Angry Birds 1.0

Angry Birds is an excellent and addictive puzzle game. It was first launched on the iPhone and iPod Touch and has now been made available for some Android phones, Windows, and Mac OS X. It is said that the game will be launched for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 in the near future.

The game puts the Angry Birds against a group of evil pigs. Your objective is to kill the pigs on each level. To do this, the birds use a slingshot to launch themselves at the pigs and either destroy them directly, or collapse the environment surrounding them to kill them. The first few levels are easy enough that you can calculate the trajectory of the slingshot and kill the pigs rather directly. On following levels, they start using materials to protect themselves. They use wood, stone, and ice. Each material has a different strength and it will take more hits to destroy ice, than it will to destroy wood, for example. Not all your Angry Birds are the same. With the progression of the game, you get more powerful birds that behave differently on impact and have special powers.

The Mac port of this game has received varied reviews. Most of the bad reviews focus on the fact that the Mac game doesn't include as many levels as the iOS versions. The other frequent complaint is that playing the game with the multi-touch trackpad is often hard and it results in accidental mistakes. I played this on the iPhone, and multi-touch is the way to go. The trackpad on most Macs isn't as responsive as the glass screen on the iOS devices, though.