Posts Tagged ‘angry birds’
Kids run up big bills thanks to fake, £15-a-pop, Angry Birds game
January 16th, 2013 • 4 Comments
There’s a number of people out there who have downloaded a dodgy version of Angry Birds to their phones, finding that they’ve been hit with a £15 charge every time they opened it.
It seems to be mostly children who have fallen foul of this rogue version, and some of them have run up bills beyond £500.
PhonepayPlus, mobile content regulators, have seen a 300% rise in complaints relating to children and app downloads in the past 12 months. Some of the complaints focus on free downloads which introduce in-app purchase options once the kids are hooked on a game. Then there’s the swine who create copies of popular games and plant malware in them.
A spokesman for PhonepayPlus said: “In one case, children as young as 11 years old downloaded free versions of popular games from the Android app store such as Angry Birds, Assassin’s Creed and Cut the Rope… in one case a 14 year old girl was tricked into paying for virtual credits in a game when a social media ‘friend’ said she had no credits to phone her dying grandmother.”
Elsewhere, children were tricked into sharing a promotion for supermarket vouchers from Tesco and Asda on Facebook, which misled them into taking part in a premium rate competition, which meant that up to 89,000 children were charged £5 every time a trivia question was sent to their phone.
PhonepayPlus continued: “Connected devices will define the age in which today’s children live and we are determined to ensure that they can receive the benefits while being protected from the risks. Smartphones in children’s pockets can burn holes in parent’s wallets, so we are working with partners across industry and other agencies to prevent this.”
If you need advice, see the phonebrain.org website.
Angry Birds meet Star Wars in unstoppable gaming combination
October 8th, 2012 • 8 CommentsIt’s the biggest mobile game series of all time (well, we’re guessing it is anyway), and Angry Birds is about to get a hell of a lot bigger as it teams up with notorious cash-generating sci-fi franchise Star Wars. Oh yes.
Coming on November 8th on iOS and Android, and accompanied by a vast range of cash-in crap, erm, merchandising, Angry Birds Star Wars will see the cast of the movies played by various birds (Luke Skywalker will be the red one). As you’d expect, the evil pigs will be Darth Vader and his mates.
Less impressively, the game will be a rehash of the oddly unsatisfying Angry Birds: Space game, which might be why the Birds people have teamed up with the Wars people.
Whatever happens, it’ll probably not as good as Malcolm Tucker’s attempt at a description of Star Wars…
Commercial Break: The most YouTubed ad of all time. What were we thinking?
July 31st, 2012 • 2 CommentsWe estimate that, over the history of mankind, approximately 80 million adverts have been made. We also estimate that more than 80 per cent of them are now on YouTube, allowing us to enjoy their insidious hidden messages all over again and maybe go out and purchase their products all over again.
But what is the most-watched YouTube advert of all time? Is it the one with the Smash aliens? The one where Kevin Keegan has a shower with Henry Cooper? The Kia-Ora one? No, it’s this – Angry sodding Birds. Almost SEVENTY FIVE MILLION HITS.
You can check out the rest of the top twenty over at Adweek…
Young man learns how to play Angry Birds
October 18th, 2011 • 14 CommentsWe’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – today’s youngling is totally down with the modern gadgetry and technology. Last week we brought you the kiddie that thought a magazine was an iPad, and now here’s another one of the tomorrow adults getting to grips with how Angry Birds works.
He picks it up straight away doesn’t he? Cool as a cucumber.
Google+ improves slightly with addition of games
August 11th, 2011 • 3 CommentsLast month, Google+ crept on to the social networking scene and it’s fair to say that it hasn’t been a huge success. If you’re a Twitter user, you might have found it as being like a different version of that service that goes at 1% of its speed while making you have to once again read the inanities of certain people who you’ve unfollowed on Twitter because they’re dicks, even though you have mutual friends. There’s probably a comparison to Facebook to be had there as well.
Anyhoo, is there actually a point to any of this? Oh yes, we were rambling on about the limitations of Google+. Well, it’s about to improve with GAMES. Google have teamed up with Zynga, the brainiacs behind FarmVille and CityVille and all that tripe and some of their games will be appearing in the new games section of Google+ that is available to some of you now, but will be rolled out in full shortly.
