So the Flappy Bird guy is back, and I hate that I'm still thinking about it three days later.
Dong Nguyen, the Vietnamese developer who pulled Flappy Bird from every app store back in February after it got way too big for him to handle, put out a new game called Swing Copters on Thursday. Free download, his studio dotGears, and by Friday morning it was sitting at number one on the App Store. I downloaded it on my lunch break like an idiot who never learns, and I want it on record that I regret almost everything about the next twenty minutes of my life.
Here's the whole game: you tap the screen to make a little guy with a propeller hat swing his arms up, which pushes him upward, and you're trying to fly through gaps in horizontal bars that are swinging back and forth. That's it. No forward momentum to manage like Flappy Bird, just up and down through moving gaps, except the gaps move in ways that feel actively hostile. I got through four gates on my best run. Four. My nephew, who is eleven and has thumbs made of some superior alien material, got to nine and would not stop telling me about it at dinner.
I want to be clear that I don't think this is bad game design exactly, Nguyen has said before that Flappy Bird's difficulty wasn't an accident, it was the whole point, something meant to be played in short frustrating bursts on a train or in a waiting room. Swing Copters is that philosophy turned up another notch, maybe two notches. It's less a game and more a machine for generating small doses of rage on command. Some of the App Store reviews I skimmed this morning are genuinely funny, people accusing it of being "unplayable garbage" as their top played app of the week, which, sure, that tracks, I did the same thing.
I wrote a post back in February when Flappy Bird got pulled, and I remember being kind of annoyed at how much attention it was getting even as a five-minute distraction, my hot take at the time was that half the internet was mad about a free bird game as a way of not thinking about actual news. I stand by that, mostly. But I'll admit there's something almost charming about a developer whose one big weird hit made him famous (and reportedly very uncomfortable, he gave interviews at the time about the pressure and the death threats over a mobile game, which is insane to type out) coming back with something that's essentially the same joke told again, harder. No ads bolted on, no in-app purchases trying to sell you continues. Just a free, mean little toy.
One thing I'll say against it: the hammers. There are these spinning hammer obstacles later on that rotate at a speed that feels like it was tuned specifically to make you drop your phone, and I did in fact drop mine on my kitchen floor trying to dodge one, which is how I now have a hairline crack across the bottom corner of my screen that I'm choosing not to think about until I have to replace this phone anyway.
If you're the kind of person who got a weird satisfaction out of Flappy Bird's cruelty, go get this one, it scratches the same itch. If you're not that kind of person, genuinely don't bother, you will not enjoy a single second of it and you'll have wasted a coffee break being annoyed at a cartoon propeller hat. There's no Android version yet as far as I can tell, so if you're on a Galaxy or a Nexus you've got a little more time before this ruins your week too.
Also, small aside, I saw the Amazon buying Twitch news pop up in my feed this morning and my first reaction was just to wonder what happens to all the ad reads streamers do mid-broadcast. That's a much bigger story than a bird game obviously, and I assume every other tech blog on the internet is writing three thousand words about it today, so I'll leave that one alone for now. Go break your phone on some hammers instead.