So I need to talk about the bird for a minute because it's taken over my phone, my brother's phone, and apparently half the subway car I was on this morning.
If you haven't run into it yet: Flappy Bird. Free app, iOS and Android, made by some guy in Vietnam named Dong Nguyen under a one-person outfit called dotGears. It's been sitting in the App Store since last May doing basically nothing, and then sometime in the last couple weeks it just took off. It's the #1 free app in the US store right now, ahead of Candy Crush Saga, ahead of every trivia and puzzle knockoff cluttering the charts. Pixel bird, pipes lifted straight out of the original Super Mario Bros., one tap to flap, and that's the entire game. No menus to speak of. No tutorial. You tap, the bird hops up a little, gravity yanks it back down, and you have to thread it through a gap that looks generous and is not generous at all.
My personal best is 6. Six pipes. I have watched my little brother get to 17 and then immediately try to lie about it later (I checked the screenshot, it was not 17).
Here's my actual opinion on this, and I've been sitting on it for about a week now: I don't think Flappy Bird is a good game, and I think that's kind of the point. The hitboxes feel meaner than they should be, you'll watch the bird clip a pipe by what looks like two pixels and just die, no mercy, straight back to zero. There's no ramp-up, no easy first ten seconds to hook you before it gets hard. It's hard immediately and stays exactly that hard forever. Normally that would kill an app dead in a day. Instead people, me included, keep reopening it, muttering under their breath, closing it, and reopening it again four minutes later. Rage-quitting has basically become its own distribution channel and I don't think anyone planned that on purpose, which is the part I find genuinely funny.
It's got the little banner ad wedged in at the bottom too, the kind that shifts the whole play area up half an inch right when you're mid-flap, which feels almost hostile if I think about it too long. I don't actually believe it was designed to mess with people on purpose. I think it's just a cheap free template with ads bolted onto it, and the meanness is just how a physics engine behaves when nobody bothers to smooth out the collision boxes. But it works anyway, broken and all. Sometimes janky is more addictive than polished, and that bugs me a little, because I've spent years assuming good design is what wins.
Unrelated, but also happening this weekend: the Super Bowl was Sunday, Seahawks over the Broncos, 43 to 8, which is about as lopsided as that game gets. I watched maybe a quarter and a half of it at a friend's place before giving up and checking my phone, and no surprise, half the room was doing the same thing, texting or, yes, playing Flappy Bird between plays once it stopped being competitive somewhere in the second quarter. RadioShack ran that ad with a bunch of 80s stars showing up to reclaim their own decade, which I thought was legitimately funny for a store that's felt like a museum for about ten years now. Small thing, but it stuck with me more than most of the ad break did.
Anyway. If your phone hasn't caught the bird yet, it's coming. Someone in your group chat is going to send you a screenshot of their score sometime in the next week, and you're going to download it out of spite, tell yourself you'll play it once, and then it's 11pm and you're still stuck on 4.
I'm not proud of how much of my evening this thing has eaten. I'm also not deleting it yet.