While the App Store may be entirely overrun by terrible games and apps focused around varied levels of toilet humor, there are some definite diamonds in the rough if you’re willing to search for them. Bad Air Day [99¢ / Lite] is one such instance of a game centralized around managing farts, which you would naturally just assume to be terrible that actually turned out to be a surprising amount of fun. The basic premise amounts to you taking the roll of a bellboy at a tall hotel who just got finished chowing down at some kind of all you can eat taco buffet. Well, now you’ve got a case of the furious farts, but your life depends on the inhabitants of your hotel not getting a whiff of them.
As you ride the elevator, your stomach will gurgle, and you’ll emit a giant green puff of gas which must be managed. At its most simple, this just amounts to swiping on the screen to waft the fart in a particular direction. You can either blow it around until it dissipates on its own or direct it up to one of the exhaust fans at the top of the elevator to get sucked out. These vents randomly open and close, which often force you to get creative with managing your farts, particularly with a full elevator.
On each floor, hotel clientele get on and off. There are a wide array of elevator passengers from little old ladies who just stand there to clowns bouncing on pogo sticks. Each person seems to have a different fart tolerance as well, so while you might be able to accidentally squeeze one by a briefcase carrying businessman, an angry dog might not be so tolerant. When a part of the gas cloud approaches someone’s nose, a red circle fills up in small segments. If it fills all the way, that person turns in to a skeleton and you lose a life. Also, after each floor, passengers get off the elevator and you score higher based on how little of your farts they smelled.
While all this is happening a, for the lack of a better term, fart fairy shows up who awards bonus points if you keep them enveloped in your stinky green cloud. It all gets incredibly hectic, and it won’t take long before you’re dealing with an entire elevator full of people, multiple farts, and a greedy fart fairy anxious to get a sniff. All of this is set to perfectly suited fart-centric music as well.
Bad Air Day has everything a good iPhone game should have. It’s universal from the start, comes packed with Game Center for achievements and online scoring, and has a gesture-based control system that works fantastic. The art style is cute, the music couldn’t be better, and the game is built on a funny (yet entirely cliche) premise. Don’t let the fart app stigma scare you away from giving Bad Air Day a try, especially if you’re the kind of person who can appreciate the silly side of the App Store.
