March 15, 2011

By Michael Lowell

Angry Birds
Android, DS, iOS, Mac, PC, PSP, et. al (reviewed on Android with Nook Color)
Developed: Rovio Mobile
Publisher: Clickgamer Media (Mobile)
Release Date: December 9, 2009

Let’s pretend the year is 1990.  That was a pretty damn good year for video games, right?  Take my word for it.  North America was greasing their grips with Super Mario Brothers 3 and role-playing introduction Final Fantasy, two critical installments in two of the medium’s most significant franchises.  The Western end of the Pacific pond was getting an introduction to the Super Nintendo and flagship title Super Mario World, a game that will probably get its own wing in the Platforming Pantheon.  And if you were one of those fat virgins playing video games on a personal computer, space shooter Wing Commander and cult franchise Commander Keen were getting a lot of your love.  Where am I going with this?  Pretend that in this great year for commercial video games, tech magazines and industry executives are sending praise down unfamiliar roads.  Video game journalism™ and the video game industry are raving about a man by the name of Wes Cherry.  Wes Cherry?  Who the flip is Wes Cherry?  Oh, he’s important.  Wes Cherry’s video game is on its way to killing productivity at business offices around the Western World.  And people are demanding that Wes Cherry’s incredible achievement get “the respect it deserves”.  Tech magazines are penciling in his work as an atypical Game of the Year candidate, asking how one man could slay the gigantic Nintendo dragon and create one of the most popular video games of 1990.  A video game for adults in a market crowded by products for children?  A video game for men and women who don’t play video games?

The game that I’m referring to?  You probably figured it out.  Either that, or you had Minesweeper in the back of your head.  I’m talking about Solitaire, a freebie add-on for the Windows 3.0 operating system.  “What are you talking about?  That’s crazy talk!  Nobody would have been dumb enough to label Solitaire a Game of the Year candidate!  Solitaire is just a simple time-waster!  It’s a game you hook your brain into when you get a couple minutes of free time!”  You’re totally correct.  That love-triangle between Cherry, Solitaire, and the public is totally hypothetical.  I was creating a course of events where Wes Cherry actually got some recognition for his work and Microsoft didn’t screw him out of any possible royalties.  I was fabricating the ridiculous course of events that has now swarmed the release, rise, and fascination with mobile phone killer app Angry Birds.  It’s the mobile gaming sensation that’s sweeping the nation!  And if you ask somebody why they like the game, you’ll probably hear something like this: “I can play it when inbetween the important Facebook comments that define my day!”; “Angry Birds speaks to my level!”; “It’s easy to learn and difficult to master!”  I have one hell of a news flash for you: The Street Fighter series is easy to learn and difficult to master.  Starcraft: Brood War is easy to learn and difficult to master.  Civilization is easy to learn and difficult to master.  A child can pick up any of those games and play them competently.  Getting good at them can take years and decades.  If you concluded your last gaming session and convinced yourself that Angry Birds is “easy to learn and difficult to master”, I would like to address a statement to you and Mr. Mobile Gaming Consumer Base: The ballistics genre is decades old and it’s been done a hell of a lot better.  Just because nobody could market an archetype for ballistcs games doesn’t mean they never happened; that nobody found the Halo that spawned a tactical shooter frenzy in a genre dominated by a diversity of deathmatch, squad-based, and single-player shooters.  The consumer’s ignorance of the niche market for ballistics games does not mean Angry Birds is any good.

As a success story, Angry Birds is McDonald’s.  It’s cheap and it’s disposable and nobody’s claiming it’s the height of the business.   (At least I hope not.)  As a game, it’s best compared to another famous multi-multi-platform puzzler: Lemmings.  Angry Birds is Lemmings in reverse: Rather than using your specialized, disposable critters to construct a means of conquering the environment, you’re out to destroy it.  What are we planning to destroy?  Well, there’s a bunch of pigs.  They stole eggs from a bunch of birds.  Just like the real-world rivalry between birds and pigs, shit is going down.  Clearly defying their name sake, these Angry Birds are going to disperse retribution for the loss of their unborn loved ones by flinging themselves at the pigs’ strongholds.  Ever had a bird fly into your window?  Yeah, that’s Angry Birds.  Staying true to the shallow mobile gaming market, Angry Birds is not complicated: It’s your job to snuff out those pig bastards with an army of willing participants. Tiny bluebirds can be sent into a spread formation at the tap of the screen; black birds act as bombs; white birds act as bombers.  But see, there’s a catch: Blue birds work well against ice blocks; red and yellow birds need to avoid the stone structures that black and white birds can dispatch.  The onus is on the player to make sure the birds get to the right spot.

It’s so easy, a smartphone user can do it!

