Angry Birds

Why, you may ask, am I reviewing a game that has achieved tremendous, mainstream levels of success, such that the games' publisher was bought out for a relatively low 8-digit sum by EA? Is that indie? Well, I guess they were before they made any money, right? And it's a good little game.

But that's not why I'm reviewing it, sure I can examine how it embodies itself as a lightly executed, ergonomically poised platform-app, like Mario for mobile, but that's relatively trite compared to the more interesting layer: these birds are terrorists.

I didn't notice it myself, the credit goes to my fiancee, ready to give birth, intuitively tuned into the sensitivities of life.

"It's so violent."

"Como?"

"Yeah, you're making these birds commit suicide in order to kill these pigs."

And you know, I kind of took that for granted, like a plumber hopping on turtle shells takes for granted that they will start moving at a constant speed in whatever direction they were facing, bouncing off of obstacles and annihilating all in their path. Just like I'm having a baby with this woman, so too are the next generation of successful games on web and mobile having a baby with the cross-pollinated expectations of reformed Space Marines and hockey moms just becoming veteran players.

Think about it. You're literally flying these birds into buildings. And pigs, come on. It's capitalist decadence dude. I know because I once pushed to develop a game called Gorilla Warfare, a strategy game with asymmetric guerilla considerations baked into the mechanics, and we decided the enemy soldiers would be dogs and their masters would be pigs - if you complete the secret criteria in each campaign fashioned after a major revolutionary theater, you could take the fight to Pigistan. We know what pigs represent.

And then there's the level designs. You've got the usual Mario 3 roulette of geographic settings, but you also have various flavors of McMansion stacked up with glass and balsa wood, cities loading skyscrapers, and then later construction sites where the undoubtedly securitized real estate is being furbished by pigs in hard hats. There are pig families that you annihilate, pig children, pig wives, family pigs with unkempt mustaches. That this game has so far flown under the political radar as a friendly, casual bit of fun, is completely astounding to me. This is one of the most subversive titles to hit the public since Super Columbine Massacre motherfucking RPG.