Angry Birds

So, now that I've gotten three stars on the first four stages of Angry Birds, I think I'm ready to post about this game. (This is not to rub it in, Jaques, I'm just pretty into this game).  I realize that volumes and volumes must have already been written on this game.  Oh well, here’s one more.

This is a game I only play while taking a crap.  And occasionally while waiting for something.  This means that I play it for at least five minutes every day (sometimes longer).  In fact, there are definitely times when I'll be sitting on the pot at work, and I'll realize "oh wait a second, I didn't come in here to play angry birds."

But what i want to talk about, apart from taking dumps, is my experience with Angry Birds.  After playing through Angry Birds and several of the expansion stages, I began to get tired and bored with the new levels and started over from the beginning with a goal of getting three stars on each level.  I think that playing the game so extensively prepared me for the three-star challenge, and I found my interest renewed and reinvigorated by this greater challenge.  Now that I've gotten three stars on the first four stages, my interest is waning again (prompted in part, by how very different the "ham 'em high" stage is from the other stages).  But I'd like to share the strategies I learned along the way.  

The first and most basic strategy to Angry Birds success is to familiarize yourself with the "restart" button.  I usually restart a given level a minimum of ten times before getting three  stars, and sometimes many more times than that.  Once I get a feel for a level, I'll restart it after the first bird if it doesn't do exactly what I want it to do. Some levels will only take five minutes to beat, and others will take days.  I've definitely played myself cross-eyed trying to get three stars on some of these Angry Birds stages.

Okay, with an intimate familiarity with the restart button, you are ready to proceed to the next Strategy.  Which is to try and beat a level using the minimum number of birds possible.  Any leftover birds will be worth a whopping 10000 points. This usually means finding the best possible "breaking point" for a given level.  Or at least close to it.  The game can actually be forgiving in this department.  So launch your first bird into said breaking point, and mayhem will ensue.  Take note of how many points you made with this first shot, and be prepared to restart any of your subsequent turns if they do not match or beat this number.

This strategy will work for a while, but after a certain point, it gets harder and harder to get the three star rating with just the 10k bonus for preserving birds.  The last strategy I have discovered is employed at this point.  This is the strategy of total destruction.  Rather than preserving birds, spend them trying to destroy as much of the level as possible.  You can sometimes get more than 10k points in a single turn based on destruction alone.  Ultimately, a combination of these approaches seems to work best.   

So, that's about it.  Pretty simple stuff.  Restart Frequently, Destroy as much as possible with as few birds as possible, but don't be afraid to spend a bird on destruction if the spare-bird-bonus isn't doing it for you.  Happy Birding,

-Dave