Angry Birds - The Playset

I resisted the urge to get Angry Birds for my iPhone, maybe due the people that were banging on about it were the sort of people that still do quizes and games on Facebook. But during a weak spell in October, seeing it on a friends iPhone (and being a lifetime gamer) I too downloaded it, and got hooked. It's such a simple concept, smashing up those rubbish buildings and knocking over those pigs is soo satisfying!!

It's the biggest selling game on iTunes, available for just 59p, and by August last year it had sold over 6.5million downloads , still topping the most paid app on the store as I type - a more expensive version was made available for iPads has sold over 200k and it's also the biggest selling on the newly launched App Store (Mac OSX 10.6.6 Download available here) so, you can now download it for your desktop too (I'm not going to do this btw).

So, after the t shirts and soft toys comes news from toy maker Mattel at the 2011 International CES that they are to release a physical version of the game in May.. Pictures below from iLounge

Now, this seems a little flawed to me. The cashing in whilst the game remains hot is fine, but a physical version - surely a lot of fun and challenge of the original iPhone game was its unpredictability - the fact that sometimes you think you'd done exactly the same shot as before, only to get different results? (Read this article from Wired "The Physics Of Angry Birds") With a physical game, once the bird hits those fake wooden plastic planks, the whole construction will collapse - and where is the fun in that? Please, friends and family reading - don't buy me this for Christmas 2011, and I've already got Buckeroo.

Update : Read an interview with Angry Bird's Mighty Eagle, Peter Vesterbacka - make of the game (and others) on Tech Crunch here.