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Angry Birds Space has meteoric success

by Mark Tyson on 27 March 2012, 14:00

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In just three days since release the latest in the stratospherically-popular line of Angry Birds games has reached a downloads tally of over 10,000,000! Angry Birds Space was released last Thursday and made simultaneously available on four major platforms; PC, Mac, iOS and Android. This release was preceded by an extensive, and one would assume expensive, advertising and promotional campaign that seems to have pushed the right buttons for gamers all around the world. Reaching the top spot of the iOS download chart within hours, the new Angry Birds Space has also had critical acclaim to match its download success.

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.

angry birds space gameplay
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
"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 (Ā£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.


HEXUS Forums :: 13 Comments

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It's coming out quick with these Angry Bird game variations, Angry Birds Rio was only just made available a few weeks ago

Erm.. what?

wikipedia
Based on the wildly successful Angry Birds, Angry Birds Rio was released for devices using Apple's iOS, Google's Android and Mac OS X in March 2011
No windows phone 7 is rather telling. Not looking good for Windows Phone 7 is it…
cheesemp
Not looking good for Windows Phone 7 it is…



I changed your answer so I could get a Yoda picture in this thread!!


:p
I have always maintained that Windows Phone 7 is too little and too late. Nokia with all it's fanfare is struggling to sell many Win 7 phones and I can't see it improving much.
shame because I like the Nokia 800 and windows on it. I think Android has become a complete mess and Apple - well its Apple. If the Nokia 900 was available in the UK, I'd probably jump on the windows mobile wagon.

But, with news that the most popular mobile game is not being made for the format does signal a nail in the coffin.