Angry Birds

Angry Birds is like Scorched Earth meets ragdoll physics. (Younger players might go with Worms instead of Scorched Earth, but I say get off my lawn, dammit!)

That simile should be the other way around, really. It's pretty clear that the focus here was on the physics simulation for the stacked objects (bricks and pigs) and how they fall over when other objects (birds) impact them. There's a crucial bit missing, though, in my opinion -- there's basically zero specificity in the launching of the birds.

This is a big deal (or seems like a big deal to me, anyway). Once you have an idea about where you want to hit the structure, the angle and velocity at which you want to launch your bird, you have pretty close to zero chance of reproducing that result. Sure, the game gives you a marker for the trajectory of your previous bird, but it keeps the specific settings that produced that trajectory hidden from the player. All we get as interface is a touchscreen flick-and-release mechanic that winds up being basically random.

Which is goddamn frustrating!

The level I stopped playing on (shown in the screenshot above) was simply impossible for me. I don't know why, either. I even went to the extent of watching a video walkthrough on YouTube in order to find out how to beat this particular level. I hate, hate, hate video walkthroughs, so you can be sure that I really, really, really tried to get past this level. Nonetheless, even knowing exactly what I needed to do in this case, I was unable to ever get the damn thing to work. I made shots that looked to me exactly like what I saw in the walkthrough, but it never worked out exactly the same way. Pretty close, pretty damn close, but never close enough for this piece of shit fucking game.

How can the game designers here have set the bar for success so high for the player and then given them such fucking crappy goddamn controls in order to meet those requirements?! The choices made in this game's development blow my mind.

All this game needs in order to get over this ridiculous hump is to give the player some persistent settings for the launching of the birds. Just numbers, for crying out loud! The game obviously uses math to calculate these trajectories and the results of the impacts, so share that information with the player. Give them control over it! How do we know the game uses math for these calculations? It's software! It can't not be math!!

So this is why I put Scorched Earth first in my simile to describe this game. Scorched Earth was all about player control over carefully calculated trajectories and impacts. I see no reason why this game couldn't be as tightly controlled. I can only assume that the developers started with the knocking down blocks physics idea and then saddled this piece of shit (or really excellent) game with really shitty touchscreen controls. Way to fucking go.

There's a lot of cursing in this critique. I think that's because, other than being a goddamn unplayable pile of fucking shit, Angry Birds is a really great game. Yeah, that's right -- I feel like this would be one of my favorite games so far except for a single element that ruins the whole experience entirely. That makes me angry, thus the swearing. Fuck!

Other niggles about this game might include the fact that it's annoying how the game doesn't want to show you the entire level at once (it is possible, of course) and the long delay after one completes a level. The sounds are okay, I guess, although I think they'd get repetitive and annoying before too long. The different types of birds are really brilliant... and I don't want to think about it because I'll get all angry again about not being able to enjoy such a nifty idea. Fuck! All of these observations are pointless, of course, in the face of the fact that the game is fundamentally screwed.

So sad.