Fart Attack

Beans in, gas out. Blast bogeys, dogs and seagulls with a well-timed trump, and keep an eye on the meters at the bottom of the screen: beans top up your farts, fizzy pop tops up your burps.

Three big stinkers guard the levels. Lady Lavender is an air freshener, so farts bounce straight off her - save your fizz. Grab a gold can for Mega Gas and let rip with both barrels.

HOW IT PLAYS

You have two weapons, and they point in opposite directions. A fart (Z) comes out behind you as a cloud that swells as it drifts, and the recoil shoves you forward. Fire one in mid-air and it lifts you higher, so you can stay airborne for a while by firing farts. A burp (X) fires forward as a fast, tight shot, and it’s the only thing that can knock incoming bogeys, bird droppings and air-freshener spray out of the air.

Each weapon has its own meter of nine. A tin of beans gives you three more farts, and a can of fizzy pop gives you three more burps. Run either meter dry and all you get is a sad little toot. The rare gold can is Mega Gas: for eight seconds both meters stop going down, you fire more than twice as fast, and every cloud is half as big again.

Each level wants a set number of kills: twelve for the first, eighteen for the second, then three more for every level after that. When you reach it, the border flashes red and a siren goes off, and a boss walks on.

THE BOSSES

• King Snotty is a giant nose. He stomps back and forth, sneezes a fan of bogeys at you, and every so often jumps. When he lands he sends a shockwave rolling both ways along the ground, so jump over it.
• Lady Lavender is a floating air freshener. Farts do nothing to her. She drifts across the top of the screen spraying perfume, then dives straight at wherever you’re standing. Jump and burp. More fizzy pop drops during this fight than at any other time.
• Sir Sproutalot is a Brussels sprout that bounces all over the screen and drops baby sprouts when you hit him.

Beat a boss and you get a bonus of a thousand points times the level, both meters filled right up, and an extra life (up to five). Then the next level starts, faster than the last. After all three bosses they come round again, tougher each time.

TIPS

• Chain your kills. Each kill made soon after the last one raises a combo multiplier, so a fart cloud that takes out three things at once is worth far more than three separate shots. Getting hit resets it.
• Fart away from the danger and toward the goal. A fart pushes you forward, so face the way you want to go and fire behind you. It gets you out of trouble and hits whatever is chasing you.
• Save the fizz. Burps are the only thing that clears the air. In the Lady Lavender fight you need every one of them, so get into the habit of using farts for ordinary enemies on the ground.
• Big sprouts split. From level three, a big sprout breaks into two little ones when it dies, and they shoot off in both directions. Stand back from it.
• Air fresheners are fart-proof too. The small ones that turn up from level three shrug off farts and spray you back. Burp them.

BEHIND THE GAME

Fart Attack was the first game on the site, and it sticks closely to the ZX Spectrum: a 256×192 screen, the Spectrum’s fifteen colours (eight, plus brighter versions of seven of them), 8×8-pixel sprites, and a border that flashes in time with the action, the way Spectrum games used to flash theirs when loading. The music is written for the Spectrum’s one-channel beeper. It is a single square wave playing one note at a time, swapping between the tune and a fast arpeggio so quickly that it sounds like chords.

None of the sound is recorded. There are fourteen different farts and six burps, and each one is a recipe: a sawtooth or square wave sliding down in pitch, wobbled by a second, slower oscillator, mixed with white noise and pushed through a filter. Each one is randomised a little every time it plays, so no two are quite alike. Each sound also comes with its own word, from FART! to FRRRAAAAAPPP!, which pops up on screen where it lands.