Cheats & hidden options
Boogerman hides a couple of codes worth knowing, and both work right here in the browser. One drops you onto any stage you want; the other tops your meters back up when a fight has drained them dry. Enter them exactly as shown, since a single wrong direction means starting the sequence over.
Level select
On the title screen, enter this sequence:
LSpaceK
Once it takes, press and to scroll through every stage and start wherever you like. It's the quickest way to practice a boss you keep losing to, or to pick up in a later world without grinding back through the earlier ones.
Refill mucus and belch
This one has a catch: it only works after you've grabbed a spicy pepper and a milk bottle earlier in the stage. With both in hand, press this while playing:
Space
Both meters top straight back up, which is exactly what you want before a boss you can only wear down with booger throws.
How to actually fight
Your first instinct will be to jump on enemies. Fight it. Collision detection here is loose and rarely rules in your favor, so a stomp that looks clean often costs you a hit instead of scoring the kill. The dependable weapons are the ones you fire: boogers from the mucus meter with K, burps and farts from the gas meter with L. Stand to burp, crouch to fart, and let a little trial and error tell you which projectile drops which foe fastest.
The move worth learning first is the charge. Hold L until the gas meter starts flashing, then release: standing gives you a super burp that crosses the whole screen and breaks through certain barriers, crouching gives you a super fart. That matters more than it sounds, because some solid-looking walls have items stashed behind them. Early in Nasal Caverns there's a mouth boxed in by rocks that nothing but a fully charged fart will crack open, with a red pepper waiting on the other side.
Boss strategies
Every world ends in a one-on-one arena, and each boss cycles through a short loop of three to five moves. They feel cheap until you've watched the loop once, then they turn predictable. Boogers beat all five, and the platforms scattered around each arena are there to give you a cleaner throwing angle or somewhere to duck.
Hick Boy, who guards the Flatulent Swamps, is the gentlest of the bunch. He lobs a chicken, fires three eggs, then flies across the arena. Perch on the branches, pelt him with boogers, and hop to the next tree each time he crosses. Fly Boy in Boogerville is nearly as soft: he spits and tries to ram you, so ignore the trampoline, keep your feet on the ground and throw between dodges.
Revolta in The Pits tightens things up. He throws heads, and every time a booger lands he leaps to the far side, so hit him and immediately jump across to meet him again. Deodor Ant is the real wall. He burrows underground to switch sides and sets off earthquakes that drop rocks from the ceiling, so throw a booger, and the instant he dives, tuck under a ledge until the rocks stop, then jump his shots when he resurfaces.
The Boogermeister closes out Pus Palace by bouncing from side to side, scattering boogers across the floor and screaming when he hits the far wall. Throw, read which way he bounces, and leap to the next pillar to stay level as you chip him down. It's attrition more than a puzzle. You can rehearse any of these fights online by using the Level select code above to drop straight onto a boss.
Exploring levels and earning lives
Stages move left to right but climb and branch more than they let on, and the good items tend to sit somewhere awkward. Stand on a toilet and press to get flushed into a sewer bonus room. You don't need these rooms to finish the game, but they're packed with power-ups, so take the detour. Noses do the opposite: press to get sucked up and fired off to another part of the stage. Hold over a trash pile to dig through it, since some are hiding items.
Touching a hut sets a checkpoint, and you'll want those, because Boogerman doesn't take many hits. His cape doubles as a health gauge: red is full, and the first hit drops it to yellow. Take another while it's yellow and he melts away, so treat the quick flashing right after a hit as an invulnerability window and use it to get clear. A fresh cape bumps yellow back up to red, and grabbing one while you're already red leaves it flashing slowly between the two colors, a hidden extra hit point.
For extra lives, hoard plungers and pop pimples by jumping on them; both tally when the stage ends, and grabbing enough plungers in a single level earns a 1-up. Nobody quite agrees on the number, but it's somewhere around thirty, and it resets each level, so every plunger you walk past is one you don't get back.