Well, that was a bust. I had three people over, a cooler of beer nobody really needed because it's February and my apartment is already cold enough, and about ninety minutes of actual football before the Seahawks turned Super Bowl XLVIII into batting practice. Final was 43-8. Denver, a team that broke the single-season scoring record this year, managed exactly one offensive touchdown, in garbage time, against a defense that apparently decided sacking Peyton Manning was a fun way to spend a Sunday night.
The game was basically over twelve seconds in, when Manning's shotgun snap sailed over his head into the end zone for a safety before anyone had even sat down all the way. It was 22-0 before the first quarter ended, and then Percy Harvin took the second-half opening kickoff back 87 yards for a touchdown, which is the exact moment my buddy Dave got up, said "well," and went to go check his phone instead of the TV.
And that's basically what everyone did. My timeline turned into a highlight reel of Broncos jokes for the rest of the night, which, fine, that's what a blowout Super Bowl is for now I guess. You watch the game with one eye and Twitter with the other, and by the third quarter you've mostly given up on the eye that's on the TV. The one thing I actually enjoyed on the broadcast itself was the RadioShack commercial, the one with a whole parade of 80s icons (Hulk Hogan front and center) storming into a store to reclaim "the 80s" because RadioShack apparently still looked like 1986 inside. It was self-aware in a way ads from that company have never been, and it got an actual laugh out of the room, which none of the beer commercials managed.
But honestly, and I feel a little weird admitting this, the game losing its pulse by 8pm just meant my phone came out for a different reason than checking the score. I've been absolutely, embarrassingly hooked on Flappy Bird for about a week now. If you haven't run into it yet, you will soon. It's this tiny, ugly-on-purpose game from a solo developer in Vietnam named Dong Nguyen, and it's been sitting at number one on the free App Store charts. The whole game is: tap the screen to flap a little pixel bird through gaps in green pipes that look suspiciously like they wandered off the set of Super Mario Bros. That's it. No levels, no story, no upgrades trying to sell you anything. Just an endless column of pipes that kill you almost instantly.
My personal best is 17. Seventeen pipes. I've seen people online claiming forties and fifties and I genuinely don't believe most of them, because this game is unreasonably hard for something that looks like it took an afternoon to build. The hitboxes feel like they're lying to you, honestly, like the bird's wingtip is clipping a pipe that's clearly still an inch away. I've dropped my phone onto the couch cushion more than once this week. Not hard enough to break it. Just with feeling. There's something almost insulting about how simple it looks and how mean it actually plays, and I mean that mostly as a compliment.
I should say, I don't love that half my apartment spent the fourth quarter of a Super Bowl staring at their phones instead of the game, blowout or not. Feels like a small, dumb sign of something. Then again I was one of them, so I don't get to be too smug about it.
So that was my Super Bowl Sunday: a blowout nobody wanted, one genuinely good commercial, and forty-five minutes of muttering at a bird. Dave took off around 9:30, said the traffic getting out of the city after these things is worse than the game was, which, fair. I stayed up another hour trying to beat 17.
Didn't.