A new game that combines the mechanics of "Flappy Bird" with a weird "2048" bent is fast becoming one of the most addictive mashup games of this season.
The free game, aptly named "Flappy48," challenges players to work their way as a tile with the number 2 through a "Flappy Bird"-esque series of gaps. For each gap they successfully hurdle, they are presented with a tile they can either collect or ignore. If they collect the tile and the number on the new tile is the right multiple of two, the new tile combines with the first tile. The player continues to flap through the gaps until he reaches the 2,048th tile. Otherwise, the form a trail of floating tiles that it makes it more difficult to pass through the gaps.
Dan Moran, a fourth-year computer science student at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, developed "Flappy48" as a "tribute to the massively popular games, "Flappy Bird" and "2048."
Players can play "Flappy48" on Moran's website, which requires a Unity Web Player to play the game. Moran also came out on Twitter Wednesday, saying that "Flappy48" for Android is now available for download at the Google Play Store.
"Flappy Bird" was a wildly popular mobile game developed by Dong Nguyen that took the mobile gaming scene by storm in December 2013. It dominated both Google Play Store and Apple App Store's free games charts in January and February. The goal of "Flappy Bird" is to tap the screen to make a bird fly through a series of pipes without crashing. The game ends if the bird crashes.
Following his game's extreme success, Nguyen baffled millions of players when he pulled out his maddeningly addictive game.
"I can call 'Flappy Bird' is a success of mine. But it also ruins my simple life. So now I hate it," he said on Twitter.
The demise of "Flappy Bird" inspired such a huge number of clones that Google and Apple are now labeling new game submissions as spam. Recently, however, Nguyen announced that he is considering putting the game back online, though no specific dates were posted as to when players can expect to see it back again.
Gabriele Cirulli, the creator of "2048," on the other hand, has no plans to pull his game from the app stores. The self-described accidental game-maker, who created the game in a weekend as an exercise, said "2048" was inspired by similar games that were inspired by "Threes!", an iOS game where players combine tiles in multiples of three.
