The erratic and impossible to control rise of Flappy Bird .
As of this moment, the top free download on the app store isn’t Instagram, or Facebook, or Snapchat, or even the brand new streaming service Beats Music. It's a skeletal, crummy-looking, ad-saturated game called Flappy Bird. Yes, Flappy Bird .
You can only do one thing in Flappy Bird. The thing you can do is tap the screen to make the bird … beat … its wings, and in so doing, attempt to fly through a series of narrow, same-sized gaps.
Flappy Bird is comically hard. The wave intervals in which your dumb little bird rises and falls are so large that it takes perfect timing to pass through a gap. Add to that the fact that the pipes are placed close together and that their collision borders seem to extend more than a few pixels beyond their color borders, and you have a supremely frustrating little time-waster. I played for three minutes before I cleared my first pipe, and after ten minutes my best score was 7 (pipes passed).
So why, exactly, is this ugly, spare, hard, unoriginal game so crazily popular? (And it is popular: its 63,100 user reviews average four stars.) Scrolling through the reviews yields a few answers.
The first reason, and the most surprising, seems to be that people actually enjoy the challenge and frustration provided by the game.
These reviews are typical:
via IFTTT
The post Why On Earth Is This Borderline Crappy, Impossibly Hard Game The Most Popular Download On The App Store? appeared first on iPhone 6.
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