Angry Birds Halloween: A Ghastly Special Edition of Terrifying Fun! This season, Angry Birds returns with a treat: a spectacular Special Edition! Hundreds of pigs, pumpkins and plump, pulverizing birds! 45 daunting levels of pig and pumpkin-smashing action! A Fearsome Tale of a Golden Egg… of Terror! We’d like to take this opportunity to wish our fans worldwide Happy Halloween!
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Angry Birds Star Wars, a new edition of Rovio's irked avian saga, will be out November 8 for iOS, Android, Amazon Kindle Fire, Mac, PC, Windows Phone and Windows 8. In Angry Birds Star Wars, the birds and pigs we all know and love (or tolerate) from previous Angry Birds games, have taken on the guises and personalities of the iconic characters from Star Wars. As you might have guessed, the pigs will be represented by Darth Vader, his stormtroopers and other evil Star Wars characters, where the flying birds will look like Luke, Leia, Han, Chewbacca and other iconic Star Wars characters. “Both Star Wars and Angry Birds share the instant and irresistible appeal of hands-on fun,” said Colum Slevin, Vice President, Head of Studio Operations for Lucasfilm Ltd. “People seem to instinctively know what to do when handed a lightsaber or a bird in a slingshot, so this is a natural combination.” Star Wars locations will be represented in the game as well. You'll be knocking down buildings on Tatooine, Hoth, and the Death Star as well as other, yet-to-be announced intergalatic locations. Even the unforgettable Star Wars music will referenced in the game.
Angry Birds Tazos are back with a brand new web game! You need to login to sign into the game to play it but there are a weekly tournaments, so get your gaming on!
What do you get?
You can play it here: tazos.angrybirds.com
Despite a burgeoning market filled with educational children’s games and apps which aim to turn smartphones and tablets into tools for learning, when it comes to time spent actually playing games, kids are still gravitating to games that are more “fun” than instructive. At least that’s what the folks atKytephone recently discovered. The startup, which offers tools that turn Android phones into kid-safe devices with parental controls, found that Rovio’s Angry Birds Star Wars is the most played game since its release, and several other Rovio titles top the charts in terms of time spent gaming.
Kytephone pulled this data from a sample size of 13,000 children, aged 8 to 14 years old, located in over 70 countries. Kytephone co-founder Anooj Shah says the team didn’t find any major differences in app usage between regions. “Everyone seems to love Rovio games, regardless of where they live,” he says. The company looked at this data during the holidays and then again in the new year to see if anything had changed.
During the holiday season, the company found that children were spending 51 percent more time in Angry Birds Star Wars, compared with Angry Birds, despite only having 40 percent of its install base. They spent 197 percent more time in the Star Wars version than Angry Birds Space, despite having only 57 percent of its install base.
The most popular games, in terms of time spent playing, were as follows:
In the beginning of January, usage changed slightly, and Kytephone saw an increase in Bad Piggies, which then moved to become the most addictive game. The top three games now remain Star Wars, Bad Piggies and the original Angry Birds.
Angry Birds Star Wars has an install base that’s 60 percent larger than Bad Piggies, Shah noted, and during the holidays it increased that base by 50 percent while Angry Birds Star Wars increased by 60 percent.
But in terms of hours spent playing, Bad Piggies wins as it’s played an average of 1.12 hours per install. Star Wars is a close second with 0.8 hours per install, and the original Angry Birds is played 0.27 hours per install.
These figures are a different way of looking at the kids’ mobile gaming market than those studies where only downloads or even “actives” are measured, because Kytephone’s rankings are based on how long kids are playing these games, not necessarily how often. But to be clear, they’re not representative of an overall mobile trend in children’s gaming, since Kytephone is currently an Android-only service. The iOS platform has a wider variety of games and kids’ apps, we should mention. In addition, Kytephone’s service is targeted at slightly older kids, because it’s for those who have their own Android device on loan from their parents. That is, it can’t tell what games kids play when they just “borrow” mom or dad’s phone for a few minutes, as many younger children do. It also misses out on the entire iPad gaming market, which a number of kid-friendly app makers have specifically targeted.
That being said, what these numbers do show that Rovio has managed to increase the stickiness and addictive nature of its games over time, at least in terms of children’s preferences.
Depending what's behind it, you may be able to shake some of that parenting guilt.Guilty of letting an electronic screen babysit your children?
Queensland University of Technology researchers from the Games Research and Interaction Design lab have released a paper looking at active versus passive screen time for young children, predominantly two to five-year-olds.