Absurd theme?  Totally.  It’s befitting of a product likely inspired by flash game developer Armor Games and their popular Crush the Castle, itself a ridiculous cacophony of faux medieval machismo.  There’s a reason Angry Birds’ commitment to senseless violence is earning the franchise some “animated series” treatment.* (The lone gripe?  In a war between cartoon birds and cartoon pigs, emphasizing the “total” in total warfare isn’t a good idea.  The kid-friendly Advance Wars got it right: No civilians allowed; the only participants were the ones who wanted to pick up a gun.  Angry Birds begins with a siege upon the finest castles and bunkers in the Swineland and works its way to the enemy’s houses and swimming pools.  Awkward.)  The actual artwork and the actual sounds are not going to win any awards.  At least the Rovio art team got the basics down.  In their mad dash to fashion a web of unappealing backgrounds and sprites, they at least notched a clean color palette and the uncluttered action necessary for a good ballistics game.  (The “great minds” behind the industry’s “triple-A titles” haven’t been able to figure this out during this entire generation of video games, but the guys “making cheap mobile phone games” got their heads around it.  Amusing.)

So it’s simple and it’s cute.  What’s wrong with the game?  For starters, I don’t think much of “polished simplicity”.  You can grind your Super Meat Boys and your Pokémanz into fucking gemstones and I would still call them average games.  I’ll choose “polished complexity” or even “imperfect complexity” over “polished simplicity” every single time.  There’s a reason that Deus Ex, Starcraft, and Civilization are still played as they came out of the box and games like Tetris and Pac-Man had to reinvent themselves in order to remain successful.  Of course, this all assumes that Angry Birds is a polished game.  This assumes that Angry Birds is only being limited by a developer’s desire to secure a large consumer base.  That’s not the case.  Angry Birds is trying to be a puzzle game.  It’s simply using ballistics as a means of execution, where no amount of planning is going to get the job done if you whiff the shot.  The star of the show is deciding where to fire at.  For this reason, you need good physics that can recreate the same scenario time after time.  The physics system in Angry Birds is absolute shit.

Puzzle Gaming 101: The same action should always lead to the same events.  Every time.  Puzzle games are not supposed to be slot machines.  Puzzle games are supposed to be a science.  Look at Bejeweled.  That game has somehow defied its own mediocrity, a game built around a chain reaction system (undoubtedly inspired by the also-mediocre Columns) best described as a gift from God.  Bejeweled strategy discussion is “clear the rows and pieces that lead to the largest random chain reactions”.  So what, you think it’s unfair to compare Bejeweled with Angry Birds?  After all, Bejeweled is a true puzzle game and Angry Birds is a ballistics game, right?  At least that’s what you thought?  A number of levels in Angry Birds (particularly in the early game and then scattered through later words) require the player to aim a single shot and call it a day.  And then you will find that your one-hundred separate-yet-equally-accurate blasts will yield one-hundred different outcomes, all varying slightly in the way that Swineland comes crashing down.

Is that a problem?  You bet.  It wouldn’t be a gigantic issue if the game was transparent in its display of critical information.  Worms was comfortable in disclosing how much damage the enemy was taking and how hard the wind was blowing over a decade ago.  Worms gave you all the information you needed to work with.  Even if the outcome proved to be random, you could get a gauge of what results to expect.  Information is critical.  The player needs access to the methodology.  Angry Birds does not display these figures.  The player is essentially clueless on what to make of the resulting carnage.  Pigs take bumps and bruises, buildings take wear and tear, buildings come crashing to the ground.  That’s it.  You can’t see a percentage of remaining health and you can’t determine the velocity and trajectory of your shots.  Well, as one internet critic proclaimed in his personal roast of Civilization V and its artificial intelligence, erratic and indescribable outcomes are inherently random outcomes.* And guess what?  Random outcomes do not work in the delicate nature of puzzle games.  Period. The developer’s job is to minimize any and all occurrence of chance in their puzzle games.  The developer gets to randomize the player field and mirror that playing field in a versus mode.  That’s all we’ll let him get away with.  Make all the comments you would like about the random piece generator in Tetris, but later iterations were tweaked to stop passing out consecutive L’s like I was tuning in weekly to watch the Detroit Lions.  Random equals bad.  Static equals good.

Where they drop, nobody knows!

