Well I'm bewildered at the origin of the exuberance toward flappy bird. Actually I never even heard of it until after the guy removed it. Not that I have ever used a smartphone anyway. After all, it's just another in a long chain of functionally identical games. Just like Canabalt. You run until you die. There's nothing new or innovational about it. And then a bunch of games like Robot Unicorn Attack became popular on the coattails of Canabalt. And Canabalt wasn't even the thing that originated the idea, virtually every one of the old atari 2600 games from 25 years earlier had the same theme, you play until you lose. Missile command. Centipede. Space Invaders. Yar's Revenge. Pretty much the only game where you DIDN'T play until you won was Adventure, and NOT following that theme was considered innovative then! Back then, it was exciting to play a game where you could actually win it, now there's a complete about-face. Canabalt now, that game isn't about the game itself, or the idea of running until you die. That game is all about style. Atmosphere. The end of the world/evacuate earth theme, with the awesome music. Flappy bird has none of that. No atmosphere. Did the flash version I played even have music? I don't even remember.
But that said, THIS game is actually pretty good, given the circumstances. As good as it could be. Procedurally generated from a small set of pending blocks of level maps. And it IS a little bit innovational, because your score isn't directly proportional to your distance, but rather the number of rings you collect. So there is a trade-off of taking risks for bigger performance despite not traveling a greater distance, it isn't merely surviving as long as possible with nothing else mattering. So certainly better than flappy bird the game itself, which I had the displeasure of playing on bored.com in flash form after I learned about the game's existence after it made news for being removed from the isomethingorother app store. I played that thing a few times and got to 14 pipes surpassed and said "ok, so I beat 10 now, that's good enough, been there, done that". This, I got 176 on my second try and though I'm not all that inclined to see what I can do with extensive practice, I can say it's a lot less annoying than flappy bird and it wouldn't be such a dreary prospect to play it for a while. A pity. Aren't I supposed to get an extra life when I get 100 rings? Ha ha. Only if the bird was actually sonic I guess. Oh no, I know what happened. Sonic had sex with the flappy bird. And THIS is the misbegotten offspring. Eww. Argh. Well, as we all know, Robotnik has a bird fetish, at least for chickens. And chicken eggs. Apparently. So on the plus side, he'd probably get along better with this thing than sonic.
I'm just surprised at how mediocre my performance is compared to the best. Generally I'm in the top 1% at least for games like this. I get 30k+ frequently in Canabalt, 40k+ is not impossible - I'd say my half-life is about 5000-6000 meters (so 1/2 the time I play the game, I get to 5000-6000 or more, 1/8 of the time I get to 15000-18000, 1/64 of the time I get to 25-30k), I'm on the top 5 of kawaiirun, I'm possibly the only one ever to win Give Up with 0 deaths, I'm flagrantly the top score in Pause Ahead as a 0-death speedrun, but it's hard for me to imagine getting a score in the THOUSANDS on this with any amount of practice. I wonder if there's a general strategy that some people have hit on which I'm not thinking of, which decreases the risk and makes playing for extended durations more sustainable.
I also like how the music isn't heavily reminiscent of sonic game music. What can I say, I lost interest in the whole franchise in 1995, I'm amazed it was continued on with so many later gaming generation games later, and anime series I'd never consider watching, so it's a good selling point with me to diverge from sonic in any way, while possibly mocking it a bit.