Angry Birds is more than a game now, it’s plushies, Halloween costumes and baby clothes. Rovio is celebrating a new milestone by crossing 500,000,000 downloads. This is across multiple devices/browsers and apps.

Think you play too much Angry Birds? You’re not alone. Rovio released information about players’ time with the game, with a total combined playtime of 200,000 years and 400 billion in-game bird launches.

Next up animation and more licensed products.

With Aperture-brand turrets, boots, bots and panels flooding the applied science aisle of your local department store, you could forgive the up-and-coming test lab for taking a breather. Judging from their latest press release, though, their laurels remain untouched by backsides. Bolstered by recent breakthroughs in the field of jazz smoothing, Aperture announced today the first of three downloadable aural stimulus packages.

Whether you’re a mega-science corporation with decades of test experience, or a young start-up liberating your first test subject from non-testing with a chloroform-soaked rag, Aperture guarantees results. Wake up your test subject, open the chamber door, and press play–let Aperture’s patent-pending rhythmic compliance enhancers do the rest.

So this is the first of three volumes, and we’ve got no clue when the next two are coming. I’ve already given it a listen and I’m not disappointed. An unofficial soundtrack has been making the rounds for a couple of weeks, so it’s nice to get the tracks properly named and mixed. I’m also a fan of the ringtones provided, though I don’t think I’ll be making the switch.

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Literally taken, a sidehill gouger is an imaginary creature with uneven legs. If you ever see one out in the forest, start looking for Bigfoot, because he’s probably not all that far away. Here at GA, though, we want to talk about a sidehill gouger, we probably mean the indie game developed by Canned Games. (If an “Imaginary Creature Angels” section ever gets started, you’ll hear it here first, though.)

Rating: E (There is no ESRB rating since this is an indie game)
Players: 1
Genre: Puzzle
Publisher: Canned Games
System: Xbox 360 (80 MS points)
Release Date: December 15, 2009

BUY/PASS

Canned Games’ designers, Shannon Brownlee and Adam Culberson, have taken a beloved family story and set a puzzle game (dedicated to Everett “Grampy” Culberson) to it. It’s pretty simple.

Young Andrew is at summer camp and wants to go fishing when he recalls his Grampy’s advice: Beware the Sidehill Gouger. Each level, in a nutshell, requires you to find and shoot the Gouger with Andrew’s trusty slingshot.

I have one recommendation, as far as actual gameplay goes: Ignore the “How to Play” section given to you at the beginning. It’s a little confusing, and you’ll pick up everything you need to know in the first few levels anyway.

Move Andy around with the left stick to uncover bits of the 9×6 board, and aim his slingshot with the right stick. You’re given clues to the Gouger’s location with bits of blood on the ground, and, lest things get too easy, occasional potholes will befall you. Or you befall them. Either way, the level is over if you end up in one. Or if you let the monster-thing eat you. But I thought that went without saying.

You also uncover a couple of other creatures on your trek across the 54-square board: Treesqueaks and Hidebehinds. Treesqueaks live in trees, and they squeak. But one thing their name won’t tell you is that if you dare to cross its path again, it might just pick you up and drop you in an undisclosed location, kind of like the Secret Service does for the President in the event of a nearby disaster/bomb threat/upset wife. Hidebehinds hide behind things (Yeah! I know! It’s genius!) but may cover up the steps you’ve already taken once you cross its path. Altogether, these things don’t really impact gameplay that much, they just make it a little less predictable.

What Canned Games has done is make a Minesweeper clone. Granted, this is a Minesweeper clone where you do your best to blow up the mine once you think you know where it is, but still.

Of course, there are differences. Well, in Minesweeper, you get points. The timer also counts down to give you a finite amount of time to complete the board and gives you some level of urgency. When you finish a minesweeper board, maybe you even feel some sense of accomplishment. Sidehill Gouger…well, maybe this is because it’s meant for kids, but the timer counts up. As far as I know, there’s not a point where a level just says to you, “Okay, you’ve been doing this too long, you’re done.” And if it did, it wouldn’t matter — you’d just start the level over again with slightly moved pieces. Also, those points things? I can’t find any. You get “trophies” for completing “days,” and a “new best time” record set any time you finish a level particularly fast, but those just don’t particularly mean anything to me. (Once again, that could be because it’s probably for children.)

Overall, the aesthetic of the game is bright and colorful, and the art is like it’s attempting to be a lifelike cartoon. As far as the people go, anyway. A few of the boards were bright enough that I found it difficult to see the treesqueaks from time to time. This may be a design thing, but a few of the tiles become curves, and one curve always meets another. So, when you find a curve, you also are almost guaranteed to find another curve — and you can cross off finding the Gouger in that spot.

These kinds of puzzle games aren’t always my bag, and this isn’t any different. However, I was hoping that I could play at least ten minutes before I started hating myself. This isn’t to say that this game made me a bad person (man, I hope not), but I did eventually just start throwing all caution and patience to the wind as a result of having no reason to play carefully. When I got it right, I got it right within fifteen seconds. If I failed, I got Andrew eaten or stuck in a hole in twenty seconds or less. Not a huge waste of time.

I will admit that after a certain point, I just couldn’t do it anymore. The story from one day to the other…well, there really isn’t one. There’s a premise for the entire game in general, and from there I just assume that Andrew loves fishing so much that he’ll do it even with the promise of being eaten by a monster at least twenty times before he gets to the pier. You play on the same maps over and over again, and the same song is used repeatedly. Nothing that adds any excitement at all or takes away from what becomes an endless stream of potholes and imaginary creatures.

Because I’m so impatient, one feature in particular did make me laugh. At the bottom of the screen where you move between levels is a meter that measures your “streak,” how many levels you beat without failing. To me, that kind of became a joke in itself. I played this like I was running towards a cliff, and if I happened to shoot the Gouger, then yay. I’m sure that if you wanted to think and strategize this sort of thing, you could get a perfect streak going, but that’s definitely not for me. My streak was never higher than 1. I like action, and guns, and a storyline that lasts more than a few screens. Sidehill Gouger might be the perfect indie game for some of you out there, but not me.

I might have seen this game a lot differently if I were 12 years younger. As an 11 year-old, I loved these sorts of puzzle games and likely would have played it for at least two hours — well worth the buck it costs. But as an adult, I just don’t dig it that much. That said, if you want to entertain your kids, go ahead and pick this up. It’s clean fun with some sweetness behind it at a very affordable price, and where else can you find that these days?

It’s a little difficult to describe, but maybe watching the trailer will help you figure out exactly what MNC is.

So, you got that? Men in uniform, performing specific jobs in an arena-type area for fame and money, not to mention the cheerleaders…

I take that back. Monday Night Combat is a lot more like football than I thought. It looks incredibly promising (“I could spend an entire month obsessed with this”-type promising), so as soon as we get a release date, we’ll let you know. Until then, check out Uber’s website at http://www.uberent.com.

Gryomancer is a title we first got information on during Gamescom. It’s been silent since then, but today we got some news about the puzzle/rpg game from Square Enix and PopCap Games.

The brand new trailer shows some of the characters, art and gameplay action. At the end of the trailer, we see that the release date is set for November 18, 2009 for PC and Xbox Live Arcade.

The title joins the story of Square Enix RPG with the puzzle aspects from PopCap Games. It has 12 stages with over 50 monsters to use in battle and an online leaderboard.

Here is the new trailer: