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I love that damn game!!!

‘Angry Birds’ tops the mobile pecking order
The mega-popular Angry Birds did not hatch perfectly formed.
Before the mobile video game landed in Apple’s App Store, the birds and their porcine enemies both needed seasoning.
The birds now hop eagerly as they await a chance to divebomb the pigs that stole their eggs. If bombardments fail, you hear the grunting of the pigs ó which are green, thanks to the swine-flu scare that hit as Angry ideas were gelling for the Finnish developers at Rovio Mobile. “They even had runny noses in character sketches,” says Rovio’s Ville Heijari.
During the polishing stages of the game, “we were determined to add more character and more personality,” says Joe Wee, co-founder of U.K.-based mobile game publishers Chillingo, which worked with the designers.
Other additions included a trajectory line that remains after a bird is fired from the slingshot. And the ability for players to pinch and zoom and pan left and right, before taking a turn, are “tiny things that add up,” he says.
There’s no telling whether Angry Birds would have laid an egg without these tweaks.
But with them, the game has soared beyond phenomenon status. Players have bought more than 10 million copies from the Apple Store and more than 100 million across the other platforms.
Rovio has sold 2 million plush Angry Birds toys and branched out into shirts and hoodies. And last month, the developer released a new version, in which you free caged exotic birds ó a tie-in to the Fox animated film Rio, out Friday. Angry Birds: Rio, which comes in free and paid versions on iPhone (99 cents) and iPad ($2.99) and free for Android devices, had 10 million downloads in its first 10 days. Coming soon: an Easter edition.
Angry Birds demonstrates the huge potential for the perfect mobile game in a global marketplace that Juniper Research expects to rise from $6 billion in 2009 to $11 billion in 2015.
But what goes into a “perfect” mobile game? Experts say it should:
ï Be easy (but not too easy) to play. The goal with Angry Birds, Heijari says, was to make it playable by anyone, with “a core game-play mechanic that you can instantly grasp,” he says. “Simplicity was always the top priority.”
ï Be quick to play. The best mobile games let you play for just a few minutes or an extended period, says Andrew Stein of PopCap Games, creator of Bejeweled and Plants vs. Zombies. Also important: Mobile games can “be disrupted at any time by a phone call or a text,” he says.
ï Have a “look.”Angry Birds’ “audiovisual design was in line with this: simple, basic shapes (and) bright colors,” Heijari says. Another Chillingo-published game, Cut the Rope, stars the green, google-eyed Om Nom, who antsily awaits candy you deliver to him. “It’s important to create characters users get emotionally attached to,” Wee says.
ï Be addictive. The best mobile games call to you from your purse, backpack or pocket.
When all these factors come together, word of mouth can go viral. “People tell you, ‘You gotta play Angry Birds,’ ” says analyst John Fletcher of research firm SNL Kagan, which estimates that U.S. customers spent nearly $600 million on mobile games in 2010. “People get it.”