Indie developer Dong Nguyen has broken his silence following thesudden removal of his popular Flappy Bird game recently.In an interview with Forbes, Nguyen says the game was originally designed to be played "when you are relaxed." However, the notoriously difficult game, created in mid-2013, rose to fame recently, with some social network andYouTube users pointing out, comically, just how frustrating it is to navigate Mario-style pipes with a pixelated bird. "But it happened to become an addictive product. I think it has become a problem," explains Nguyen. To solve that, Nguyen removed the app last weekend, and he notes "it’s gone forever."

The popularity of the game, which Nguyen revealed to The Verge generates on average...

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Zhang Yimou, the director behind Hero and House of Flying Daggers and the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games opening ceremony, has paid $1.23 million for violating China's family planning laws. According to averified Sina Weibo account for Zhang's local district in Wuxi, he and wife Chen Ting paid around 7.5 million yuan ($1.23 million) to the local family planning bureau on February 7th. The cost covers an unplanned birth and social maintenance fee for the two children that the couple raised in violation of the country's one-child rules — Zhang and Chen have two sons and one daughter.

While the 35-year-old policy includes some exceptions for rural couples and has been loosened as part of larger legal changes,Zhang admitted to the...

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Rapper and actor Ice-T is well known as a big gamer, but recently he tried something a bit different — recording an audiobook set in the world of Dungeons & Dragons. As he recounts on his podcast, the fantasy book proved a daunting challenge for the Law & Order: SVU star. "Dungeons & Dragons is some of the most crazy, deep, deep, deep nerd shit ever invented," he explains. "Every word you're saying is made up. Motherfuckers talk like Yoda." The language proved difficult enough that the recording was spread out over two days, as opposed to the single afternoon he expected — it took Ice-T three and half hours to get through 25 pages of material. "This shit is impossible to read," he says. It's unclear which book he was reading, or when...

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