Have You Played... The Fancy Pants Adventure?
Like Sonic but good
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.
The Fancy Pants Adventure is a 2D platformer with a line-drawing art style and a fun feeling of momentum, but really I remember it for its bouncy acoustic guitar loop.
It's a little bit Sonic, in the way you build momentum when barreling down hills and use that to launch yourself from ramps or run up vertical surfaces. That sensation plus the surprisingly detailed animation on your stick figure character made Fancy Pants, well, fancy - and much better than any other Flash platformer I'd played up until that point. Heck, it's better than any Sonic game I've ever played. I hate Sonic.
That guitar riff, though. It's maybe 12 seconds long and it repeats twice within even that short time. Yet I never grow tired of it. I'm humming it now.
You can still play Fancy Pants Adventure at Miniclip, and there's a larger, Super version coming soon to Steam.