Angry Birds and the Magic Equation
As someone occasionally mystified by the rubbish that people buy on "grown-up" consoles, I find the App Store a much more rational place. I can account logically for the success of almost every big hit in the Top 50 – Fruit Ninja and Flight Control and Flick Kick Football are brilliant games, FIFA and Tiger Woods enormous franchises with 20-year histories, Peggle and The Secret Of Monkey Island are excellent conversions of classic titles sold for a tiny fraction of what they cost on other platforms, and so on.
Even Doodle Jump can be explained away (despite the presence of numerous near-identical but superior games) by a combination of fortuitous timing and commendably-frequent and substantial updates bolstering an unspectacular but still pretty enjoyable game.
But as for the year-long chokehold exerted on the top of the charts by Angry Birds, I just don't get it.
I must admit, I haven't progressed very far to make that judgement. The first time I played the Lite version I got stuck on the fourth level (ie 1.4), and after about 50 attempts to hit the exact pixel the game had arbitrarily selected as the "right" one to solve the stage I gave up, partly out of frustration but mostly boredom. I just didn't see the entertainment value in repeatedly stabbing at a giant fruit cake with a knitting needle in the hope of blindly hitting a particular raisin.
Subsequently – out of a sense of professional duty – I ploughed through to the end and then onto the full version, but the game's fundamental characteristics didn't appear to change any and I had no more fun.
Angry Birds, in fact, reminds me a lot of the worst aspects of the seminal puzzle game Lemmings. Which is to say, it's nearly always obvious what you're supposed to do, but the game then makes actually doing it a miserable fiddly chore, based on a demand for extraordinary precision that it doesn't give you the tools to achieve.
Your bird catapult comes with no calibration, no way of knowing that your last shot (which fell just short) was fired at 65 degrees and 90% power and so maybe you want 64 degrees or 92% next time. You have to guess both trajectory and power, based on looking at a tiny area of a tiny screen and made worse by having to zoom right out if you want to have any idea of where you're actually shooting.
And if you do manage to somehow fluke it despite all these handicaps, the game grades your success by equally haphazard and impenetrable rules. Beat the first stage with a single shot and you might be awarded one star or the maximum three for what appeared to be two identical outcomes, with no clues as to why one was deemed better than the other.
Neither clearing a level nor getting the maximum score for it involve any repeatable skill, they're simply lotteries. It's basically like playing golf blindfolded – take 100 swings in the dark with someone pointing you in approximately the right direction and eventually you'll get the ball in the hole, but you might as well have gotten a monkey to do it for all the pride you can take in the achievement.
(Come to think of it, getting a monkey to do it would actually be quite a lot more impressive. And lucrative.)
So why has it sold millions? Frankly I haven't the foggiest – it's not like the App Store is short on cute cheap puzzle games that are a hundred times better, and it can't just be because people buy whatever's in the top 10, because it had to get into the top 10 in the first place. It doesn't even look especially pretty – Retina graphics or not – once you've zoomed the view out far enough to make a level playable. (See the second screenshot above.)
Interestingly, though, the game's developers claim that it's all maths. According to an interview in the print edition of this month's Develop magazine, Finnish studio Rovio claims that it has uncovered a "magic equation", a formula that guarantees a game's success.
Naturally they don't spell out what this equation is – indeed, the company's COO Niklas Hed says "It's easy enough to make an equation for the outline of a good game, but with making a really good game there is this magic in it that you can't define so easily… it's about setting up a place where you can find the spark needed". Whatever the heck that means.
He is, however, adamant that the equation does exist, adding "I'm so glad we have an equation like this, because we know why we made Angry Birds as successful as it is."
If so, it's obviously been a while in the making – none of Rovio's dozens of previous games ring any triumphal bells (anyone fondly recall War Diary Torpedo?), and neither of their previous iPhone games – ponderous 2D horror adventure Darkest Fear and horribly complicated stacking puzzler Totomi – are names carved in the pantheon of App Store smash hits either.
But maybe they only just perfected it. I guess until Rovio's next game arrives and we see whether they really do have a foolproof recipe for making multi-million-megahits, a "magic equation" makes as much sense as the explanation for Angry Birds as anything else.
Think of it as a twist on gambling addiction.
Generally, if you gamble, you lose more often than you win. So, you equate the sensation/anticipation of gambling with a masochistic sort of pleasure. Over time, winning becomes less of an end in itself and more a way of funding the losing.
Same with AB. It's not 'trial and error' (because, as you say, there's no quantifiable way to learn and refine). It's 'lose until you win'.
Having started playing Angry Birds on my 1st Gen iPod Touch I can see how it's a frustratingly annoying game (and I pity the poor Android players…). Stabbing at a tiny screen doesn't work very well at all.
However, on my iPad it's a totally different game – the bigger screen makes all the difference. It's still impossible to adjust shot power, but at least the aiming is much easier – if you can see the start and end points, trajectory based games are relatively simple once you learn how far stuff goes.
You see, if you play it enough, and fail enough times it is possible to accurately aim things. By the time I'd got to the final set of levels in the game I was accurately destroying everything on the first go. if you have the determination to not stop playing, it's possible to brute-force learn how to aim things simply because you're doing it so often. Kind of like brute-force learning your multiplication tables.
The scoring is a bit random, I really don't understand how completing a level on the first hit isn't counted as 3 stars. Also, the last set of levels with the big fat red bird is somewhat tedious and not that challenging since it just bludgeons everything out the way. I get the feeling the designers got a bit bored making levels towards the end.
It was a fun game, but I don't think I'll bother playing through it again.
It is just gambling and yes that is what people want provided you pretend it isn't just gambling.
Anyhow here, try this flash game I made ages ago,
http://bowwow.wetgenes.com/ nobody likes it, but I think it works quite well at turning the feeling I had playing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Wars
into a random daily puzzle.
Consider it an antidote.
Their magic formula will probably consist of making Angry Bird sequels from now on. If they were that confident they're cracked the code they'd be making new original titles.
When you destroy something, it adds points (with a visible indication of how many points you've earned). Anything destructible adds points. Spare Birds add points too, but it's possible to earn more points by using all your birds – in certain situations.
Stars are awarded based on score. It is possible to improve your score with practice, forethought and accuracy (though, much as with pool it's possible to pull off some amazing fluke shots). I know this because I spent a lot of time trying to improve my Angry Birds: Seasons score. This is amazingly simple, basic and easy to observe.
I think you're a man of the right principles, Stu, but you're also the guy who once claimed the PlayStation could emulate the SNES on national telly(text). This is a serious mess-up of a post almost on a level with that. Less of the hubristic ignorance, please.
You sure do care about Angry Birds.
Viewers! Welcome our guests from Something Awful! Apparently I’m “spergin’”, which I’m sure is modern young-person internet slang for “jolly super”.