Angry Birds

 I avoided Angry Birds for a long time. Partly, I blame Hitchcock, though I also blame the fact that I've never owned a phone that responded to my touch except when I pushed the buttons. Ahh.. there was some kind of hilarious innuendo there, but I just couldn't put my finger on it. Anyway, with the computer release of Angsty Avians, I nabbed a copy to give it a try. Like millions of other people, I found it elegantly simple, charming, and entertaining- for perhaps 3 minutes.

If you've played a free, internet flash game in the last decade, you'll be incredibly familiar with the premise of Angry Birds: you take a projectile, and you shoot it at something. Aim is set by choosing an angle and setting velocity, then you watch your beaked-ball fly at its target. This particular version of that tired convention at least tries to add a bit of depth to the experience. Several of the projectile types have additional abilities that can be activated after they are fired. Some gain afterburner, some clone themselves, and others poop explosives. No joke. 

The different bird types are also important in relation to the specific puzzle being tackled. The objective of each level is to hit pigs with your birds, because they stole your eggs. Fair enough. But like the piggies who thwarted the wolf, these little pigs build their houses of sturdy materials. Some of the birds can drill through wood, others easily shatter glass, and some poop out bunker-buster bombs to get through the concrete. If you are noticing a bit of repetition in my writing, good. If you find it annoying and boring, then Angry Birds is not a game for you.

For an incredibly cheap price, Angry Birds is not a bad game. You get some nice art, amusing sound effects, and passable objectives. Of course, it's not exactly a great game either. It requires little thought outside of trial-and-error, and excitement is entirely absent. However, if you have a fancy phone with a touch-thingy and you need something to do between ordering your coffee and getting it- or inhaling and exhaling, then Angry Birds if perfect for you. If you want entertainment for longer than half a minute, then you would do best to look anywhere else.

Swat Kats: The Radical Squadron (SNES)

Any game can be compared, using like or as, to a set of constructive toys- games are like Legos, games are as if made out of Lincon Logs, games are like the mysterious law of physics that keeps silly putty together. But the most accurate simile would be that a video game is like a Jenga tower. You can lose pieces here and there, some can be weak as long as others are strong- but that one, single Jenga block, down near the base, which the entire tower is counting on? That's a game's controls- and if that thing is gone- boom, crash, awwwww, wanna play again?

Swat Kats: The Radical Squadron is a perfect example: it has good music, decent art, creative level design, downright innovation in perspective- but terribly conceived controls.

Boom. Crash.

The Swat Kats, T-Bone and Razor, are from the brief hay-day of Hanna-Barbara cartoons. They are bipedal cats who fly a jet and save the city to a sizzling electric guitar soundtrack. Seriously- its awesome. The game does its best to cram the guitar music into classic Nintendo midi music. Meanwhile, the art is right out of the cartoon, providing quality sprites of all the game's characters. 

Yet the control and movement of these characters is spotty at best. The only offensive ability is a short-ranged projectile that can be fired directly forward. You can change things up a little by ducking and firing forward or jumping and firing forward. That is all you get. When enemies are above you, you might as well accept that you are going to take a hit. Neither can you shoot down, but the designers seemed to realize this problem and gave you the Mario ability to bounce atop enemies for minor damage- but this only happens if you fall from a ledge because your characters also can't jump too well either.

Yes, you are not the most agile of cats. The character's run speed and jumping height makes any platforming, which most of the levels consist of, a complete pain. Razor has the ability to use a jet pack, which is a huge boon. You can simply jet over problematic areas. T-Bone, on the other hand, gets a bazooka to shoot through arbitrarily placed barriers. You can't even shoot enemies with this bazooka, the bullets just bounce off. It's as if the game designers wanted the two characters to be different, but instead of making a cool unique power for T-Bone to use in the game they had, they gave him a pointless bazooka and then altered the entire game to give it purpose for existing. 

It's really too bad the controls are so poor, as there are some interesting elements to the game. For one, the characters level up, and instead of earning points or coins in the levels, you collect experience points. Your attacks gain more power and your life bar gets bigger as you go. Swat Kats is certainly the first 2-D platformer I've played with such RPG features. Another cool thing the game throws at you is vehicle sequences where you fly the Swat Kats jet. The controls are simplistic to the extreme: you go left and right, and you push A to shoot- but the camera perspective puts you behind the jet, and the entire level moves instead of you. You can be dive bombing a monster in an endless barrel roll, or hovering around a giant sea worm; it's definitely creative stuff for the Super Nintendo.

Altogether, Swat Kats is a bad game that had promise to be great. Everything you need is there, but the controls and the character movement hold the entire effort back. Like the cartoon, Swat Kats: The Radical Squadren is a sad example of missed opportunity.