Flappy Bird
Flappy Bird ist eine App des vietnamesischen Entwicklers Dong Nguyen aus dem Jahr 2013. Veröffentlicht wurde sie von .Gears Studios. Die App wurde ursprünglich im Mai 2013 für Android und für das Apple iPhone 5, später für iOS 6 und anschließend im September 2013 für iOS 7 entwickelt.
Am 8. Februar 2014 kündigte Nguyen über Twitter an, dass er die Anwendung aus den App Stores entfernen werde. Den Grund nannte er später in einem Interview. Er gab an, das Spiel mache süchtig, was seiner eigentlichen Absicht, Flappy Bird zu einem Gelegenheitsspiel zu machen, entgegenstünde. Am 9. Februar 2014 wurde die App sowohl aus dem Google Play Store als auch aus dem Apple App Store kommentarlos entfernt.
Spielprinzip
Die grafische Gestaltung von Flappy Bird ähnelt der Grafik von Super Mario World und ist vergleichsweise einfach gehalten. Der Spieler führt durch das Tippen auf den Bildschirm einen Vogel durch eine von rechts nach links scrollende Spielwelt, wobei der Vogel die paarweise von oben und unten ins Bild ragenden grünen Röhren nicht berühren darf, sondern zwischen ihnen hindurchfliegen muss. Die Position der Flugschneise variiert dabei. Jedes Mal, wenn der Vogel zwischen einem Rohrpaar hindurchfliegt, sammelt er einen Punkt. Dieser Vorgang wird automatisch abgebrochen, wenn der Vogel eines der Rohre berührt. Anschließend wird er in ein Zwischenmenü geleitet, wo der Spieler wahlweise den erreichten Score über Soziale Netzwerke teilen oder wieder zum Hauptmenü zurückgeführt werden kann.
Kritiken
Die App wurde von Huffington Post als „unerträglich verwirrendes, schwieriges und frustrierendes Spiel mit langweiliger Grafik und einer schlechten Steuerung“ kritisiert.
Eine positivere Bewertung vergab Jenifer Whiteside von Amongtech.com, die der App zutraut, aufgrund des Suchtpotenzials und dem Hype um die App das Spiel Candy Crush Saga als das berühmteste Handy-Videospiel des Jahres 2014 zu überbieten.
Der Schwierigkeitsgrad des Spieles tritt bei vielen Nutzern als Kritikpunkt auf. Der Entwickler fügt hinzu, dass die App auf Android leichter zu spielen sei als die iOS-Version.
Kommerzieller Erfolg
Im Januar 2014 führte die App die iTunes-Store-Charts der kostenlosen Apps in den USA und in China, sowie später im selben Monat den britischen iTunes Store an. Ende Januar galt die App als meist heruntergeladene App.
Das Spiel brachte dem Programmierer nach eigenen Angaben durch eingeblendete Werbung, sogenannte „In-App-Werbung“, bis zu 50.000 Dollar pro Tag ein.
Klone
Insbesondere nach der Einstellung der App am 9. Februar 2014 wurden hunderte Flappy Bird ähnelnde Apps veröffentlicht. Eine der erfolgreichsten darunter ist die Splashy Fish, das sich einige Zeit auf Platz 1 der Gratis-Apps-Charts im Apple App Store befand. Auf diesem Marktplatz war in den ersten 24 Stunden seit der Entfernung etwa ein knappes Drittel aller 300 hochgeladenen Spiele Flappy-Bird-Klone. Auch noch knapp einen Monat später, vom 28. Februar bis zum 3. Marz, erschienen dort 240 Plagiate - dies entsprach einer Flappy-Bird-ähnelnden App alle 24 Minuten. Im Google Play Store gab es ebenfalls etliche Klone, allerdings sind Suchanfragen auf 250 Treffer begrenzt, genaue Zahlen sind daher unbekannt. Aufgrund der schieren Masse an solchen Apps wurde eine schärfere Appkontrolle gefordert.