So let’s pose the question: Why would Rovio code their puzzle game to feature a rather noticeable element of chance?  And yes, this was a deliberate design decision.  Angry Birds wouldn’t have made it out of testing if “I can’t recreate the carnage” was an oversight (and if you want a second opinion to go with that scrap of tin foil, you can consult the level that is shaped like a plinko board).  It’s a very easy answer: The long-standing complaint of mobile phone games is that they lack depth.  They’re simple games for simple audiences.  This market is proving quite tough for dedicated mobile phone developers.  Sure, they don’t have a problem turning a profit.  But the companies making games for mobile phones don’t have the money to compete with the incredible body of knowledge that has forged the great computer and console games.  Rovio did an incredible thing: They did not have the money to create depth.  So what did they do?  They created the illusion of depth.  Voila!  Random physics! The player now believes there are numerous ways to complete each level, and if that boulder just keeps on rolling…wait for it, wait for it, there we go!  That doesn’t work in a puzzle game.  Puzzle games aren’t interesting if you can find dozens of ways to complete each of these very small levels.  The levels in Angry Birds are mazes with one entrance and a dozen exits.  “But you’re playing for score, stupid!  You’re trying to get a three-star score!  If you want to puss out with your one-star solution, go ahead.  But I’m finding the optimal way out!”  But that’s precisely the issue!  Without an element of chance, the only thing standing between a perfect score and the player is a little bit of practice and their imperfect touch screen.   (And yes, the touch screen is imperfect.  Rovio is fully aware of this.  You won’t find a level where you need to actually control the velocity of your birdman.  It’s “fire the fuck away” in this game.) The best players in the Angry Birds player base would quickly conquer Rovio’s most devious levels.  The player base would then recreate that “world record” video they saw on the internet, and the game wouldn’t be a lot of fun.

So that’s the idea: Rovio created a universe where even their own online walkthroughs (and I giggle at the idea of a developer showing their own fans how to beat the game) feature substantial incidents of dumb luck.  And how better to build confidence amongst casual gamers than designing a system where they can achieve the maximum three-star rating by utilizing the occasional bout of luck?  And then you will understand why long-time gamers show confusion and bewilderment at the assertion that Angry Birds is “easy to learn and hard to master”:  It’s hard to master because, very often, success hinges on luck.  Hell, Super Meat Boy at least had the right idea.  A portal didn’t randomly appear in front of the player and take him to the end of the level and allow him to side-step difficult jumps.  Super Meat Boy’s god status as a trial-and-error clusterfuck clicked for a lot of people because the player had to do everything right in order to conquer a level and move forward, even if the game mechanics were stacked firmly against the player.  What’s the joy in a game where my own input doesn’t mean as much as it should in getting me to the next level?  Where I conquer a level on the twentieth try because “everything just happened to fall my way this time”?

Does that mean Angry Birds is inherently unsalvageable?  Not necessarily.  Rovio at least had the presence to continue supplying a large amount of content for the game.  And in this flood of physics-kill-frenzy-based levels are a small batch of intelligently-designed battlefields that focus on the player’s ability to aim his shots and his ability to manage his ammunition.  Those are a pair of skills that still rest entirely on the player himself.  (Unsurprisingly, I’d posit most of these levels are the least entertaining sell for the wider audience.  You know, since they result in the smallest spectacle of destruction.)  In this handful of quality levels, Angry Birds is able to capture what the Lemmings late-game was able to do exceptionally well: Limit the margin for error and force players to be exceptionally deliberate about decisions.  Chance didn’t play into anything.  It was you versus the playing field.  That’s what a good puzzle game does.  And Angry Birds only does that some of the time.  After all, it can’t do it all of the time.  Not for a mainstream audience that simply won’t tolerate the punishing, grinding difficulty level that’s absolutely necessary in this kind of game.

“Stop your whining!  I like the game!  You’re thinking too hard about it!  Angry Birds tries to be fun and that’s what it is!”  Well, too bad.  Your scant knowledge of the medium isn’t the barometer.  The barometer is the medium itself.  A good video game compares favorably to the history of other good video games, not just the ones you’ve played.  So what does that mean?  It means that Angry Birds needs to be compared against the entire ballistics genre that inspired it.  That includes Crush the Castle, the game whose successes and failings inspired Angry Birds.  That includes the Worms franchise that has chugged along for nearly two decades and earned a  lot of praise.  That includes the Gunbound that took the Worms blueprint and turned it into an online multiplayer extravaganza.  I am not giving Angry Birds any bonus points for being the most popular of those games.  Not until you give me a decent physics system and build your levels around a course of events the player can actually recreate.  Figureheading the rise of mobile phone video games and dominating a market where “fart apps” rule with prejudice is a wonderful success story.  But America Online was also successful.  That doesn’t mean the service was any good.  I regret to inform you that the same criteria applies to your mobile gaming love child.

2 out of 5

(Games rated two-out-of-five will appeal to their target audience. But against the body of work produced in this forty-year-old medium? Against that copy of Beyond Good and Evil sitting on the rack for eight bucks? Yeah, it has issues.)

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Special Thanks To:

Rovio Mobile’s own web site, whose main-site screenshots comprise the illustrations in this review.* Why not take screenshots with the Nook?  Because I found out how to take screenshots but had no way to get them from Nook to computer.  Deal with it.