For the second time in less than a week, a game from an unknown game developer with sub-par graphics and simplistic gameplay has rocketed to the top of Apple’s App Store charts.
Red Bouncing Ball Spikes has arisen from nowhere to take the number paid app position in Apple’s App Store, blowing our minds away and making us wonder what in the heck is happening. Unlike Flappy Bird whose popularity can be explained partly by social media, the rise of Red Bouncing Ball Spikes is far curious and suspicious.
For the second time in less than a week, a game from an unknown game developer with sub-par graphics and simplistic gameplay has rocketed to the top of Apple’s App Store charts.
Red Bouncing Ball Spikes has arisen from nowhere to take the number paid app position in Apple’s App Store, blowing our minds away and making us wonder what in the heck is happening. Unlike Flappy Bird whose popularity can be explained partly by social media, the rise of Red Bouncing Ball Spikes is far more curious and suspicious.
According to Gamasutra, Red Bouncing Ball Spikes is based on a $10 template sold on GameSalad. Apparently, even the graphics are not much changed. Moreover, while the game is listed as developed by Louis Leidenfrost, users at GameSalad’s forum suggest it’s a pseudonym for Mateen Pekan.
Over at Kotaku, Luke Plunkett notes that the app only has 93 user ratings ranging from either 1 star to 5 stars, with nothing in between. This is always a bad sign that something is amiss. Mr. Plunkett’s own review sides with the 1-star crowd:
“It is, for want of a more eloquent term, a piece of shit.”
Curious, I played it. I wouldn’t describe it in terms of excrement, but it seriously could be any game you play for free on the hundreds of thousands of Flash and HTML5 sites on the Web.
It’s a fun little diversion, but definitely not worth the $.99 I paid to try it out. Unlike Flappy Bird where you can at least theorize that the developer is the luckiest man on earth, with Red Bouncing Ball Spikes, the clues suggests there may have been a lot more than luck involved.
