Apropos of nothing Flappy Bird floated across my mind today. It struck me odd how little people seem to refer to it now, given how popular it got. I was reading its Wikipedia page; the game was pulling in $50k USD a day and the dev pulled it because he thought it was too addictive. Or possibly because he didn’t feel like he could defend against the claims that he’d ripped off other games and got in over his head. It’s a fascinating story.
But the game itself I never got into. I tried it once on a friend’s phone and quickly had no more interest in playing it. I’m curious to know from people who played it a lot at the time, was it a good game? Does it hold up? Or was it a relatively generic knock-off that got famous because catapulting random ideas into the global consciousness is just a thing the internet does sometimes?
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Is Tic-Tac-Toe a good game? I know people who played it a lot at one time. Does it hold up?
If you had fun playing it, it was a good game.
Fruit Ninja? Doodle Jump? Angry Birds?
Games take a simple concept, possibly copied from elsewhere, possibly a mash up of others, possibly original ideas, and of it’s fun, it’s good.
Now was the hype over Flappy Bird strange and over the top? Probably. But remember fidget spinners? Yo-yos? Sometimes trends/fads happen.
Yoyo were nice
the kid who made it was scared of the attention it was getting
I didn’t love it, but I did get super into and really good at the piano tiles game.
Not to me, but clearly a lot of people liked it.
It’s not a bad game in the same way pong is not a bad game and checkers is not a bad game. They are simple, shallow games. That’s fine. Most people prefer deeper and more complex games most of the time, but sometimes, some people might feel like playing a simple game like flappy bird. That’s fine. There is nothing specifically wrong with it. It is playable. It’s not broken. It’s a perfectly fine game.
That makes sense. I think with more complicated games (or any art) there’s some leeway where you can appreciate some things about the game enough that you endure the parts that don’t tickle your fancy. With games that really focus down on a single element, whether you are interested in the game at all hinges entirely on whether your tastes align with that one thing.
One of the reasons I asked is that, since precision timing games are not my thing, I can’t really tell if Flappy Bird is an exceptional example of the genre, or if it’s more of a Tiger King situation where it’s not that good, but it’s a fun thing that became a fad. Seems like the crowd is leaning closer to the latter.
Yeah it is great!
I think of games like Flappy Bird and Lemmings as grinding.
Back when I used to play MMOs a lot , EverQuest, WoW and Dark Age of Camelot, sometimes it was just so nice to mindlessly grind after work.
It was a relaxing low effort thing to do to get my mind off of things.
It is one of the things I love about God of War 2018. There is a whole realm that is just about grinding the same area over and over again. You didnt have to do the area for the main storyline but it was there is you just wanted to mindlessly grind.
Wouldn’t say that EQ or DAoC were low effort mindless grind. Leveling or the super awesome large scale PvP (damn I miss this) needed tons of work, coordination and effort. I retired at the time the daoc beta went live and I basically lived there 😁
But farming for some stuff sure was low effort chilly grinding.
Anyhow, nice to read anything about daoc at all. It always seemed very niche. Eq had its moment in the sun and wow…is wow.
Omg yeah EQ and DAoC were not low effort at all. EQ was a total commitment.
Just getting a group to slaughter random mobs took time commitments.
… and raiding… HAHAHAH
Such good times.
Both were a total commitment…and yeah such good times indeed. I miss them a bit 😊
It was a classic game concept. My earliest memory was of a helicopter game in the 80s, where the game worked basically the exact same way with worse graphics.
It’s a very 80s game idea, and those games weren’t for everyone, to be sure. But Flappy Bird wasn’t a bad game, just a typical time waster of its decade. With Super Mario graphics.
Nope.
I miss Flappy Bird, I used to play it, believe me or not I hit 1000 points on that shit, I just got hiper fixated on it, it was so fun. Now I can’t run it on recent Android versions.
Seems to be many versions playable online in your phone browser.
https://flappybird.io/ There’s one that seems functional. I never played the original more than once or twice so idk how accurate it is but it seems to match my memory.I know, actually Epic Games bought the rights I think, they remade the game.
But just doesn’t feel the same, the original had something different.
I played the one Epic made, it’s the most accurate so far.
https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/flappy-bird-android-fdb665
I mean personally I would trust the rando who puts it up for free online more than I would trust epic games to make an accurate version, but like I said I don’t have enough of a memory to accurately judge. I also like that the online one doesn’t have ads or purchases.
Is 1000 points the same as 1000 passes? Where you pass through the opening, is that 1 point? Or do they start getting worth more the longer you play?
One point per pass
Points and passes are the same. 1000 points are equivalent to 1000 passes.
I play this version at work sometimes
I never thought it was a good game, but I knew it was oddly popular
It was extremely popular. For a while after it got pulled there was a small market for phones in airplane mode that still had a working version of the app. Some of the auctions went into the high five figures.
Which I never understood. You just needed the apk. I only heard of the game after it was pulled. I went online, found one of those apk mirror sites, downloaded it, and installed it. Not sure why they put the phones in airplane mode to sell the phones. Then again I always have my phones set to never auto-update.
IIRC the reasoning was that if the play store / app store synced, the app would be removed from the phone. I think for the vast majority of people, you may as well ask them to cast a spell as ask them to “sideload an APK”, so if they really really wanted to play Flappy Bird and felt that was beyond their capacity, this was the only alternative. Or maybe people thought phones with the “original” app would appreciate in value as collector’s items? The whole thing is mysterious to me.
It was insanely addictive to me. Nothing really special just a good idea really. I’m sure with any and all it’s rip offs your getting a similar game. I appreciated the lack of data privacy with the game. If you had it on Android back in the day it’s still downloadable from the play store.
I can see why people like games like Flappy Bird. I like a game that does one thing but does it really well. Precision button pressing has never been my forte so I have no sense of whether Flappy Bird was a “pretty good” precision button presser that just happened to get weirdly famous, or if it got famous because it really nailed the precision button presser genre.
No
