One subgenre of games I’ve only encountered a few times in this generation, and have almost always hated with a passion, has been what I’d call precision tower climbers. With an example being Jump King, the typical design is to make your goal simply getting to the top of a tower, building, or whatever, with you needing to jump or otherwise propel yourself up. Simple, right? 

Well, no, because most typically the power of your jump is based on how long you hold down your button before releasing it. The problem? There’s typically no means other than your internal timing to help you understand what trajectory you’ll move in and with how much force. As if that isn’t frustrating enough, the other layer of the gag is that typically when you fail you won’t just fall back down to where you jumped from, the stages are typically set up in a way that will maximize your punishment for every mistake. I understand there are those who enjoy this, but I don’t count myself among them.

So now on to Fartmania, a game that is admittedly quite juvenile with its use of explosive flatulence as a means for your propulsion, but one that also fits into this mode on a general level… and is far more fair overall. Your goal will be to save your pig friends who’ve been abducted by aliens who have flown off. To do this, you’ll need to move between platforms by pulling off long chains of farts, working to avoid spikes that will stun you and make you fall. In general the setup is quite simple, but that critical difference is that even if this may be pretty challenging it is still designed to be fair overall.

Yes, you’ll need to get to be very good at managing your momentum from side to side, get your timing down for farting just often enough to move just the right amount needed, and learn to be patient. The thing is, even when you fail, in general the distance you fall doesn’t tend to feel unfair. If nothing else, you’ll often have the option to just ignore tough sections entirely, understanding that you won’t get the time bonuses for saving your friends or picking up packets of beans in those spots, but leaving you to make that choice. Once you do finally get to the top you’ll then get posted to the leaderboard, and choose whether to go at it again in the hopes of doing better. While it may still be difficult, aggravating, and quite silly, I still credit it with being the first in this subgenre to feel like it wants you to succeed, and isn’t determined just to be hard in the laziest ways possible.