Flappy Bird is dead. Hounded by the press and issued with death threats, The creator of the insanely popular mobile game pulled his incredibly lucrative game over the weekend to return to his "simple life".
But is that the end of the Flappy story? Of course not.
Ever since the game became a hit the App Store has been flooded with clones, all trying to replicate its mixture of irritating gameplay, bad graphics and addictive reward structure. Some, like Ironpants, so at least have the decency to draw new graphics and use a different name.
Others, not so much.
Take the cynical money-grabbing disaster that is 'Fly Bird - Flappy Bird Flyer'.
This appalling excuse for a business idea is essentially a shameless, poorly-coded rip-off of the already terrible original. Except that it's not even that really. In reality, this is just an attempt to gather up the App Store search traffic for the term 'Flappy Bird', except you have to spend actual money to get extra lives. That's right - it's 69p for three lives. Avoid this.
Here are four other clones of Flappy Bird to either avoid or download to sate your desire for incredibly difficult mobile games:
- Flappy Bee: essentially the same as Flappy Bird, but with a bee, and bad collision detection, and the reviewers hate it, and the bee is annoying and not cute.
- Flappy Plane: all you have to ask before downloading this is "do planes flap?" The answer is no. Avoid.
- Fluffy vs Flappy Birds: if you thought Flappy Bird had bad graphics, you have no idea about how much worse your life is going to get if you download this rubbish collection of in-app purchases designed to fleece kids who know their parents' App Store password.
- Smarkle Flyer: this person not only doesn't understand what makes a good game, they've also designed to hang their attempt to gather free money from App Store users on the word 'smarcle', which means nothing.