#dong nguyen

“Flying with a propeller hat is not as easy as it looks.”

Some smartphone and tablet game developers will spend hours writing the perfect summary of their work for the ‘Description’ section of the product’s page on the App Store, listing why the game is fun, perhaps mentioning some of the characters, a little bit about the story, and so on. But on the app page for Swing Copters? We get that one-liner.

It’s hard to recommend this game — the official follow-up to Flappy Bird — so I’m going against our blog’s positive focus a bit here. Alas, it’s just as difficult to avoid giving Swing Copters at least a fleeting mention.

Maybe you’ll love it, or maybe you’ll hate it, but the chances are you’ll fall at the centre of the like/dislike Venn diagram, because Swing Copters is the latest addition to an emerging subgenre of games known as 'masocore’.

The Masocore Genre

Masocore games have been around for a while, but they’re only just starting to reach the level of popularity which earns them the right to an umbrella term. A portmanteau of 'masochism’ (deriving pleasure from pain or suffering) and 'hardcore’, masocore titles directly thrive on the divisive relationships they build with players, pushing their patience to the extreme by purposely upping the difficulty to a near-impossible level.

Flappy Bird was a member of this genre, with players nearly throwing their iPhones across the room in anger as they tried to guide the annoying little clump of yellow pixels through green Mario-esque pipes. We hated it because it was hard, but we loved it because it was hard. That’s the case for all masocore games.

Why do we love incredibly difficult games? It’s fairly arguable that bigger titles on the likes of Xbox and PlayStation are typically quite easy, perhaps because they’re often very repetitive. How challenging can first-person shooter games be when we’ve played 100 of them? Plus, big-brand developers have to try to strike a fine balance between easy and hard to keep players of varying abilities interested.

With masocore games, there are no limits other than actual impossibility. Because we’re still in the novelty phase of games-that-are-so-damn-hard-you’ll-want-to-punch-babies-and-puppies, masocore games typically go viral. Flappy Bird got so big that its Viatnamese creator, Dong Nguyen, pulled the game from the App Store because he was making so much money from it (through simple banner ads) that he was scared people would start targeting him.

And when they go viral, everyone will be a part of the brief spell of popularity the games churn up, so there’s a big unspoken competition going on. On the first day of Flappy Bird’s explosion, the person on Twitter who tweeted a screenshot of their high score being 8 was heralded a hero!

This has mostly always been the case. I still remember when the game N tore through my school, and nobody in Computer class would get anything done because every single last student was trying to be the best, trying to get the best level completion times, or quite simply trying to get further than the first few sets of levels (because, being masocore, N was not merciful to its players in terms of difficulty).

There’s also been QWOP and, a personal favourite of mine, Super Meat Boy, which is just extremely fun to play and has rather lovely graphics, too. The Impossible Quiz  and Impossible Quiz 2 were huge and still are (Pewdiepie gave them a bit of a boost, I think), and games like Cat Mario, which fall under the subsubcategory of games that are just unfair and can only really be completed by trial and error, prove very popular.

And perhaps the biggest draw of masocore games? They’re easy on the brain. Ironically, the games which require the most amount of patience are also the games which require no effort to play at all. Flappy Bird was a one-tap game. You tapped a screen to make the bird jump. That was it. And Swing Copters is just as simple…

Swing Copters, also known as the return of sucker of souls

After the cute little one-liner about helicopter hats, Nguyen provides two bullet points on how to play. “Tap to change direction” is the first, which pretty much covers everything. You’re a little unnamed character (also a bunch of pixels, like Flappy Bird), and this time around you’re flying vertically. Flappy Bird’s vertical pipes are now horizontal, um, girders, I think, and the only addition are swinging hammers on each side of the gap you’re supposed to fly through.

And those hammers are awful. As if controlling the little blighter wasn’t hard enough, having a couple of swinging hammers to dodge is diabolical.

The little character starts off by flying to the right. Tap the screen, he’ll change direction to the left. Tap again, he’ll go right. And so on. That’s the only control. And you have to navigate yourself through girders and swinging hammers by way of that control system. It sounds laughably simple on paper, but hold judgement until you’ve spent an hour trying to get used to judging the speed and acceleration of direction changes and then tell me it’s easy.

I can but offer one small grain of advice at this point (because I’ve got a grand old high score of absolutely nothing — I can’t even make it past the first girder) and that is, the character starts flying on the second rotation of his helicopter blades. That’s roughly a second. It’s a small but handy gauge to help know when he’s about to fly off.

The second bullet point in the app’s 'How to play’ section says that you can unlock extra characters if you get past four girders, which at this point sounds like an evil little tease, because I highly doubt anyone will ever make it past three of the irritating green bars and their ruthless hammer accomplices.

So long as you’re okay with spending hours of your life watching a small and prospectively-cute little helicopter monster thingy fall to the ground thousands upon thousands of time, go and give Swing Copters a whirl. It’s free on the App Store, and Apple has currently stuck it on the front page for a week in the Featured section, so just scroll down.

And, as the final line of the tiny Description which Nguyen has written on the App Store’s listing says with something of a sarcastic smirk:

“Enjoy the game.”