Angry Birds 8.0.3 Pc Port
Crispina Blomker
The game follows the same story as the mobile phone game: There are 4 "acts", each with several levels. The mission is to destroy the pigs, who have stolen eggs from the birds' nest. In this version, there is only one kind of bird and one kind of pig. The music is lifted from the Nice Code game Beach Ball (also known as Star), and there are no sound effects.
The player only has five preset angles to aim their slingshot; this makes the gameplay outcome effectively predetermined. This does, however, make the game have a loose form of actual physics, including the ability to knock down wooden planks and fortresses. Comparable bootlegs, such as Super Angry Birds and the Sega Genesis port, feature heavily stilted physics in comparison.
Another, non-copyright infringing version of the game exists, known as Angry Duck. Assuming Nice Code is the developer, this was likely meant to appear on plug 'n play systems made by DreamGEAR and similar companies; however, the Angry Duck variant is rather uncommon.
Would you be open to the idea of an Angry Birds game on the Atari 2600? Do you think the 2600 could support such a game? How would it work? What would it look like? Give me your best speculation on this subject. I'm very interested to hear your replies.
Seriously though, while Angry Birds is really a straightforward concept, I am not sure the VCS could handle a physics based game like this, despite its simplicity. Is there any game for the 2600 showing some realistic physics with several objects colliding and bouncing with each other?
The destruction/deformation could be a combination of objects moving/reacting to impact and falling due to creation of voids below them. Have different object types (just like the real thing) so you can have all manner of reactions without too much programming headaches.
It certainly could be done on a larger cartridge with more RAM. Simple rigid body dynamics are not that complicated but given 128 bytes, you can't store many positions, orientations, velocities, constraints... Even with a simplified system of circles instead of rectangles, the RAM gets full too fast. I'm not exactly sure how you would draw so many discrete elements but I am sure that there are several people here who could do it well.
The history of Atari ports is that the game captures the essence of the game. Perhaps an angry birds port could be a fusion of breakout, human cannonball, and air-sea battle. Pigs are buried under a mound in little gaps and you have to chisel your way to them in the fewest amount of birds. The gaps and number of pigs could be random. And various settings could be avalible for the birds.
One could do a game in which a few varieties of bird weapons were launched at sequential structures in order to collapse the structures to crush pig targets hiding within. For aiming the birds, I think Imagic's Trick Shot pool game would be instructive to look at for ideas. The collapsing of the structures would probably have to be more Tetris style collapse than the relatively-advanced goings on in Angry Birds. What I mean is that you knock out some blocks with your bird and the ones above drop.
I'm amazed that a thread about angry birds anywhere on the internet has gone on this long without someone making a joyless "I liked angry birds better 10 years ago when it was *insert name of obscure java based brick breaker type game*!"
I haven't played it in eons, but isn't Angry Birds like that old Xonox double ender game Artillery Duel? A decade later in the early 90's, I also played a PC gamed called Scorched Earth that was similar, at least going on memory.
Like solidcorp already said, keeping track of all those objects (position, angle, rotation, velocity...etc) would take up a lot of memory. Updating that many object simultaneous would be processor intensive too.
I'm open to Angry Birds for the 2600. Crush The Castle may be better but Angry Birds taps into that mascot appeal that brings people in so effectively, if your mascot sucks obviously it doesn't work(See the 90s and the animal platformer explosion.).
I'd say approximation of effect would be a good route as in predefined animation of rectangles falling over or rotation where you let more standard sprite collision methods influence the movement of the pillars rotation clockwise or counter-clockwise. There would still be a physics simulation but most of the more heavy calculations of so many objects colliding with true physics math could be culled way down.
I'm not an expert but even if you use the most basic display kernel I really doubt the CPU could keep up effectively and you'd still lose any chance of character recognition in the sprites if for example the pillars are rendered with the Player objects and the birds and pigs end up being red and pink squares.
Thrust is a great example of physics in a 2600 game but there is only one ship with the rest of the game graphics being terrain so it has a lighter load in calculations to that of multi-pillared buildings getting hit by a projectile ijs.
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