Flappy Bird, thy name is Badland.
Do you remember it, by the way? The little side-scrolling pop-game using Mario graphics, where you had to keep a birdie afloat by repeatedly pressing a button. Not much else to it, maybe a few obstacles here and there, but otherwise this is all that made one of the most copied computer games in recent history. Putting it on par with, say, NetHack or Maniac Mansion. If nothing else, this is the Flappy Bird's greatest achievement.
A smaller, yet to my mind not a less important achievement of computer games (and maybe of things in general) is... well, the shiny, or "polish", as you folks like to call it; the result of work which is not necessarily innovative with respect to the original, which however improves1 upon that, possibly in other ways such as graphics or user interaction. No, I did not ask for processing units amounting to teraoperations per second, but now that I have those, I might as well make use of them, which is why I prefer Monkey Island 3 to King's Quest and Diablo II to NetHack... despite the dumb fact that none of these titles requires hardware capable of teraoperations per second.
So Badland is a Flappy Bird with greatly improved gameplay. First of all, it is structured around levels bearing a vast array of obstacles, each with its own logic. But more importantly, the player's avatar may gather strengths or faults over time, such as the number of "birds" -- they call 'em clones -- occupying the environment -- only one of them needs to reach the target point at any time, so they provide... fault tolerance! -- or the movement mechanics or the size or shape of our clones. This combination of environmental and personal factors make the game uniquely enjoyable in my opinion, moreso that the level design is quite good for a smartphone game, anyways, far above the mere five bucks that I gave the developers. If Google decided tomorrow to remove the useless pile of ad-driven "freemium" shite and keep solely games like Badland, oh, I'd be happily using their so-called marketplace; then at least they'd give me a chance to find something likeable. Anyways, the levels are rather short and sometimes frustratingly difficult, but eveything from the graphics to how things are placed on the map make the overall experience quite pleasant.
The developers, a small company called Frogmind, deserve all the praise in my opinion, although they do seem to be doing this as a part-time thing, otherwise it's hard to explain the very little that you hear about them. Supposedly they've launched a sequel to their game, but it's not on the Google market anymore. So enjoy this while it lasts, I guess.
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The footnote here became longer than the main item itself while it unfurled beyond my mind, so I guess I'll make it its own separate discussion in the near future. ↩