I died again, again, and again.

I swear I got that little yellow chicken nugget around the tubes. But apparently not.

Game over.

Your score: 35. A new high score.

Flappy Bird, Stratford students’ latest addiction, is a game app with terrible graphics and a deceptively simple objective: guide a little yellow bird around an endless series of green pipes which dangle menacingly from the air.

Fly until you die. That’s it. There are no levels, no extra lives or bonus rounds, and no end. You tap your screen (although the game is available on computers, most students play it as an app on their smart phones) to keep the bird aloft and guide it around the pipes.

When students first pick up the game, it seems as though the little bird lacks the self-preservation instinct of most non-digital species, ramming itself into the green tubes which are always blocking the flight path. Earning a score in the double digits can take a week.

Senior Mallory Maxwell, who reported her current high score is stuck somewhere in the twenties, is just one of the many Stratford students currently battling a Flappy Bird addiction.

“I kind of hate the game and feel like a nerd when I play it,” said Maxwell, adding that despite her frustration she cannot seem to turn the game off. “I can never get the bird where I want it to go. It’s really annoying.”

Senior Holly Bean, with a high score of 37, said that the main reason she even downloaded the game is because she found that most of her peers were playing it so she thought that she wanted to try it out also.

Only a handful of students with wills of steel have managed to resist downloading the app to their devices.

“Everyone was getting addicted to it and I didn’t want to get addicted to it,” Sophomore Wehbe Lee said. “I knew if I downloaded it I’d play it all the time.”

Now they may never get the chance.

Flappy Bird’s frustrated fans finally drove the games creator, Dong Nguyen, to remove his painfully addictive game from the app store last Sunday, Feb. 9.

Before taking the app down, Nguyen told his twitter followers that he “cannot take this anymore” but he will continue to make gaming apps.

The game, once free, is now selling at wildly inflated prices online. At last check, iPhone and Android users are selling their devices on ebay with the game installed in it for as high as $6,100.

But students who missed out on Flappy Bird – or don’t happen to have six large lying around – can download free knock-offs like Splashy Fish, Fly Birdy, City Bird, Flappy Bee, Flappy Pig, Flappy Superhero.