What they found was not all screen time should be considered equal and while government recommendations may advise just one hour of screen time for young children a day [and none for kids under two] it didn't take into account the difference between actively engaging in a screen activity and passively absorbing media.
“The major thing we had an issue with, with the government recommendations, was they treated all types of screen time as being equivalent,” Dr Penny Sweetser said.
“Whereas if you look at all the different activities which make up screen time, you could be TV viewing, using your computer, children doing their homework on a computer, reading a book using an electronic reader, playing video games on something like an iPad or engaging in physical games on something like an Xbox Kinect.”
The research team proposed screen time could be divided into at least two different types – passive, in which participants are sedentary and are passively exposed to media and active, in which participants are either cognitively or physically engaged with the media.
The researchers divided active screen time further – into cognitively and physically active screen time.
“For physically active games we found that they can actually be comparable to physical exercise - similar in intensity to light to moderate walking, skipping and jogging - and they actually have a host of other benefits," Dr Sweetser said.
"They can improve academic performance, social skills and self esteem, they can motivate young children to exercise and be more active in general and they can improve their academic performance,” Dr Sweetser said.
More specifically, video games had been linked to improved visual attention, problem solving, conductive reasoning, coordination and the tracking of multiple objects.“If we look in terms of cognitive reactive, there is actually quite a substantial body of research that illustrates the benefits of active screen times in terms of children's cognitive development. Dr Sweetser said some of that research associated computer use during school years with improvements in school readiness, cognitive development, helping to facilitate social interaction and language use improvements, such as word knowledge and verbal fluency.
So while Angry Birds or Fruit Ninja is not the worst way to distract a bored child or keep them quiet long enough to finish your coffee, Dr Sweetser still recommends parental interaction.
“You might want to consider playing with them and engaging with them and making sure that the content they are using is appropriate, that is it is providing them with some sort of educational stimulation,” she said.
Any day now, I will become a parent. To prepare, I’ve been looking at a lot of apps that claim to be educational and fun for children, but what I already know from being an uncle is that kids don’t care about those educational apps. They just want to play Angry Birds. The good news — depending on your definition of that, I guess — is that my experiences with my nephews has just been borne out by science. A new study shows that kids log more time play Rovio’sAngry Birds games than any educational games, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Angry Birds is a great primer for learning physics.
The study was done by Kytephone, a company that gives parents tools to turn their Android phone into a more kid-friendly device. They studied 13,000 kids between the ages of eight and 14 in more than 70 countries and found that Angry Birds Star Wars was the most popular game, probably because adding lightsabers to things inherently makes them more awesome. It’s joined in the top three by the original Angry Birds and Bad Piggies. The study wasn’t based on downloads, but rather on total time children spent playing each game.
Angry Birds is not an educational game, and when I say it’s a great primer for physics, I don’t mean to say that it teaches kids physics. I have a four-year-old nephew who loves playing Angry Birds, and he’s surprisingly good at it, but it’s not because he has a great understanding of potential energy, gravity, or force of impact. He just knows that if he makes a bird hit a pig hard enough, that pig will probably fall over and disappear.
When he gets older though, and he’s learning about things like potential energy, he could make the connection that the farther back he pulls on the slingshot in Angry Birds, the more potential energy he’s putting behind launching the bird. Being told that an Angry Bird travels along a parabolic trajectory could help him understand what those words mean. Playing Angry Birds Space won’t turn him into an astrophysicist. Could it help to spark his interest in the subject, though? Stranger things have happened
The other lesson to take here is that making a game educational doesn’t really do much if a child doesn’t want to play it. I think kids can learn a lot more from games that are actually fun to play as long as those games have at least a modicum of something educational about them — look at classics of the genre like Math Blasters and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?. One thing is for sure, though — nobody’s learning anything from Temple Run, which came in at number eight on Kytephone’s list.
Rovio has added 24 new Samba-themed levels and a whole bunch of power-ups to Bronze Award-winning movie tie-in Angry Birds Rio.
Naturally, you'll have to do a bit of work before you can play through these new stages.
You'll have to collect lots of stars from other levels to unlock 18 of them, and gather a whole bunch of feathers to unlock the other six.
That shouldn't be too much of a problem, though, given that this update introduces four helpful power-ups.
These power-ups include Sling Scope and Super Seeds - both of which appeared in Angry Birds for Facebook - and two fresh perks (Samba Burst and TNT Drop).
You'll receive 20 free power-ups just for downloading this update, and a further free power-up every day you play. If you need more, power-ups are also available through in-app purchases.