[Wikipedia]
Der Cache:
Wie sich wahrscheinlich schon die meisten gedacht haben, muss man einfach die Datei hier herunterladen:
Download
Dann den Ordner entzippen, einfach die GC5PM33.exe starten und das Spiel so weit spielen, dass man die Koordinaten weiß. Wichtig ist, dass man sich während dem spielen gleichzeitig die Koordinaten merken muss, da sie weg sind, wenn man versagt.
Falls man den Fehler bekommt, dass die msvcr120.dll fehlt, dann kann man diese unter diesem Link auf der offiziellen Windows-Seite herunterladen. Die meisten PCs werden die Datei aber sowieso installiert haben, da es sich dabei um eine Standard-Datei des Visual C++ - Packages handelt, welches automatisch installiert wird, wenn man etwas aufwendigere Spiele, Programme oder eben Visual Basic installiert hat.
Achtung: Du bist gerade dabei, eine Datei herunterzuladen, die weitere Informationen enthält, um den Geocache zu finden. Als Geocache-Besitzer versichere ich, dass diese Datei sicher ist. Sie wurde weder von Groundspeak, noch von einer Reviewerin/einem Reviewer auf schädlichen Inhalt überprüft. Du lädst diese Datei auf Dein eigenes Risiko herunter.
Unbedingt Zugang von Süden wählen, da es von Norden illegal ist. Man kann hier leicht Probleme mit den Besitzern bekommen!
Parkplatzkoordinaten: NordFinal-188; OstFinal-100
Idee zum Cache und Versteck: Kriagl13
Programmierkünste und allgemeine Hilfe: Zwoggi
Hier noch ein nettes Video zum Spiel: Video
You can check your answers for this puzzle on GeoChecker.com.
Flappy Bird
Flappy Bird is a 2013 mobile game, developed by Vietnam-based developer Nguyễn Hà Đông (Dong Nguyen) and published by .GEARS Studios, a small, independent game developer also based in Vietnam. The game is a side-scroller where the player controls a bird, attempting to fly between rows of green pipes without coming into contact with them. The developer created the game over several days, using a bird protagonist which he had designed for a cancelled game in 2012.
The game was released on May 24, 2013 but received a sudden rise in popularity in early 2014. It was criticized for its level of difficulty and alleged plagiarism in graphics and game mechanics, while other reviewers found it addictive. At the end of January 2014, it was the most downloaded free game in the iOS App Store. During this period, its developer claimed that Flappy Bird was earning $50,000 a day from in-app advertisements as well as sales.
Flappy Bird was removed from both Apple's App Store and Google Play by its creator on February 10, 2014, due to guilt over what he considered to be its addictive nature and overuse. The game's popularity and sudden removal caused phones with it pre-installed to be put up for sale for high prices over the Internet. Games similar to Flappy Bird became popular on the iTunes App Store in the wake of its removal, and both Apple and Google have removed games from their app stores for being too similar to the original. The game has also been distributed through unofficial channels on multiple platforms.
In August 2014, a revised version of Flappy Bird, called Flappy Birds Family, was released exclusively for the Amazon Fire TV.
Gameplay:
Flappy Bird is a side-scrolling mobile game featuring 2D retro style graphics. The objective is to direct a flying bird, named "Faby", which moves continuously to the right, between sets of Mario-like pipes. If the player touches the pipes, it ends the game. The bird briefly flaps upward each time the player taps the screen; if the screen is not tapped, the bird falls due to gravity. The player is scored based on the number of pipes that the bird successfully passes through, with medals awarded for the score at the end of the game. Android devices enable the access of world leaderboards, through Google Play.
There is no variation or evolution in gameplay throughout the game as the pipes always have the same gap between them and there is no end to the running track, having only the flap and ding sounds and the rising score as rewards.
