As
the advent of the smartphone gadget reaches its peak, so has the number of
touchscreen games that keeps people’s eyes glued on their touchscreens. There
are some smartphone-users who play for fun and there are those, too, who turn
fun into extreme—extreme rage, that is. With teeth gnashing, matched by
colourful swearwords enough to fill a dictionary; fingers continuously tapping
the screen for hours, paired with eyes full of the determination to win; veins
popping as brows become knitted together in frustration at another defeat; and
dark under eyes showing up after another sleepless night of game play, people
have gone crazy over a new bird game: Flappy Bird. It’s a game that has gone viral
on millions of people, and the infection just keeps getting worse.
Created
in May 2013 by Dong Nguyen, an indie game developer based in Vietnam, Flappy
Bird currently tops the ‘Most Popular’ chart in both iOS App Store and Google
Play Store. It earns a whopping $50,000 a day, according to Forbes, and much to the surprise
of the developer himself who created the game in just a span of three days. The
game is also the current buzz of the social networking society with the
infamous #flappybird or #flappybirdhighscore. Even local celebrities like Anne
Curtis and Jerric Teng are hooked on Flappy Bird according to ABS-CBN News. The
continuous tweets, statuses and photos of social networkers and media serve to continually
put Flappy Bird in the limelight since the start of 2014.
Simple,
yet terribly addicting, Flappy Bird is a game wherein the player navigates an
adorably cute bird through a small gap between never-ending streams of pipes.
Each pass through a pipe grants the player a point. The player is then rewarded
with a medal for his first ten points. It sounds easy, right? Start with your
first game, tap the screen to make the bird fly, hit a pipe, and you end with a
score of zero. Play again and still you get a zero. Play the third time? The
addiction starts. It’s a game reminiscent of the green pipes in Super Mario,
the colourful birds in Angry Birds, and the graphics and sound effects of a 90s
video game, yet a game that leaves you tapping for hours, nonetheless.
Despite
the stress-inducing game play of Flappy Bird, every game has a trick of its
own. While many game strategists argue that Flappy Bird is unrealistic due to
the rate the bird falls upon collision with the pipe which, in short, means the
game defies gravity; in research, the game actually follows another rule of
physics based on an analysis by Frank Noschese, a Physics and Chemistry High
School teacher in New York. According to him, what really affects the game is
the impulse provided by a player’s tap on the screen. The ‘pre-tap velocity’ and ‘post-tap
velocity’ is supposed to be constant or same, but in Flappy Bird, it isn’t;
therefore, a light tap on the screen will send the bird flying higher than its
supposed flight. It’s, thus, a trick of timing and reflexes.
“Tap to flap your wings and fly. Avoid pipes.
Try to earn medals,” a game with such simple instructions,
yet one that will literally blow your mind off to the pit of Tartarus. You’re
not from this century if you’ve never or won’t ever try Flappy Bird. Students,
the business circle, celebrities, media men and even scientists are addicted to
Flappy Bird. Anytime soon, it would be no wonder if even President Aquino himself
becomes secretly hooked on the game.
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| With this, I call quits! |
Now that I'm officially over Flappy Bird, it's Iron Pants up next. ;)
Yours,