There’s others as well. Something called Bejeweled Blitz is there. And something called Angry Birds as well. You might have heard of them. Google say: “When you’re ready to play, the Games page is waiting—click the games button at the top of your stream. You can see the latest game updates from your circles, browse the invites you’ve received and check out games that people you know have played recently. The Games page is also where your game accomplishments will appear. So you can comfortably share your latest high score—your circles will only see the updates when they’re interested in playing games too.”
So Google+ just got a little bit more interestinger. While you’re on a roll Google, we’ve got a request that you might like to consider and that we think will catch on – scratch and sniff OAP volleyball videos next please.
Commercial Break: Tyson WILL cure your Angry Birds addiction
March 15th, 2011 • 2 CommentsAre you an Angry Birds addict? Finding that you’re spending days on end just trying to get past one particular level, unaware that elsewhere, the world continues to turn and that normal people are getting on with actual living?
You need help. Proper help, from a man who has been at the very top of his game and strode the world like a colossus. A winner. No, not Charlie Sheen. You need Mike Tyson.
He’s currently starring in a documentary series where he shows his lifelong love of pigeon racing – real birds as opposed to angry cartoon ones, and here he demonstrates some of his bird-handling skills with the Mike Tyson Angry Birds Addiction Cure.
Don’t argue with him – he’s probably still capable of smashing your skull in like it’s a cream cake.
All hail the playable Angry Birds birthday cake!
February 21st, 2011 • 4 CommentsAre you a dad? Reckon you’re a good one do you? Pushing your kids on the swings, turning up for school plays, giving piggy backs even when your sciatica is playing up? All that kind of thing? Yeah, not bad we suppose.
Here’s the news. You’re nothing. Your efforts are futile. The best dad in the world is almost certainly Mike Cooper from the Electric Pig website. Mike enjoys making elaborate, fun birthday cakes for his son Ben, and this year he got a bit carried away with it all.
In his latest attempt to delight young Ben, Mike made a fully-working Angry Birds cake, complete with a catapult and iced birds and pigs as per the obscenely popular game. Total assembly time was ten hours. Total destruction time was two minutes. We don’t know how good it tasted, which as far as we’re concerned, is the most important thing.
Fancy a piece of the Angry Birds cake action? There’s a how-to guide over at Electric Pig.
Angry Birds will be bigger than Tetris, probably Jesus too
February 15th, 2011 • 12 Comments
Yesterday at the Mobile Premier Awards in Barcelona, there was a keynote address from Peter Vesterbacka. That name will probably mean nothing to avid readers, but you’ll be aware of the work he’s involved in. Vesterbacka is the ‘Mighty Eagle’ at Rovio Mobile, creators of Angry Birds.
How big is Angry Birds, exactly? It’s massive right now, but Rovio intend it to be as ubiquitous as Tetris.
Vesterbacka told the audience some factoids you probably won’t know, about the game that is slowly becoming the world’s greatest time vampire:
• Angry Birds was only released in December 2009, initially for the iPhone. Now available across several platforms, the game hit 75 million downloads over Christmas, and is expected to announce ‘triple figures of millions’ in the next few weeks
• Despite only going on sale before last Christmas, over a million Angry Bird toys have already been sold
• Vesterbacka plans for Angry Birds to be the new Super Mario Bros., with the game becoming ‘an entertainment franchise’; the game will mimic Tetris in terms of global popularity, with the game being released across all platforms – mobile, desktop, web and console
• Rovio developed and published 51 games over a period of seven years before achieving overnight success with Angry Birds. They’re the Pulp of app developers.
Finally, you can play Angry Birds for real
January 26th, 2011 • 1 CommentWhat started out as a humble iPhone game has become a global phenomenon (except probably in those parts of the third world where they don’t have many iPhones or internet access). Now there’s a new addition to the Angry Birds toy range.
It’s a catapult and you can recreate the game in actual real life by firing red birds at stationary green pigs. Assuming you can find any that is – most of the farms we frequent seem to have started painting their pigs pink or grey since the game became a hit. Probably in order to stop copycat porcine bird attacks…
It’s coming soon from Character Options and we reckon that about a dozen kids will lose one or both eyes before it’s banned.
