Flappy Bird - Review

The following review is composed entirely of things I said out loud to my girlfriend when playing Flappy Bird on her phone during a train journey.

Fuck this bird.

So, am I right in thinking you have to tap to flap the bird, and get him through gaps in the pipes? OK.

The graphics are terrible. The bird looks like a fish, and those pipes are straight up stolen from Mario. No subtlety. Just ripped right out of the mushroom kingdom.

I am so hungry I might crack open your phone and eat the bird.

Oh, fuck off. I never hit that pipe. Broken collision detection.

I feel like I've played this before, but better.

OH YEAH, SMACK INTO THE FLOOR, YOU ABSURD BIRD.

What kind of bird flies like this? One flap and then a quick plummet to earth. It's a chicken. It must be a chicken.

If this was my phone, I would smash it, I am so angry at this stupid fucking fishchicken.

How the hell does anyone get a high-score of 50 on this? What degree of masochism facilitates such a thing?

It's compulsive, but then so is heroin, and I wouldn't want to be doing that either.

This a totally hollow experience. Like an Easter egg. But made from ashes.

I hate this bird more than I hate anyone. I hate it more than Robert Mugabe.

It saddens me that people will spend hours on this yet never play Drop7 or Punch Quest.

FUCK THIS BIRD.

Never let me play this again.

Flappy Bird is out now on iOS and Android. If you like games, for the love of God download something else.

Funky Smugglers - Thoughts

Airport security, by all accounts, can be a somewhat dehumanizing experience. You can't take liquids through checkpoints, you have to take your shoes off to show you don't have a stiletto knife stashed between your toes, and if you look like you might be a bit suspicious you're likely to have a prolonged and intimate experience with a rubber glove. But at least we don't have to pass through an X-ray scanner and have our belongings wrenched away from us by an unseen hand.

Funky Smugglers, the new Android and iOS game from 11 Bit Studios, gives you the chance to BE that unseen hand. As passengers pass through the X-ray screen, contraband items they've stashed upon their persons show up in red. Your task is to flick those items away before they board the plane, to ensure that no-one can attempt to hijack a plane with a pair of scissors. As more passengers pass through, the speed at which they move increases, and the difficulty ramps up.

For a while this seems like a perfectly simple and fairly basic game - flick red item until too fast to flick red item any more. But some score-attack games have mechanics that are not intially apparent, which once discovered make the game blossom like a cherry tree. Ikaruga's colour-chaining, Tony Hawk's manuals and reverts, and Joe Danger's wheelies are all fine examples. Funky Smugglers' secret weapon is tossing (fnar fnar). You can only hold onto contraband items for a limited amount of time, as shown by the ring that appears as you touch them and rapidly disappears. By quickly tapping them again, you can toss the items and thereby reset the timer, and thus open up the possiblities for ridiculous multipliers and high scores you could not have dreamed of previously. This feedback loop is absurdly compelling, and ultimately what hooked me - each time I felt I needed to keep tossing those items, bump that multiplier up, just get one more fix of the voiceover saying "ULTIMATE COMBO, BRO!" (This may be the first, and only, time I have enjoyed a videogame referring to me as '"bro")

The game has several other tricks up its sleeve to compel you into playing just one more game. If you're connected to the itnernet you can throw your weight behind team battles - the player base is split into two teams and any points you earn go towards a team total. How the mighty Vaders lost to the Donalds is a mystery I shall take to my grave. At any one time you have 3 additional missions to complete - challenges such as throwing so many items to the top or sides of the screen, or getting X amount of points with tossing - that reward you with coins, which you can spend on a variety of cosmetic upgrades. Most of these, such as new textures for your X-ray scanner, or new items for your passengers, are largely inconsequential, although buying the 2 additional music tracks should be mandatory, as each of the three songs in Funky Smugglers are utterly superb. If you can't be arsed to play for the coins you can purchase them with real money, which sat uneasily with me at first. I'm not a big fan of in-app purchases in paid games, but these are largely unintrusive, bypass the trap of pay-to-win, and frankly the core game was addictive enough that earning the coins through diligent security checks was quite enough.

All in all, Funky Smugglers is one of the finest timewasters I've found on Android, and one of the few score-attack games that has me itching to beat my own scores. The many little hooks that the game lays will get under your skin, and create a compelling experience that is fun for just a quick game or a ridiculously intense, swearing-filled marathon. Airport security never felt so good.

Funky Smugglers is out now for Android and iOS.

Plague Inc. - Thoughts

It started in India. By the time anyone noticed that it even existed it had infected over 2 billion people. Insomnia is no reason to bother the doctor, surely? But soon it was more than just sleeplessness, it was fever, vomiting... and worse. By the time everyone had realised just how bad it was, it was too late. Bodies in the streets. Martial law. Closed airports. I think some scientists in Greenland are still working on a cure, but all of our research ceased when the government finally collapsed under the weight of 40 million corpses. I heard on the shortwave that the last American died yesterday. Now the few of us that are left here wait for the end. God help me, I haven't slept in 4 days.

Plague Inc is a very pleasant unpleasantness.

This is the first game from Ndemic Creations, in which you play the part of a pathogen, and your objective is to merrily spread to all the peoples of the world, and then make them dead.

Play takes place on a map of Earth, where you press on a country to drop Patient Zero and watch as they (presumably) wander around touching people without washing their hands. As more and more people succumb to your germy creation, the infected areas bloom into a deep, biohazardy crimson. Boats and planes crisscross the world, possibly taking your infection with it. There is a real grim satisfaction in seeing the first little red plane jet from A to B, dragging behind it a red trail, spreading your custom pathogen to pastures new.

As more and more people become infected, you earn DNA points, which you use to evolve and mutate your disease in new and exciting ways. You'll need to make yourself more lethal if you want to achieve your goal of wiping out those pesky fleshbags. But it's here that Plague Inc reveals itself as a deeper strategy game than it appears at first glance.

As your disease gets more dangerous symptoms, more countries will notice it and work towards a cure. You can delay this with other upgrades, but those humans are a tenacious bunch. Finding and keeping a balance between infecting more folks and not being cured is a real stressful delight. I can't tell you how pleased I was when I managed to wipe out humanity with them just days away from discovering a cure. Distressingly pleased, in fact.

Different kinds of pathogen unlock each time you successfully bring about the end of mankind. Fungal spores, for instance, spread very slowly, and thus demand more evolutions of your transmission methods. The bioweapon is utterly lethal, so much so that the challenge comes from spreading faster than your hosts can drop dead.

Some will doubtless find that the subject matter makes them a little queasy, and that it is in poor taste to have a game where you must wipe out all humanity. To those people, I would respectfully point to Medal of Honor: Foreignerfighter and other games of its ilk, and say that at least Plague Inc does it's mass murder thing memorably and intelligently. Just look at those graphs(Plague Inc has excellent graphs)!

Plague Inc has achieved something that very few mobile games have done for me - making me want to keep playing it after I'm done on the bus or in the coffeeshop or waiting for my parole officer or whatever. If you let it, it gets under your skin and into your head like... well, like a virus.

Plague Inc is out now for Android (and iOS, if you can stand to put up with awful software like iTunes)