queerlilhayseedIs Flappy Bird a good game?
https://piefed.blahaj.zone/c/games/p/641975/is-flappy-bird-a-good-game
TheAlbatrossI never thought it was a good game, but I knew it was oddly popular
It was extremely popular. For a while after it got pulled there was a small market for phones in airplane mode that still had a working version of the app. Some of the auctions went into the high five figures.
Which I never understood. You just needed the apk. I only heard of the game after it was pulled. I went online, found one of those apk mirror sites, downloaded it, and installed it. Not sure why they put the phones in airplane mode to sell the phones. Then again I always have my phones set to never auto-update.
IIRC the reasoning was that if the play store / app store synced, the app would be removed from the phone. I think for the vast majority of people, you may as well ask them to cast a spell as ask them to “sideload an APK”, so if they really really wanted to play Flappy Bird and felt that was beyond their capacity, this was the only alternative. Or maybe people thought phones with the “original” app would appreciate in value as collector’s items? The whole thing is mysterious to me.
64bitheroIt was insanely addictive to me. Nothing really special just a good idea really. I’m sure with any and all it’s rip offs your getting a similar game.
I appreciated the lack of data privacy with the game. If you had it on Android back in the day it’s still downloadable from the play store.
I can see why people like games like Flappy Bird. I like a game that does one thing but does it really well. Precision button pressing has never been my forte so I have no sense of whether Flappy Bird was a “pretty good” precision button presser that just happened to get weirdly famous, or if it got famous because it really nailed the precision button presser genre.
It was a classic game concept. My earliest memory was of a helicopter game in the 80s, where is worked basically the exact same way.
It’s a very 80s game idea, and those games weren’t for everyone, to be sure. But Flappy Bird wasn’t a bad game, just a typical time waster of its decade. With Super Mario graphics.
I miss Flappy Bird, I used to play it, believe me or not I hit 1000 points on that shit, I just got hiper fixated on it, it was so fun. Now I can’t run it on recent Android versions.
Is 1000 points the same as 1000 passes? Where you pass through the opening, is that 1 point? Or do they start getting worth more the longer you play?
Points and passes are the same. 1000 points are equivalent to 1000 passes.
One point per pass
Seems to be many versions playable online in your phone browser.
flappybird.io There’s one that seems functional. I never played the original more than once or twice so idk how accurate it is but it seems to match my memory.
flappybird.io There’s one that seems functional. I never played the original more than once or twice so idk how accurate it is but it seems to match my memory.
I know, actually Epic Games bought the rights I think, they remade the game.
But just doesn’t feel the same, the original had something different.
I played the one Epic made, it’s the most accurate so far.
I mean personally I would trust the rando who puts it up for free online more than I would trust epic games to make an accurate version, but like I said I don’t have enough of a memory to accurately judge. I also like that the online one doesn’t have ads or purchases.
It’s not a bad game in the same way pong is not a bad game and checkers is not a bad game. They are simple, shallow games. That’s fine. Most people prefer deeper and more complex games most of the time, but sometimes, some people might feel like playing a simple game like flappy bird. That’s fine. There is nothing specifically wrong with it. It is playable. It’s not broken. It’s a perfectly fine game.
That makes sense. I think with more complicated games (or any art) there’s some leeway where you can appreciate some things about the game enough that you endure the parts that don’t tickle your fancy. With games that really focus down on a single element, whether you are interested in the game at all hinges entirely on whether your tastes align with that one thing.
One of the reasons I asked is that, since precision timing games are not my thing, I can’t really tell if Flappy Bird is an exceptional example of the genre, or if it’s more of a Tiger King situation where it’s not that good, but it’s a fun thing that became a fad. Seems like the crowd is leaning closer to the latter.
pasdechanceI play this version at work sometimes
Yeah it is great!
I think of games like Flappy Bird and Lemmings as grinding.
Back when I used to play MMOs a lot , EverQuest, WoW and Dark Age of Camelot, sometimes it was just so nice to mindlessly grind after work.
