By Allan Maurer

UPDATED! DURHAM, NC – Kill those darn pigs, they’re laughing at me, I thought, loading another bird in its slingshot. I fire the bird, which, screaming a martial arts cry, careens toward a mass of stones protecting three green pigs. And bounces off. The pigs laugh, heh heh heh.

When I first heard of this “Angry Birds,” game, I thought, I’ll just try it out and see what all the fuss is about, shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. About 45 minutes later, I was stuck on level 14 and stopped. I couldn’t believe I had played for so long.

Whoever would have thought that sling-shooting red angry birds at towers of rock protecting little green pigs would be so addicting.  I sampled the popular “Angry Birds” game while testing a DROID PRO from Motorola for a review I’ll be doing here later. But I’m far from the only one the game hooked.

More than 40 million downloaded

More than 12 million copies of the 99-cent “Angry Birds” game have been downloaded, while 30 million copies of the free version, which includes ads, are on mobile phones.  On January 5, 2011, the game became available for Windows XP through Win 7 on teh Intel AppUP store, which targets netbooks.

According to Rovio, the Finland-based maker of “Angry Birds,” the iPhone version is played an average of 65 minutes a day by crazed pig killers. He said the ad-supported free version was projected to earn $1 million a month by the end of 2010. Also, by measuring how many people download updates, the company knows the game has a fairly amazing 80 percent retention rate.

The basic idea is that a bunch of pigs are stealing bird eggs and the birds retaliate.

On a recent train trip to Charlotte, the person sitting next to me was using a different DROID phone model. I was playing the game to kill time and asked him if he had tried it. I handed him the DROID PRO and for the next 20 minutes or so, he was immersed in shooting birds at towers of rock.

When I took the phone back, he looked on his own DROID and found the game. He was a goner for the rest of the trip. I put my phone in my pocket and took out my Kindle to do something a bit more productive.

The game recently celebrated its one year anniversary and just yesterday Sony announced it would be available on Playstation 3 and Playstation Mobile. It is currently available for the iPhone, iPad, and DROID phones. A Windows Mobile 7 version is in the works.

I’ve always wondered if your brain does the same type of calculus – subconsciously – to figure out the trajectory of the Angry Bird missiles as it does to accurately throw a rock, spear, baseball, football, or basketball. You do learn to improve your shots as you go, although it gets progressively more difficult.

There are a few tricks: if you touch a bird in flight at the right arc, it splits into three missiles, doing more damage than a single hit would to the structures protecting the egg-stealing pigs. I did find the small touch screen on the DROID PRO a problem at times. But it didn’t stop me from playing.

Mighty Eagle upgrade available

A recent update for the game included a special Holiday version and a Great Eagle feature.  The “Mighty Eagle” is like the Mighty Mouse of the Angry Bird world and blasts through some of the harder levels that may stymie players, but it has to be purchased.

A recent Associated Press article quoted Thomas Way, a computer sciences professor at Villanova University, who said, “It fulfills some kind of pleasure center in the brain.” He also said the game is oiling the wheels of mobile technology the way video games did for the PC.

Way notes that games and the games industry have been “A driving force behind technological development.”

He points out, too, that games like this that become widely known are common points of social interaction, much like talking about the latest TV show, movie, or news story is.

It certainly proved to be that for me.

Some folks do have a knack for it. While in Charlotte, I handed the DROID PRO to a teenager who managed to zap through more levels within a few minutes at a Christmas party than I had in several days.

She’s not alone either. The famous author Salman Rushdie claims he’s a “master at the game.”

Note: the author is red/green color deficient and mistakenly called the game pigs “pink” prior to correction.

Email TJS Editor Allan Maurer: Allan at TechJournal South dot com.

 

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Tags: Allan Maurer, Angry Birds, Droid Pro, mobile gaming, review, telecom