Friday Fun-Time: FlapMMO.

FlapMMO, an online replication of the now-infamous "Flappy Bird."

If you haven't heard of Flappy Bird, the awful and addicting tap-to-fly-the-little-bird-through-pipes mobile game that flared up to become the most downloaded game on Earth until its mysterious Vietnamese creator yanked it from the various app stores, you might be living under a rock. But for those who have arrived late to the party and would like to offer up their own sanity, or for seasoned players who seek a new spin on the old form, the internet has again worked its magic to come up with the marvelous burst of insanity that is 'FlapMMO.'

Aside from translating Flappy Bird to a larger and wider screen, the game seems graphically identical (and very sharp looking, might I add). The touch screen tapping mechanism has been replaced with tapping of the space bar; naturally, this is the one and only control. I would argue that this new web version is somehow more difficult than the original mobile game, as I've yet to mange a score higher than 8 (my "real" Flappy Bird score is 86); of course, there are those who can barely get past 5 pipes in any version, so calling any one more difficult than the other is about the same as parsing the meaning of the word "is."

The game gets the second half of its title from the video game phrase "massively multiplayer online game," or "MMO," a category of game where large groups of players take part at once. FlapMMO is exactly this; there seem to be at least thirty-ish servers, each capable of handling upwards of 500 players. This adds an interesting layer to the experience: as you begin your run-through, it appears as though your red bird is surrounded by hundreds of translucent yellow birds following the same path, a countless number of whom fall at once as they collide with the first few pipes. As you progress into the further pipes, the crowd of other players becomes smaller and more spread out.

Though there is no true interaction, FlapMMO does allow for you to give your bird a screen name, inevitably leading to...interesting results. Some are seem to be rather unremarkable, others are keyboard pictures. And then, of course, there are entries ranging from "Hitler was right" to "BrackPoop" to "JESUS" to "YOLO" to to "chixen nuggets," and my personal favorites, "Richard M. Nixon" and "karl rove" (there are also several other notable names that happen to be of the sort that I won't be publishing).

Click here to play.

UPDATE: It seems that some servers present the game in different templates, including a fish version.
Also, new favorite names: "hide yo kids" and "Sir Swaggington."