Ever miss the good ol’ days of gaming where your characters and the environment were really pixelated, but you bashed away at that lumpy controller for hours on end anyway, because you just couldn’t get enough of stomping on turtles and rescuing maiden’s kidnapped by mean old spiked-shelled turtles?

Well, if you do find yourself yearning for those golden days of gaming, there’s a game on iTunes and Google Play that resembles the ambiance of that game, but be warned, this game is so addicting it’s insane!

Flappy Bird doesn’t have anything like the same game play as Super Mario, it’s far simpler – all you have to is keep tapping on your screen to keep a little bird afloat and help it fly past Mario-esque obstacles.

Sounds simple right? But its not even remotely easy.  There’s an art to tapping you see, you need to find the right rhythm to go through obstacles.  Tap too fast you go off the screen and when you come back down and your finger’s too slow you slam into an obstacle.  Tap too slow and you bird won’t stay afloat and you crash headlong into the ground.  Then, just when you thought you got the tapping right, just when you’re confident that you’re getting pretty good at the game, you slam right into an obstacle. Fly off the screen, slam into the ground or smash into an obstacle once – just once – and you can kiss your ass goodbye. Game over sucker.

 Yup, this game is hugely, annoyingly, irritatingly frustrating, but even if you want to throw your phone across the room because you can’t get that stupid bird to just fly correctly, you don’t because you want to prove to yourself and the universe that you can get through the freaking obstacles and that stupid bloody bird isn’t going to get the better of you.  But its not going to happen of course, that’s just a lie you tell yourself because you don’t want to admit that a pixelated bird is driving you insane.

The funny thing is, though this game is driving people insane, it’s one of the top apps on Google Play and iTunes right now.  Are people are just plain masochistic or do they like to believe that they love challenges and they can find a way to beat this crazy game? Here at SiliconANGLE, having tested the game for ourselves, are more inclined to think its the former…

So why not just delete the app if it’s such a stupid game?

Again, the ego card is in play here.  Humans do not like failing and they will do their best to find a way to beat any game.  Someone wrote a review of the game on iTunes which perfectly describes the whole Flappy Bird experience:

“The game is not fun but it is addicting. The joy you feel after finally beating your record is indescribable and the boiling anger you feel inside of you instantly diffuses only to fill you with false hope that you may be able to do it again and possibly even do it better. This is what will convince you to keep playing. But the agonizing cycle inevitably resumes again with the dreaded smack of a sound effect punch, once again refueling the hatred for the bird right back into every fiber of your being. The only reason I have not yet deleted this horrid game is for the overwhelming sense of relief and accomplishment I feel when I finally beat a high score; and it is for this reason, I fear, that it is why I keep playing until I cannot hold back a punch. I assume this feeling will soon consume you too but don’t say you were never warned,” wrote Someone Random123.

And who do we have to thank for this game?  Nguyen Ha Dong, a game developer who runs .GEARS, an independent studio in Vietnam.  He has been developing games for four years and the studio focuses on bite-sized games – games that you can play in just a few minutes – that are heavily influenced by pixelated games from the golden age of gaming.

As for the success of Flappy Bird, Dong stated that he just got lucky.  The app was released back in May 2013, so it’s weird that it’s only just gotten popular now.  For some, the game isn’t the only thing that they are focusing on – some hardcore Flappy Bird enthusiasts are making a contest of the best review for the app, just like the one posted above.

If you haven’t tried the game, before you hit that download button, think hard and contemplate whether you want to lose your sanity over the what has to be the most ridiculous game ever to make it popular. The game is addicting as hell, infuriating and could quite easily cause you to do some serious damage to your iPhone, android or whatever device you happen to curse with it.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you.