Reception:
Flappy Bird received generally mixed reviews from critics, with a Metacritic score of 52/100 based upon seven reviews and a score of 48.17% based upon six reviews on GameRankings. The app was criticized by the Huffington Post, which described it as an "insanely irritating, difficult and frustrating game which combines a super-steep difficulty curve with bad, boring graphics and jerky movement". IGN gave the game a mediocre score of 5.4 out of 10, quipping that the game is as addictive as it was shallow. Despite criticizing its playability and its "no skill" requirement, IGN noted that the gameplay made it "an addictive short-term distraction" for the casual skill and score-obsessed players. The game's difficulty has been a source of ire for many users, with one user stating that it took him half an hour to achieve a score of five points. According to its creator, the game is slightly easier on Android devices than on iOS.
Nolan Bushnell, the creator of the video game Pong, compared Flappy Bird to his own game by saying "simple games are more satisfying". John Romero, a co-creator of the shooting game Doom, said that Flappy Bird is "a reaction against prevailing design the way grunge was a reaction to metal."
Release
Flappy Bird was originally released on May 24, 2013, with support for the iPhone 5. The game was subsequently updated for iOS 7 in September 2013. In January 2014, it topped the Free Apps chart in the US and Chinese App Stores, and later that month topped the same section of the UK App Store where it was touted as "the new Angry Birds.” It ended January as the most downloaded App on the App Store. The Android version of Flappy Bird was released to the Google Play store on January 30, 2014. In early 2014, Nguyen claimed in an interview with The Verge that the game was earning around $50,000 a day in revenue through its in-game advertising.
Legacy
The removal has spawned remakes and parodies of the game, such as Sesame Street's Flappy Bert and Fall Out Boy's Fall Out Bird.Flappy Bird became one of the most cloned games in Apple's App Store. At the peak of its popularity, over 60 clones per day were appearing on the App Store, prompting both Google and Apple to begin rejecting games with the word "Flappy" in the name. CNET reviewed seven "Flappy copycats" for iOS two days after the original game's removal, describing the options as "pretty bleak", but singling out the underwater Splashy Fish as the closest approximation of Flappy Bird.
Shortly after the game's removal, security researchers warned that some versions of Flappy Bird and its imitators available on alternative Android app stores have been found to contain malware that can lead to unauthorized charges to a user's phone bills. The number matching game 2048 has been compared to Flappy Bird because of the similarities between how people react to them and by the chain of clones that they are both respectively part of.
In February 2014, the non-profit computer science education organization Code.org unveiled a set of lessons that would allow the student to make their own Flappy Bird clone.
Nguyen's other games Super Ball Juggling and Shuriken Block ranked at 6th and 18th respectively on the App Store during early February 2014 on the back of Flappy Bird 's success. He revealed in March 2014 that he is currently developing three other games, in similar formats to his previous releases.
An Easter egg in Android 5.0 (Lollipop) allows users to play a modified version of Flappy Bird involving a flying Android and Lollipops replacing the pipes.
On New Year's Eve in 2014, Google displayed an animated Google Doodle featuring Flappy Bird as one of the year's most searched phenomena, alongside the World Cup, the Ice Bucket Challenge and the Philae spacecraft.
[Wikipedia]
The Cache:
As most of you may have guessed already, you just have to download this folder:
Download
Then just start unzip the folder, start the GC5PM33.exe and play the game until you know the coordinates. You have to memorize the coordinates while you play, since they will be gone as soon as you fail.
If you get the error "msvcr120.dll missing", use this Link to download it from the official Windows-Site. Most PCs should already have the file installed somewhere, since it is downloaded automatically in the standard Visual C++ package, which is used for all kinds of games, programs,...
Alert: You are about to download a file that contains further details needed to find this geocache. As the cache owner, I represent that this file is safe to download although it has not been checked by Groundspeak or by the reviewer for possible malicious content. Download this file at your own risk.
Approach the Final from the South, otherwise it's illegal! You might get problems with the landowners!
Parking: NorthFinal-188; EastFinal-100
Idea for the Cache and the Final: Kriagl13
Programming and general help: Zwoggi
Here's a nice video about the game: Video
You can check your answers for this puzzle on GeoChecker.com.