More Angry Birds tat incoming for Christmas
November 11th, 2010 • 2 CommentsProving that a good idea can be milked until the tanks are dry and there’s nothing but blood, HMV and O2 are gearing up to sell iPhone cases based in the insanely popular Angry Birds app:
You know they’re going to fly off the shelves – the perfect stocking filler for over 10 million players worldwide. Now that’s sorted, any chance you can stop titting about and build some more levels, you money-hungry Finns?
Angry Birds game gets own toy just in time for Christmas
November 4th, 2010 • 2 CommentsAngry Birds has been one of the massive successes of 2010, with over 11 million copies of the game purchased for the iPad and smartphones. This year, it became the top-selling paid application on Apple’s UK App Store in February and reached the top spot on the US App Store in the spring of 2010 where it stayed ’til October. When it was released on the Android, it was downloaded 1 million times in the first 24 hours of release. Astonishing!
And so, here comes the inevitable tie-in. The developer of the game, Rovio Mobile, are releasing Angry Birds plush toys, just in time for impulse buys over Christmas. There will be five toys available, based on the birds in the smash game.
However, there’s a snag. If you want one, they’re only available in “limited quantities”, so you might want to get on it before America finds out. They’re retailing at $14.99 and available from a special Angry Birds shop, here.
There’s also mutterings that this game could be turned into a cartoon, a TV series or even a film, such is the interest in it. Let’s just hope we don’t end up with another Crazy Frog on our hands.
[ME]
HotUKDeals Of The Day – Thursday 21st October
October 21st, 2010 • 1 Comment
High-octane phone games, pretend indoor sky-diving and the white-knuckle ride that is mid-table Premier League football action. If you thought it was going to be Dullsville around here this afternoon, then you’re an idiot and so is your sister.
Wave to HotUKDeals over there – they’re the ones who came up with it all… again.
If you’ve got an iPhone and you like playing games, you’ve probably whiled away a whole heap of hours thumbing your way through the various levels of Angry Birds over the past few months. Good news children – a brand new game is here.
It’s called Angry Birds Halloween and the sharp-eyed among you will have realised that it’s a Bonfire Night tie-in. As with the original Angry Birds iPhone game, it’ll set you back 59p, but that’s a small price to pay for 45 new levels of a game that’s almost as addictive as crack. AND the original game is FREE on Android.
Next up, a great offer if you’re a member of the armed forces based in the Midlands and enjoy the delights of the Premier League soccer competition. It’s the chance to go along to St. Andrews and watch Birmingham v West Ham on Saturday 6th November for the paltry sum of just one pound.
Of course, there’s an argument that our poor boy troops and girl troops have already witnessed plenty of diabolical acts of horror if they’ve been posted to a area of conflict, but a quid’s a quid isn’t it? How bad could it REALLY be?
If you’ve ever fancied being part of the armed forces but have got a gammy leg or no bravery whatsoever, you can get a brief glimpse of it all with some cut-price indoor skydiving – now with 65% off, although we don’t know if that means your jump is from a height that is 65% lower than usual.
£19.95 will get you two flights and a DVD for you to take home, highlighting your exploits at Airkix – (the ultimate indoor skydiving experience it says here). Plus, you won’t have to sit through Birmingham v West Ham either….
(deals found by HUKD members AgentSingh, smithyp1 and amibees)
Angry Birds aren’t happy with Microsoft Windows Phone 7
October 10th, 2010 • 9 CommentsSo your new mobile operating system is universally panned before it’s launched – how do you keep punters interested enough to give you a chance when it’s finally available? Well, if you’re Microsoft and the OS in question is the already-hated Windows Phone 7, you might attempt to associate it with the one of the most popular mobile games ever.
The problem? There’s no association whatsoever.
Some eagle-eyed folk noticed the Angry Birds icon appear on the brochure site for Windows Phone 7 – in fact it’s still there:
The casual observer would be led to believe that Angry Birds will be available for Windows Phone 7. Except that’d be wrong. Angry Birds developers Rovio haven’t agreed to develop Angry Birds for Windows Phone 7, and were quite vocal about the fact this afternoon on Twitter:
The most curious factoid of all? Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer does bear an uncanny resemblance to the pigs in Angry Birds. Coincidence?