It was a relaxing low effort thing to do to get my mind off of things.
It is one of the things I love about God of War 2018. There is a whole realm that is just about grinding the same area over and over again. You didnt have to do the area for the main storyline but it was there is you just wanted to mindlessly grind.
DyskolosWouldn’t say that EQ or DAoC were low effort mindless grind. Leveling or the super awesome large scale PvP (damn I miss this) needed tons of work, coordination and effort. I retired at the time the daoc beta went live and I basically lived there 😁
But farming for some stuff sure was low effort chilly grinding.
Anyhow, nice to read anything about daoc at all. It always seemed very niche. Eq had its moment in the sun and wow…is wow.
MimicJarIs Tic-Tac-Toe a good game? I know people who played it a lot at one time. Does it hold up?
If you had fun playing it, it was a good game.
Fruit Ninja? Doodle Jump? Angry Birds?
Games take a simple concept, possibly copied from elsewhere, possibly a mash up of others, possibly original ideas, and of it’s fun, it’s good.
Now was the hype over Flappy Bird strange and over the top? Probably. But remember fidget spinners? Yo-yos? Sometimes trends/fads happen.
samus12345Not to me, but clearly a lot of people liked it.
yes, i think flappy bird had a really elegant onboarding/tutorial:
1. main menu screen, tap to start
2. the tap flaps the bird
3. you fall to the ground, learning that you need to repeatedly tap to fly
4. before any obstacles appear, you get some time to calibrate your rhythm
5. obstacles start appearing and the game starts
That’s a good point, I too think it nailed one of the requirements of “simple” single-mechanic games, which is getting the player up to speed and into the fun part as quickly as possible.
EightBitBloodHey! I think this is a FANTASTIC question, because the answers reveal the diverse ways we all categorize what a “good” game is.
The straightforward simple nature of it like TicTacToe makes it good.
The easy on boarding to new players makes it good.
The simple task and challenge while not deep, is competitive enough to make it good.
Even bad games can become good under the right circumstances or perspectives. Sonic 06 is generally considered to be one of the worst games in the franchise, and an overall bad game. But it’s great to watch others play it because of how bad it is. It’s great to watch speed runs, or the odd glitch hunting videos. Playing it JUST to experience how bad it is can even be enjoyable and “good” to anyone that likes playing bad games.
My point is, what makes a game truly “good” isn’t just a single thing about it that someone might like, but rather, a combination of all those “good” things about it that work together in a way to create a better experience than the sum of its parts. Multiple “good” things all working together to make an experience that is uniquely “good” to that game.
So what’s interesting, is that all the different perspectives in this thread prove fairly well that Flappy Bird was indeed a good game.
However, the one part about it that people haven’t mentioned yet that I appreciated about it most:
Was the fact that the bird had some of the worst physics ever.
Having a linear jump up, but an accelerating decent down that despite its description, felt like juggling a rock in high gravity more than making a bird flap it’s wings.
It was SO UNINTUITIVE, that even with the quick onboarding it felt like playing a carnival game that was rigged for you to lose. And just like those games, there was a trick to getting good at it. And that trick created a learning curve needed to actually get gud at Flappy Bird. One that in combination with its easy and simple concept, quick onbaording, and competitive design (leader boards) made it honestly a great experience at the time that I feel hasn’t quite been captured since.
(With the closest being maybe Baby Steps or Getting Over It, but neither have such a simple design. Rather a simple mechanic pushed to its limit.)
Anyway, thanks for asking this! Imo, Flappy Bird was definitley a good game worth talking about.
LMAO thank you, I spent a while trying to figure out what title to give this post. I generally don’t like sorting games (or art in general) into “good” and “bad” buckets, but I didn’t really have a good handle on why people liked Flappy Bird, and I didn’t want to make assumptions about which parts of the game make it good or bad in people’s minds. “Is it good” is the most generic criterion I could come up with, so I went with that and hoped people would expand on their reasons in the comments. I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the comments (yours and others), it’s given me a lot to think about ❤️
It’s a dedent game for a terribile platform.