Why You Can Trust CNET Floppy Candidate is Flappy Bird with Clinton and Trump
The Washington Post builds a Flappy Bird spinoff featuring major US presidential candidates in the 2016 election. Can you keep Bernie Sanders and Marco Rubio from crashing?
Perhaps the US presidential race would be more fun to follow if the candidates could fly?
The Washington Post on Monday released a mobile game called Floppy Candidate that essentially mimics the gameplay elements from the hit game Flappy Bird by replacing the airborne bird with 2016 presidential hopefuls.
"A team of in-house engineers, designers and producers came together to build an app that helps you play along this election season -- quite literally," the publication says in a post about the game.
Don't remember Flappy Bird? The addictive mobile game soared to 50 million downloads on the App Store between its debut in 2013 and its abrupt removal by the creator in February 2014.
Like Flappy Bird, the 8-bit-style Floppy Candidate has players controlling a character as they navigate through obstacles while feverishly tapping the screen to keep their candidate in the air. Players can choose from one of six presidential candidates to start -- Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio -- with an update supposed to come soon that will add the rest.
The gameplay for Floppy Candidate is pretty much identical to Flappy Bird and the scores of other clones that cropped up after the original was taken off the market, but it adds an educational twist.
In addition to navigating through obstacles from giant old-school tape recorders to the Washington Monument, Floppy Candidate players collect question-mark coins that challenge them to answer a multiple-choice trivia question about the candidate. Yes, it will tell you the correct answer if you get it wrong. And players can catch up on the latest news from the campaign trail by clicking news from the app's main screen.
Things get fun when you inevitably crash your character into an obstacle and the game spits out a quote specific to that candidate and that obstacle. When Donald Trump hits a US-Mexico border wall, for example, the game plays an audio clip of Trump saying, "I will build a great, great wall." Hillary, meanwhile, says, "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas" when she crashes into her email servers or the Department of State.
Floppy Candidate went from vague idea to functioning game in just a few weeks, says the Post, and no one from the team had ever built a game before. "The Post is pushing the limits on how to deliver content," the publication says. "That means experimenting, concocting, scheming and debating new and creative ways to help users engage with the news."
Floppy Candidate can be downloaded for free on the App Store for iOS and on Google Play or the Amazon App Store for Android devices.