined in black and shaded automatically, darker along its lower right edge and lighter at its upper left, and everything casts a shadow on the ground. Each level has its own scenery instead of the first game’s starfield. The skies are drawn with ordered dithering, a fixed pattern of dots that blends two colours into a gradient, as games did before machines could show gradients. There’s rain at the bus stop, stars at the midnight feast, and lightning on the last level.

As with everything on this site, none of it is recorded or loaded from an image. Every sprite, scene and sound is drawn or synthesised by the game as it runs.