The old and the new
To the uninitiated, the Angry Birds games are as follows; catapult a bird across the screen to collide with pigs that are often hidden behind obstacles. Angry Birds is a cute catapults-and-castles kind of artillery game. Artillery games have been going for a very long time (1976!), you might have also played Worms, itself influenced by Scorched Earth and Gorilla for PC/DOS.The headline new feature in Angry Birds Space is the game physics- multiple gravity sources make play much less predictable. The play takes place on a screen which may contain planets, asteroids or other floating-in-space things like space ships. Planets have their own gravity fields, which are visualised like a blue aura around them. Sometimes, with several gravitational bodies on screen, your projectile bird performs all kinds of bends and swerves before it reaches its final destination.
The Angry Bird trajectory curves depending on the bird's velocity and the planet's mass.
Inevitable in any new version of a game franchise are the new or extra power-ups and characters. The new birds include an Ice Bomb Bird and a Space Eagle which uses wormhole technology to squash the enemy pigs! For older gamers it's good to see the five included retro mini-games, unlocked by destroying golden eggs on some of the games levels. I say retro because the games are influenced by very old classics like Space Invaders and Breakout.
"Angry Space Bird Invaders"
The prices on various platforms are as follows; $0.99 on iPhone and Android (69p). Also the Android platform has a free, ad-supported version. On Mac its $4.99 (£2.99) and PC its $5.95 (or you can say you are from Europe and pay €5.95!) - quite a lot more. The developer, Rovio, seems to be making hay while the sun shines on this franchise with lots of merchandise available.
