I spent ten minutes earlier playing Angry Birds on the iPod Touch of a friend. The game is available for play on the iPhone or iPod Touch, provided that your device has the proper updates required to play the game.
Angry Birds is a game starring a bunch of differently colored birds who are angry… angry at pigs who apparently have done something wrong. I do not know what these pigs did (probably mass genocide of birds?), but the introductory cutscene-type deal seemed unappealing and cartoony so I skipped it.
Most of the ten minutes I spent playing Angry Birds was actually comprised of listening to my friends tell me about the controls. Apparently, these furious fowl are willing to jump on a slingshot and have someone finger them into position to be released all cannon-like in order to obliterate some pigs. This smacks of many MMORPG tropes, such as the suicide mission trope and the band of heroic fowl trope. By comparison, World of Warcraft and LOTRO both have chickens in them, and I assume they are also rather angry at the misrepresentation of their species as a fowl race.
Much like other MMORPG’s before it, Angry Birds is actually quite the intriguing multiplayer game, but for a different reason entirely. It involves a system of gaming known as “sharing,” which is commonly unheard of in many MMORPG’s as it requires people to relinquish control of the game in order to allow other people equal time in completing or failing objectives. That said, the addition of a sort of ranking system to determine who should best be set in the sharing roster may become an intriguing development for the game, should its developers decide to implement it, as it opens up an entirely new metagame that can enthrall its sizable fanbase into playing.
With that, it can be said that Angry Birds is one of the most innovative MMORPG’s I’ve had the experience of playing. Despite its lack of a crafting system and its rather lackluster quest implementation, Angry Birds serves as the immutable metaphor for the human spirit, as man, like an Angry Bird, must learn to overcome obstacles together in order to succeed in killing people who want to do other things which you disagree with.
EDIT: For the record, I do not take money from Rovio. They have not paid me to say anything. But I would like some money, so if you could send some my way, that’d be nice, Rovio. 
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16 Responses to 10 Minutes with Angry Birds: Some Impressions
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I like how they’re rolling out the content, but part of me wishes they’d take a note from Blizzard and go back and change the starter zones. Maybe put some of the areas under water.
Can pigs and angry birds swim? Maybe they should introduce a dog and cat race for players as well….
They’re essentially druidic, they can shapeshift to their water forms. Birds change to fish, pigs change to manatees.
Listen, if you’re not going to read the text to know all this, maybe you shouldn’t be writing about it.
BUT I HAVE OPINIONS THAT PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW ABOUT!
IMPORTANT OPINIONS THAT ACT LIKE FACTS UNDER CERTAIN MENTAL CONSTRUCTS!
*sigh* So much mis-information.
The birds are angry cuz the pigs stole their eggs. PIGS LOVE EGGS!!
And no mention of the holiday expansion pack!!? Or the news that the game has gone multi-platform. That’s very unusual for an MMO, after all. WoW, EVE .. what else is multi-platform? Some crappy java based game maybe.
Angry Birds came out on the intel and PSN platforms just this week. Doing all these ports was a fowl job but someone did them, and without any stealth nerfs.
PS: You’ll do anything for candy, won’t you?
I hate candy. I am a principled man with principles, and no amount of *looks around* dishonorable bribes will sway me from the cause of talking about stuff I barely know.
Besides, what the hell kind of reason would a pig love an egg?
They need the eggs for baking cakes.
And I bet they Swiftly and Modestly Propose to kill their young and infirm to make clothes too!
Like Slurms say, for cakes and…
to have with bacon. You can’t eat bacon without eggs, and pigs LOVE BACON!
I eat bacon without eggs. I thought that was normal. Are you implying, kind sir, that I am not normal?
how dare you sir, only 10 minutes with a game? You’re not allowed to talk about your first impressions with a game after so little time. You are a blogger and must be held to higher standards!
If you had read what I had written, you would have known that a large part of the MMORPG aspect of Angry Birds stems from its “sharing” mechanic. Relinquishing control after a set period of time would thus be a logical assumption to that effect.
don’t belittle me with your logic! I take great umbridge at this!
The word you’re looking for is “umbrage” and not Umbridge.
Unless you take a great minor Harry Potter character at this.
i’m acting silly and you’re correcting my grammar. you ruined it for me.
LOL. I thought correcting grammar was part of flame wars.