Flappy Bird is the newest and most addictive game around, creating a “Flappy Bird Craze” all around New Trier. This simple, yet difficult game seems to be attracting app users by the boatload, and creating an addiction for anyone who plays.

You’ve likely heard people talking about it. Most comments are about how frustrating and tremendously difficult it is.

The premice is relatively simple. It opens up with a title screen where you can see the bird and an old fashioned pixelated landscape in the background. The name gives away the subject: a small bird that you must guide between openings of large green pipes. You control the bird by tapping the screen, making the bird jump. The controls are difficult, even once you get the hang of it. Once you hit a green pipe, you “die” and the game is over. There’s no multiple lives, no checkpoints, nothing. Your score depends on how many green pipes you can get the flappy bird through without hitting a pipe, or flying too high or too low

Flappy Bird is one of the few highly accessible apps out there. I learned that you can play it anywhere. It opens quickly and doesn’t take an intense level of concentration to play.

The difficulty of Flappy Bird is probably the most frustrating and addicting aspect. After playing it for a good fifteen minutes, the highest score I could get was a measly four points. I have heard of others reaching twenty-or-so points, but once you play it, you’ll see how difficult it is. This difficulty also lends itself to frustration. Flappy Bird is known to cause spontaneous bouts of anger and yelling at the offending iPhone or iPad.

Perhaps the reviews on the app store really get to the core of this game. The app store reviewer Can if be Greater? said, “It’s genius, the way this simple game was designed to make you want to play it over and over again… Because there [are] no ‘lives’ or ‘difficulty mode’ the game is 10 times more addicting.” Another fairly frustrated user named Someone Random123 said, “it will make you so angry that you will literally scream.” Other comments span from “my life is spiraling out of control” to “Amazingly addictive and fun.”

The best aspect of this game is that it is free. The creators make their money through ads that pop up in-game. Therefore, you can download it quickly and easily, allowing yourself to be ensnared in it’s addictive grasp.

The creator of Flappy Bird is Dong Nguyen, a Vietnamese developer who has created two other similarly styled games, one of which is currently on the top ten charts for free apps as well. It seems like Nguyen is cleaning up with the so called “Flappy Bird Revolution” that is now taking place.