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So, after my first idiotic binge, I've been playing I Wanna Be The Guy a little more judiciously, and as you might expect for something I heard about months after it first appeared, it's actually a pretty fun game, at least if you were ever in the habit of designing game screens and levels, or programming your own games, and got engrossed in figuring out just how close to impossible you could make it to complete a level.
I well remember, for example, knocking out one of those Lunar lander games. It was just a matter of drawing up a sprite for the lander, and then laying out a play field using ordinary Commodore 64 graphic characters, no alternative character set required. A few sound effects, some controls, collision detection, and... d′ = d + vt + ½at², v′ = v + at! I'm a genius!
aminotluni took an interest in this and went on to elaborate it, making up levels with terrain that grew craggier and craggier, ending with a screen where the lander sprite was practically flying through a tunnel, never more than a character cell or two away from doom, running out of fuel just as it touched down. Since he'd been play-testing the levels all along, that final insane level was merely hard enough to be interesting, but to anyone else it just looked impossible.
Which is not to say that I Wanna Be The Guy isn't intentionally evil, but it's deterministic evil, not random. Sometimes you do end up banging your head against a wall (metaphorically — when I get annoyed at this game I just do something else for a while) but most of the time you're honing your timing and noting down marks and aim points to get to the next step that's tantalizingly within reach. And sometimes turns out to be a trap, but I did say that it was evil.
I guess, taxonomically, it's a skill-and-puzzle game, since once you have the moves down, you can pretty much play it through by rote. I would be rather interested in seeing a time-space graph of the inputs for a complete speed run, just to see how close the margins are.