If you haven’t heard of Angry Birds yet, don’t worry, you will soon. Actually you should be a little concerned because as trends go this one is hot. Even Dick Chaney knows about Angry Birds.
Angry Birds is a cute little game for the iPhone, iPad and many other devices. In a nut shell you aim birds at a target and try to knock it down. In the version we have been playing since Christmas you try to hit pigs. Annoying little pigs who grunt and mock your (my) inability to topple over the structures they hide in and thus destroy them.
It’s an addicting game, believe me.
I’m not sure why the birds are angry, though I suppose if I were being lobbed into annoying little pigs I might be a little pissed off too. Regardless, the makers of Angry Birds, Rovio, plan to turn the popular game into an animated series. Think Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Like most pulled-off-the-web-for-a-TV-show things I can’t imagine what the story line might be about. Shit My Dad says is a show currently on TV that was taken from a Twitter Feed. The show sucks but it has a few good zingers, though not enough to make me find it on the TV schedule and actually watch it. I’m sure the Angry Birds animated series will be a hit with kids all over the place but if the show sounds like the game it might drive parents crazy. There is no dialog, just sounds the birds and pigs make as things blow up around them. The lack of dialog has never prevented a show from being popular with kids, both Smurfs and Pokemon had quite the run and their dialog consisted of “It’s a smurftastic day in the smurfy woods” and for Pokemon all the writers had to do was have the characters say their names over and over again, just changing the inflection for get across tone.
Video games haven’t been around long enough to become true classics. They have not stood the test of time like Parcheesi, Scrabble or a game of Bingo. Families might gather around the Wii or Xbox to play these games and there might be the intense competition that a game like Parcheesi inspires but you can’t take it camping with you. Oh, wait, you can. Never mind. I’ve played a lot of video games over the last 20 years and some of them are wonderful. My son and I have been playing the Nintendo Zelda games since he was born (this might explain why he wants the Triforce tattooed on his back next month) but for some reason when I think of family fun I think of board games. Maybe because they are visible in old snapshots from when I was a kid and it’s difficult at best to take a picture of a family playing a video game and have the actual game come to mind years later when looking at the photograph. We might know we were playing the Wii but what game might be difficult to spot.
Not that it matters because our family hasn’t played a board game since last summer when I tried to get my daughter and some of her friends outside and used the game Life to entice her. At first it was fun to punch out all the pieces and set up the board but when it came time to play the game no one wanted to read the directions. There are no directions on video games, only cheat codes. Kids might not want to read directions on a board game but I promise you they will search out the internet to find the cheat codes.
I’m sure Angry Birds will be a hit. We will see McDonald’s include little Angry Birds in their Happy Meals and soon they will be everywhere.
Already I don’t want to play the game anymore.
I hope they don’t make a TV show out of Plants v Zombies because I love that game.
